essay on NCTM Focal Points on NYC HOLD

Stanley Ocken, a mathematics professor at the City University of New York has written an essay on NCTM's "Focal Points."

He states that:

"The NCTM Focal points are issued at a time when many parents are appalled by the lack of quality and content in their children's math programs. The Focal Points in grades 6 to 8 seem reasonable. But in earlier grades, they fail to disqualify very weak programs, still in use, that derive inspiration from and are consistent with the 1989 Standards.

"In Grades 1 to 5, the Focal Points fail to explain that sustained experience with nontrivial multi-digit arithmetic problems is critical to success in algebra and higher mathematics. They omit all reference to memorization. They do not admit the interpretation that skills can be developed first and understanding filled in later. Some content material is vague or weak. Indeed, the description of whole number division activities with multi-digit dividends suggests that the hardest problem that students need to handle is 99 divided by 9, while the description of place value fails to name numbers above 1000. That is unacceptable. The NCTM authors should have incorporated existing documents, most notably the State of California's Mathematics Content Standards, which provide a crystal clear grade by grade delineation of computational and symbolic skills appropriate to a content-rich elementary math program."

Check out the whole thing.