Starting in 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) has developed and disseminated standards for curriculum, teaching, and assessment. These documents have guided many subsequent efforts to improve mathematics instruction in the U.S. While these first efforts predictably met with mixed interpretations and reactions, they have stimulated broad public and professional interest in the nature and formation of such standards.

As the NCTM has undertaken to update and refine the standards, producing the new Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, it recognized the necessity to enlist the broad critical participation of the diverse expert communities that bear some responsibility for mathematics education. In order to provide for this complex advisory function, the NCTM petitioned each of the professional organizations of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) to form an Association Review Group (ARG) that would respond, in stages, to a series of substantial and focused questions framed by the Principles and Standards writing group in the course of its work.

This formidable undertaking has been, in the view of the participating organizations, dramatically successful, to the profit of both NCTM and the contributing organizations. It was a remarkable and unprecedented process that produced some of the most thoughtful and disciplined discussions of mathematics curriculum and instruction that we have seen in these professional communities. It contrasted with what was felt by some to be the inadequate participation by mathematics professionals in the formation of the original standards.

Of course, Principles and Standards addresses matters of educational goals and policies for which there is no simple right answer or formulation, and no clear or stable consensus. It represents the views of a team of writers assembled by the national professional organization of mathematics teachers, views deeply informed by the knowledge and dispositions of diverse professional communities. What can be objectively said is that the process of construction of the Principles and Standards has been open, rigorous, and well informed by the views of all professionals concerned with mathematics education, and that this has been achieved, in part, thanks to the innovative design of the ARG process. Indeed, the quality of that development process, including the ARGs, has been independently reviewed, at the invitation of NCTM itself, in a study by the National Research Council.

With this letter, representatives of the following member organizations of CBMS wish to register their appreciation to the NCTM for the design, and implementation with integrity, of this process. With this, the NCTM has established a model, heretofore all too rare, of how to stage civil, disciplined, and probing discourse among diverse professionals on matters of mathematics education.

Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences
Lynne Billard, Chair
Thomas R. Banchoff, Chair-Elect
Raymond L. Johnson, Secretary-Treasurer
Sadie C. Bragg, Member-at-Large of Executive Committee

American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges
Susan S. Wood, President

American Mathematical Society
Felix E. Browder, President
Hyman Bass, President-Elect and Past Chair of the Committee on Education

Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators
Susan Gay, President

American Statistical Association
W. Michael O´Fallon, President

Association for Symbolic Logic
C. Ward Henson, Secretary-Treasurer
Jean A. Larson, Chair, Committee on Education

Association of State Supervisors of Mathematics
Jacqueline P. Mitchell, President

Association for Women in Mathematics
Jean E. Taylor, President

Benjamin Banneker Association
Beatrice Moore-Harris, President

Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
John R. Birge, President

Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Morris L. Eaton, President

Mathematical Association of America
Thomas R. Banchoff, President
Kenneth Ross, Chair of the MAA Association Review Group

National Association of Mathematicians
John W. Alexander, Jr., President

National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics
Jerry Cummins, President

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Gilbert Strang, President