If the future belongs to our children, then Washington's future has a problem with math and science.

And so does the economy. Our state may now be a hotbed of high-tech, bioscience and entrepreneurial activity, but that hotbed will cool if we don't have educated workers with strong math and science skills.

The numbers don't look good.

In all but grade 3, less than 60 percent of Washington's students met the math standard of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) last year. Science scores are even worse: A little more than a third of 10th-graders passed the science portion of the WASL.

With so many students failing, state lawmakers and Gov. Chris Gregoire have backed off from the WASL requirements. Last year, they delayed until 2013 a requirement that students pass the math and science portions to graduate from high school. This year, they decided to phase out the WASL's math section entirely as a high school graduation requirement, replacing it with tests on individual math courses in 2014.

But the problem isn't going away. University of Washington professors have noticed that more freshmen require remedial math when they enter college. In February, 60 UW math, science and engineering professors made their concerns public in an open letter to state lawmakers, warning that instructors have had to lower their standards as math skills have declined.

"They're confounded by simple algebra," UW physics department chair David Bouleware told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

These are hardly the signs of a state confident that its future workers will have the math and science skills crucial to the 21st century economy. On the contrary, Washington lags behind other states, even as the United States as a whole has a dismal showing in math and science education compared with other countries.

"We aren't even within striking distance of reasonable numbers, and we haven't been for a long time," says Bob Herbold, a retired Microsoft executive who runs a consulting business and has extensively studied weaknesses in math and science education in the United States. Herbold says the problem is partly cultural -- American parents need to turn off the TV and make sure their kids study -- and partly political -- lawmakers need to change union-protected compensation policies and institute strong performance appraisals and pay differentials for teachers skilled in math and science.

Much is at stake. Higher math and science scores positively affect a country's gross domestic product and produce such long-term gains as 64 percent higher incomes, a Stanford University study shows.

Rosemary Brester, president of Hobart Machined Products, a King County manufacturer, knows firsthand how the lack of workers skilled in math and science affects business. In a June op-ed column for Tacoma's News Tribune, she said jobs with good pay at her com- pany "are going unfilled because too many of our young people lack the analytic and problem-solving skills needed to do the job -- or even to train for the job."

Mike Sotelo, president of Seattle-based Approach Management Services, which helps companies manage workers' compensation claims, sees a state educational system mired in mediocrity. "These kids are graduating, and we're getting them. In many cases they meet minimal criteria, but there's nothing more than that. We're not getting the superstars out there that are dazzling us." He sees it as a three-pronged problem: Washington's educational system values a teacher's tenure more than performance; parents and schools fail to hold kids to high standards; and America's global competitors, such as China and India, are more serious than ever about educating their children, including in math and science.