Where is the evidence?

During the last half century, school mathematics in North America has under- gone two major waves of attempted reform: the new math movement of the 1950s through the early 1970s and the standards-based movement of the past two decades or so. Although differing sharply in their approach to curriculum content, these reform efforts have shared the aim of making mathematics learning more substan- tial and engaging for students. The rhetoric surrounding the more recent movement, however, has been much more shrill, the policy differences more sharply drawn, the participants more diverse. The so-called math wars of the 1960s (DeMott, 1962, ch. 9) were largely civil wars. They pitted advocates of rigor and axiomatics against those promoting applied, genetic approaches and were conducted primarily in journal articles and at professional meetings. Today's warfare ranges outside the profession and has a more strident tone; it is much less civil in both senses of the word. Debates about the new math never became directly implicated in national poli- tics in North America (although they did at times elsewhere in the world). The controversy over recent reform proposals, however, has irresistibly drawn U.S. politicians into the fray—from President Reagan's plug for one of John Saxon's mathematics textbooks at a White House reception for school principals in July 1983, to Congress's 1994 mandate that the Office of Educational Research and Improvement establish expert panels that would identify exemplary and promising educational programs, to Secretary Riley's 1998 call for a cease-fire in the "math wars," to last year's U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce's hearing on the federal role in Grades K-12 mathematics reform. This high-profile involvement of politicians has helped inflame an atmosphere already heated by melodramatic discourse in the press. In the Wall Street Journal, Lynne Cheney (1997) recounts horror stories of students failing to learn basic skills in the nation's mathematics classrooms: