The process of discovery worked so well for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as they explored the Pacific Northwest that they and the world never forgot the lessons they learned.

But even Lewis and Clark needed to prepare for their journey by memorizing the basics.

Now Washington’s top educators are coming to similar conclusions about math education in this state. Speaking in Spokane on Thursday, State Superintendent Terry Bergeson spent much of her annual state of education address tackling our crisis in math.

Nearly half of Washington’s high school juniors have not passed the math portion of the WASL, even after two attempts. Parents have become so concerned they’ve launched advocacy groups called Parents for Math Matters in Spokane and Where’s the Math? in Seattle.

Last week even the New York Times reported on the controversy over math education in Washington state. Frustrated parents here now pay for math tutors to make sure kids don’t enter middle school still adding on their fingers.

In recent years our state combined a push for math reform with a more rigorous testing that has sadly failed to increase student learning fast enough for the juniors who will graduate in 2008. Too many schools have turned away from teaching math basics. Instead they focus too heavily on urging students to discover methods and answers on their own.

While the thinking is laudable, the discovery approach fails children when it neglects to instill such basics as multiplication tables and long division. Further, it does not appear to tap the successful teaching methods used in the Asian countries that produce the top math students in the world.

Fortunately, leaders are climbing on board to tackle the problem. Bergeson pledged Thursday to launch a “thoughtful and significant course correction.” Bill Gates lent significant ballast this week with a worthwhile recommendation to raise our state requirements from two years of high school math to four.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in September shifted its earlier position. It’s now calling for schools to focus more narrowly on basic math skills. Fourth-graders, it recommends, should be primarily developing “quick recall” of multiplication and division, and learning about decimals and the area of two-dimensional shapes.

In addition, Bergeson wisely backed off her stance on denying the struggling math students of the Class of 2008 their diplomas. She plans to work with the Legislature to make that change. She doesn’t advocate giving students an easy pass, however. And she’s right: They need to continue studying math right up to graduation.

We can’t leave Washington students caught in an eddy because they lack the basic skills to flow into the work world ahead. Of this state’s job openings in the next decade, 47 percent of them are expected in fields such as computer science and engineering.

Fortunately, many parents are already eager to help their children practice the basics. They know even Lewis and Clark learned to tie ropes and paddle small streams first.