It's a nice dream, to have a populace educated to a much more advanced level in math, but I don't think it's doable with America as it is, i.e. we can't have both. We could at least stop sliding further down, perhaps, and I'd be glad to hear about many sorts of changes in state- and nation-wide curriculum, while we're to have such things, for what I believe to be marginal improvements. At the smaller margins we have individual parents doing what they can with things like these Russian Math programs, as they have done for a long time, and I think is probably sufficient to ensure the prodigies aren't snuffed out.
What's stopping us? For starters, over a hundred years of battling desires: https://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AHistory.html Not any of the sides entirely without some merit. And that is closer to America's strength, in that try as we might to enforce Universalism in some domain, we're pretty bad at it against ourselves. This is a good thing, since while the surface of possibilities does suck and we can dream it was much better, it is not entirely uniform and solid, there are yet still many cracks for the precious few (many of whom being immigrants who found their own crack just to get here) to slip through, drag some along with them, and come out to do great things.
What's stopping us? For starters, over a hundred years of battling desires: https://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AHistory.html Not any of the sides entirely without some merit. And that is closer to America's strength, in that try as we might to enforce Universalism in some domain, we're pretty bad at it against ourselves. This is a good thing, since while the surface of possibilities does suck and we can dream it was much better, it is not entirely uniform and solid, there are yet still many cracks for the precious few (many of whom being immigrants who found their own crack just to get here) to slip through, drag some along with them, and come out to do great things.