By Paul Basken

Washington

Corporate donors encouraged by the Obama administration will spend at least $260-million over the next four years to help improve student achievement in mathematics and science through specially designed television programs and video games.

The plan, announced today by President Obama, will include new television programming from Sesame Street and Discovery Communications, as well as video games developed by Sony and other members of the Entertainment Software Association.

The president also announced plans for the White House to host an annual science fair. The plans are all part of a strategy to bring excitement to the long-running quest to raise the international rankings of American students in science and math.

"We're going to show young people how cool science can be," Mr. Obama told a gathering of corporate leaders and educators at the White House.

Several of those leaders said afterward that the initiatives could be helpful, even if they are not a complete solution for either colleges facing underprepared freshmen or their schools of education under pressure to produce better-trained teachers.

The idea of a White House science fair, in particular, "sends so many important messages," said Sharon P. Robinson, president and chief executive of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

Yet, Ms. Robinson said, educators don't yet have a full understanding of how tools such as video games can be used in education, and how to work most effectively with students who have been using them.

And, she said, those types of tools might not be the best approach for reaching children in the poorer urban and rural parts of the country who are most in need of the help.

Mr. Obama said he hoped the initiatives would be especially useful in attracting women and members of minority groups to the sciences, in part by helping to break traditional views of the value of studying science.

Persuading companies to make better science-oriented games and programming is clearly worthwhile, said Susan L. Traiman, director of public policy at the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives of the largest American companies. "It doesn't substitute for public-policy initiatives," she said, "but is an essential piece that's needed to complement public policy, and too often overlooked."

Others were more skeptical. The Obama administration still isn't doing enough to help give American schools the trained workers they need, said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

"It's wonderful to have this coordination of after-school activities, but they all are essentially workarounds," Ms. Walsh said. "And until we address the ability of Ms. Jones in the second-grade classroom being able to teach mathematics at a level that is comparable to what teachers in Singapore and Finland can do, then we're going to have this problem."