This is the published version. First published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society in 2000, published by the American Mathematical Society

Roitman, Judith A.

English

KU ScholarWorks

JANUARY 2000 NOTICES OF THE AMS 5CommentaryIn My OpinionRevising the NCTMStandardsWhen the first volume of the National Council of Teachersof Mathematics’s Standards for K–12 mathematics educa-tion came out in 1989, no one, including the authors, imag-ined how influential it would be. Mathematicians had beenasked to participate in the project but, with few exceptions,had declined. The U.S. had never had national standardsin any subject. Who could have predicted that the 1989 Stan-dards would matter? But it did. State standards were rewrit-ten, major curriculum projects were funded, assessmentswere radically overhauled, and, once people realized whatwas going on, a backlash movement began whose greatesteffect has perhaps been a rather astonishing politicizationof mathematics education.People learn. Three years ago, when I was asked to helpwith the Standards revision (later titled Principles and Stan-dards of School Mathematics), I jumped at the chance, asdid several of my colleagues: five of the twenty-six Princi-ples and Standards writers are mathematicians.1 What didwe jump into?Nothing we were used to. Mathematics may be, as Bar-bie said before she was reprogrammed, hard, but this wasmuch harder. It was hard because (a) this was education,with fractured communities (including our community ofmathematicians), each speaking a different dialect; (b) wewere necessarily, not of our own choosing, going to be em-broiled in politics largely not of our own making; and (c)it wasn’t a question of what we personally wanted to say,but of distilling direction and consensus out of a fracturedand varied field.It was also hard because of its public nature. Work likethis is eventually very public, but Principles and Standardswas public before it began. There was an oversight com-mittee, the Commission on the Future of the Standards.There was the NCTM Board, which had to agree that whatwe wrote represented the organization.2 And there werethe ARGs, the Association Review Groups—the AMS hadone—which responded to formative questions and later pro-vided extensive critiques of the draft.And, after a first draft was widely distributed in the fallof 1998, there was feedback: about 630 individual re-sponses, scores of organizational responses, and com-missioned reviews from a wide range of people, includingoutspoken critics of the 1989 Standards.The responses were, of course, conflicting. If one per-son liked a particular sentence, another person hated it.If one person had a suggestion for change, another per-son had a different, incompatible suggestion. Making senseof all this took a good computer program and, more im-portant, classification and coding by an intelligent andcareful staff. Broad feedback summaries, variously orga-nized, were distributed.To focus us as we went through this maze, Principlesand Standards was put through the National ResearchCouncil (NRC) review process, concentrating on our re-sponse to nineteen issues drawn, by the Commission, fromthe feedback. These issues largely were the flashpoint is-sues of the feedback; they encapsulated areas of concernand contradiction in what we were hearing. These nineteenissues with NRC comments were presented to us beforewe wrote the final draft, along with representative, generallycontradictory, comments from the feedback process. Wethen had to present the NRC with a plan of response foreach issue. And, ultimately, we had to write a final draft.As we began to absorb the feedback and respond to theNRC, it became clear that not only were we not speakingfor our individual selves, we were not even speaking forour writing group or for the constituencies we represented.Our primary job had become to respond to the varied andconflicting opinions we were presented with, to try to un-derstand the deep concerns underlying specific comments,and to try to honor them. It is much easier to give yourown opinion than to distill the conflicting opinions of oth-ers into comprehensible form.Would I do it again? Yes, in a heartbeat, and no, not inthe same lifetime. I learned an enormous amount aboutkids, schools, how people learn, and how people teach. Ithink about school mathematics very differently. I havetremendous respect for my Principles and Standards col-leagues and will miss not only our personal collaborationbut collaboration with people of their professional inter-ests. It is vital that the mathematics community be in-volved in this kind of work. It should be seen as a majorarea of our responsibility, and I am continually astonishedthat it is not. Our community generally does not rewardor honor this sort of time-consuming, challenging, sociallyimportant, and intellectually interesting work. Until it doeswe should not complain that our students come to us un-prepared nor wonder why so few mathematicians are in-volved in educational policy.—Judith RoitmanAssociate Editor1Of the rest, about one-third are classroom teachers, one-third areprofessors of mathematics education, and the rest are adminis-trators, curriculum writers, and so on.2Or as close as it is possible to represent an organization as largeand varied as the NCTM, whose annual meetings far dwarf the JointMathematics Meetings.commentary.qxp  11/9/99 4:16 PM  Page 5

Revising the NCTM Standards

https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/1808/17176/1/RoitmanJ_NAMS_47%281%295.pdf

Revising the NCTM Standards

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

KU ScholarWorks