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Bernadine Fong, retired Foothill College president, has been tapped to take on one of the biggest challenges facing U.S. education: the high failure rates of community college students in basic math.

The math stumbling block each year limits the options of millions of students in community college, who represent 45 percent of the undergraduate population in the United States.

Along with the administration of President Barack Obama, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, located at Stanford University, has taken aim at community colleges as "high leverage" venues for change.

Carnegie hired Fong to design a streamlined and supported math curriculum that can bring millions of community college students up to speed in one year.

"The (Obama) administration recognizes that community colleges are a huge factor in higher education and in reaching underserved students," Fong said.

"What they're looking for is innovations, strategies and interventions to increase the college graduation rate.

"We at Carnegie are looking very specifically at math."

The college-level statistics course is a "huge gatekeeper" to graduation, jobs and careers for millions of students each year, she said.

With a team of teachers and scholars around the country, Fong aims to design and test a new course that will give entry-level students the math they need to successfully tackle statistics a year later.

The course is not meant for the math-oriented students headed for careers in science, technology, engineering and math -- so-called "STEM" students -- but for the many others for whom statistics opens the door to higher-level careers.

As president of Foothill, Fong had some experience in this area.

She oversaw the launch of the innovative "Math My Way" program at Foothill, which has given thousands of previously math-shy students skills and confidence to advance in math, she said.

It does so by having students meet for twice as many hours as in a regular course and creating "modules" by course content to identify and focus on a student's areas of weakness.

"'Math My Way' happened under my watch, and I'm very proud of it," Fong said.

At Foothill, Fong worked closely with then-chancellor Martha Kanter, who is now the U.S. Undersecretary of Education and pivotal in the Obama administration's focus on community colleges.

"I don't think it's a coincidence that Martha's there, and I'm here," Fong said.

The Carnegie Foundation has the look and feel of the quintessential "think tank," with a hushed lobby containing books, a newspaper rack and plenty of spots for researchers to sit down for scholarly chats.

In a rustic building atop a hill above the Stanford Golf Course, scholars enjoy a sweeping view of the Stanford campus, Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay.

The foundation, which moved to Stanford from Princeton, N.J., in 1997, was launched by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered by Congress in 1906 to advance the teaching profession. It aims to spark large-scale changes in public education.

Carnegie's new director, the reform-minded Anthony Bryk, advocates the use of engineering principles to create large-scale change, a method he calls "Design-Educational Engineering-Development (DEED).

"If Carnegie is looking for high-leverage problems -- places where DEED can affect large numbers of students -- community colleges are a good place to start," Bryk said.

"Nationally, more than 11 million students attend community colleges. Forty percent of all first-time freshmen begin in the two-year sector, and this includes more than 40 percent of African-American and 50 percent of Hispanic students enrolled in higher education."

Bryk, who has written on school reform as well as a book on how Catholic schools aid disadvantaged students, previously held a joint appointment at Stanford Business School and the School of Education. He has ties to organizations steeped in the school-reform movement, such as the New Schools Venture Fund.