The Gates Foundation will devote up to a decade to the issue, beginning with a $1.1 billion four-year commitment. The objectives are to educate more and better math instructors, create a new treasure of entertaining and effective teaching resources, and better understand how to teach a subject that many students currently find dry and scary.

The idea of the investment excites math educators. However, they expect that the foundation would include the viewpoints of experienced educators, which many perceived as missing in previous Gates initiatives on standards and teacher assessment.

Because of their enormous concentrations of poor children, Bill Melinda Gates Foundation will focus on the four most populous states: California, Florida, New York, and Texas.

Gates already devotes almost 40% of its K-12 budget to boosting math instruction. This more extensive program will partly be funded by redirecting funds from grants for other areas, particularly language arts.