ALFRED, N.Y.

A SMALL TOWN in Western New York (to remain nameless) announces a 3-percent hike in taxes. Phew! What a relief to the financially strapped citizens of this tiny hamlet struggling to make ends meet. The town board was able to make enough cuts in the budget so that the taxes only went up from 6 percent to 9 percent . . .

Kudos all around, until the tax bills came out. A tax bill that was $4,000, a pittance in the poorest county in New York State, was recalculated the next year to be a whopping $6,000!

What happened?

What didn’t happen in our schools is an education that produces numerate citizens. Instead, we have an entire country filled with high-school and college graduates who don’t know the difference between a total change of 3 percentage points, from 6 percent to 9 percent, and the much different percent change of 50 percent.

Surely this was an isolated incident in a poor rural school district? The sub-prime mortgage crisis makes it abundantly clear that millions of Americans, many college educated, failed to grasp the significance of a rate increase from, say, 6 percent to 9 percent, under a variable-rate mortgage. The ensuing increase in monthly payments was more than most Americans could handle.

Surely the bankers, with their Ivy League pedigrees, could have foreseen how a 50-percent increase in interest rate would be impossible for the average American family to handle. Apparently not! When you spend $200 on lunch it is probably hard to imagine how an extra $200 a month would be hard to come by.

Luckily, the government is going to bail the bankers out with a couple hundred billion dollars. Phew! Now that’s a relief. Does a billion have nine zeroes or six? Oh well, it probably doesn’t matter.

A headline in The Washington Post on March 13 read: “Panel Finds Fault in America’s Math System,” and the story pointed out that “the National Mathematics Advisory Panel convened by President Bush in April 2006 has concluded that our math-education system is ‘broken.’ ”

Not big news for those living in such a math-phobic, innumerate culture. The question is what to do about it.

At Alfred University, in Western New York’s Southern Tier, we have created an innovative new master’s program in numeracy. This M.S. degree has the goal of training teachers at all levels K-12 and in all disciplines how to infuse numeracy across the curriculum. This approach is similar to the way that reading and writing have come to be seen as the responsibility of all teachers in all disciplines at all levels. Literacy is about communication, and numeracy is no different. It is how we communicate with numbers; it is a quantitative literacy.

In my work as coordinator of the M.S. in numeracy program at Alfred University, I have come to realize how illiterate we are when it comes to communicating with ratios, rates and percentages. These are all middle-school math topics, so how do students get through high-school math without mastering them?

The sad truth is that the high-school math curriculum is so focused on preparing students for calculus that we force-feed students a steady diet of meaningless geometry, algebra and trigonometry. The result is that over two-thirds of entering college students need remediation in these very same courses, with most never having taken a calculus course in their life!

Colleges and universities now offer a bewildering variety of algebra, from beginning to intermediate to college level (whatever that could possibly mean). The high-school students who never go on to take calculus or even go to college are resigned to a life of math phobia and hopeless innumeracy.

America is illiterate! It is time we accept the fact that not being able to read and write with numbers is a form of illiteracy! The solution is teaching math in context. It is not just the math teachers who need to a do a better job of breaking out of the traditional-content teaching focus that has brought us to this point. Every teacher in every discipline at every level needs the confidence and the skills to introduce relevant mathematics in the context of his or her subject matter.

Instilling this confidence and facility with quantitative information is exactly the goal of the innovative master’s program in numeracy at Alfred University. Teachers first master the core numeracy topics themselves, and then go to learn how to incorporate these crucial middle school math topics into their own disciplines.

It is not just our students who deserve numeracy as well as literacy as part of their schooling; but also the future teachers of our students.

Eric Gaze is an associate professor of mathematics and education, and coordinator of the master’s program in numeracy, at Alfred University, in Al-fred, N.Y.