Works Discussed in this Essay:
The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom , by James W. Stigler and James Hiebert. Free Press, 224 pages, $23.00.
Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States , by Liping Ma. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 166 pages, $19.95.
One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards , by Susan Ohanian. Heinemann, 154 pages, $16.00.
In November of last year, 200 people, mostly mathematicians, sent an open letter to Secretary of Education Richard Riley. The letter asked him to withdraw the labels "exemplary" and "promising" that the Education Department had recently applied to 10 innovative math programs. I do not know the validity of the criticisms. I do know that the last time the nation let mathematicians develop K-12 curricula, in the post-Sputnik panic, the...