I began getting involved with math education during a six month stint, working in Senator Ron Wyden’s office (D-OR) from April to November 2002. Shortly before I started, there was a panel discussion hosted by American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC on the state of math education in the US.
The panel included two members of NCTM (Gail Burrill and Lee Stiff, both former Presidents of NCTM), David Klein, a math professor at Cal State U at Northridge, Tom Loveless of Brookings Institution, and Michael McKeown a medical research at Brown University who cofounded a website called Mathematically Correct (to inform parents what was going on in math education).
Lynn Cheney (Dick Cheney’s wife) moderated the discussion. It is interesting to listen to the opinions expressed. Not much has changed in terms of the arguments, except that at that time, NCTM’s standards ruled the roost, and now Common Core standards do. Common Core’s standards have a lot of ties to NCTM’s particularly in the area of the 8 Standards of Mathematical Practice, which used to be called “Process Standards” in NCTM’s standards.
David Klein and Tom Loveless were two people I learned much from during my stint on the Hill, as well as some of the people who were in the audience and who spoke during the Q&A at the end.
For your info and reading pleasure, my experience during that time culminated in a widely read article that was published in Education Next.
traditional math 