Teachers Suggest New Math Standards

America's students should be required to take four years of math in high school and receive at least an hour of math each day in elementary grades, a national teachers' group recommends.

The new standards released today by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics break down goals for students by grade levels and categories, including geometry, algebra, measurement, data analysis and problem solving.

The Standards 2000 project is the first major revision of the council's controversial benchmarks since they were released more than a decade ago.

The new guidelines "set higher standards for our students and set higher standards for ourselves," Lee V. Stiff, the council's president-elect, said today at the group's annual meeting in Chicago.

Students "must know more than just the basics. Number-crunching is not enough," he said.

Critics say the changes still toss aside math basics, such as learning multiplication tables, and are too ambiguous to be of worth to teachers.

In 1989, worried about America's math phobia and dropping test scores, the council called for a national overhaul of math teaching. It recommended making the subject more meaningful by changing the focus from drills, rules and rote learning to ``real-world'' problem solving as a way to understand how numbers work. The council also recommended that all grades use calculators.

The updated goals still stress critical thinking skills over memorization. They call for elementary teachers to spend an hour a day on math teaching, even if they do not normally block off time for specific subjects. And they say students should have mastered the basics of algebra and geometry by the end of eighth grade.

The high school standards call for four years of required math and also raise the possibility of integrated programs, which teach several math concepts at the same time rather than limiting subsections to single semesters.

"The demands made on high school teachers in achieving the standards will require extended and sustained professional development and a large degree of administrative support," the council says in its overview.

Among the council's critics is Paul Clopton, co-founder of Mathematically Correct, a San Diego-based group that stresses rigorous math benchmarks.

"These are standards meant for the general case and don't have the object of defining what your child needs to know year to year," Clopton said, adding that the new standards should set benchmarks for each grade instead of for bands of grade levels, such as grades 3 through 5.

Clopton said the new standards still lack a commitment to the basics.

"They are still afraid to definitely say our kids should be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide," Clopton said.

	This article was originally published by the Associated Press on April 12, 2000 © 2000 Associated Press Related Links Access the entire NCTM report

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