This report opens with a bleak picture of the kind of mathematics now taught within American classrooms. The situation for minority students is viewed as particularly grim. The Ford Foundation has launched a major national effort to improve minority students' performance in mathematics and to help mathematics teachers improve the quality of their instruction. The Foundation expects that the lessons learned and the techniques developed will help advance learning in science and mathematics for all students. Nine grants made recently as part of the Foundation's initiative into this area are profiled in the remainder of the document. (MP)