Learn your math, young man! There are people in China starving for your job.

It's a new twist on an old meme that is drawing serious attention from lawmakers, education administrators and mathematicians who are concerned that Utahns are not prepared for the high-paying jobs of the future.

After failing to get a task force funded during the 2008 legislative session, Sens. Margaret Dayton and Howard Stephenson instead put together a loose-knit group to figure out a formula to escape the death spiral of math grades. While they're still a couple of months from taking their suggestions public, the hope is that Utah will become a destination for employers in need of employees with high-level math skills.

How bad is it?

• The United States ranks as low as 28th of 40 countries on international math scores.

• There is a nearly 20 percent math failure rate of Utah's comprehensive U-PASS test.

• More and more college freshmen need remedial math. Dayton says 67 percent of UVU students need one to three semesters.

"That is a huge waste of student resources and school resources and time," Dayton said.

Finding the cause of poor performance isn't exactly as simple as adding two plus two, but lawmakers and mathematicians say failure on such a grand scale points to a systemic problem.

Can it be fixed?

David Wright is a BYU professor of mathematics who has long led the charge for reform. He says the American way of learning, at least in the early years, has become cumbersome. He contrasts current elementary text books with the lauded system used in Singapore. The American book is 600 pages and contains images of basketball stars and sports cars in an attempt to relate to students. Math problems are often "real life" problems.

The Singapore books (two of them at 125 pages each) focus mostly on algorithms and practice problems without the extraneous language and scenarios.

"It just gets straight to the point. This is the way mathematicians like to do it," Wright said. "I think it works best when we teach real mathematics and not embellish it so much when we use real world examples."

The Singapore method is being explored by the state Office of Education, though Superintendent Patti Harrington and Associate Superintendent Brenda Hales were unavailable for comment on Monday. Both have participated in the group's discussions.

The goal

The group is informally known as the NASA Standards Work Group.

The connection between NASA and math standards has been made by Dayton since the legislative session. Her argument is that NASA is having a difficult time finding mathematicians because the space agency can only hire American citizens, whose math grades are increasingly less impressive compared to the rest of the world.

The group would like to see Utah produce enough high-quality mathematicians that NASA hires 10 percent its workforce from the state. To reach that point, the informal suggestions are:

• Implement the Singapore math system from K-8 students.

• Rewrite math standards to match the Singapore system.

• Improve the testing system so that even those students good in math are increasingly challenged.

• "Algebra is really the key," Wright says. Basic algebra should be taught in the eighth grade and then expanded on later.

Said Dayton of the state of U.S. math scores vs. the world: "I don't think it's because they have smarter kids than we do. We've got some good brains in this state and we're just trying to access [them]."