In that case, the US should be spending less on education and more on recruiting talented foreigners. Good education can make smart people even smarter, but it can't turn average joes into geniuses. Unfortunately, the best evidence is that intelligence is mostly genetic.
Eugenics gets a bad rap for many reasons, yet sperm bank customers consistently demand donors with high IQs. Paying high-IQ men to donate sperm would be an easy way to increase the number of smart people. Mensa already has a database of such people.
There are many existing incentives that reward smart Americans such as scholarships, but these do not lead to smart people having more children.
More smart people = a better life for everyone. If it's not possible to breed more of them, the ones we have need to be kept alive, happy, and working.
There is evidence that certain unorthodox educational approaches can be helpful with low-performing groups. This Texas math teacher managed to boost test scores with rap:
Well done, but the US Math Olympiad team remains heavily Asian. They don't train by singing songs about math.
Here is what US math teachers are up against:
And here is the best attempt to make math as interesting as Star Wars:
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