The philosophical war rages. Depending on one's perspective, the use of calculators at the elementary school level is seen as either the solution to or the cause of many of the problems affecting math education in this country. Even the experts disagree. Many math educators and boards of education enthusiastically endorsed the NCTM standards and actively promoted the use of classroom calculators from kindergarten through high school. While few educators deny the usefulness of calculators at the high school level, some are now beginning to rethink their use in the lower grades.
Calculators prevent students from seeing the underlying structure and beauty in math.
We have lots of teachers reporting that they're getting kids in third, fourth, and fifth grade who don't know their basic facts. Others disagree, however, claiming that calculators help younger students grasp the underlying principles of mathematics by allowing them to spend time on those principles rather than on the rote computations necessary to solve them. But I don't want to spend class time adding and subtracting five and six digit numbers. I would rather spend class time doing other math. And the answer to that question may lie in the reasons why we teach math today.