Juggling the Numbers

A federal spending shift spurs debate over mathematics and science education

By Jeffrey Brainard

For a decade, as the chancellor of Maryland's public university system, Donald N. Langenberg had pushed universities there and elsewhere around the nation to produce better-qualified schoolteachers in science and mathematics.

Then, after stepping down in 2001, he returned to the University of Maryland at College Park as a professor of physics, and began collaborating with other physicists there on how to improve undergraduate instruction in their field. Only then did it dawn on him