The danger of not requiring three years of math is that the board will be accused of elitism, of favoring tracking, of pursuing a low skills curriculum for the average student and of being soft. That's already begun to happen. Here was the pedagogical left accusing the conservatives on the board of being, as it were, soft on crime. Both are major steps toward putting more beef into the state's math program, though the board's version tilts slightly toward more emphasis on basic math facts, and leaves a bit less wiggle room for fuzzy projects and untestable understandings, and thus a little less time for conceptual play. But in a confrontation that often seemed more like a religious war than a disagreement over how children learn, those differences swiftly became distinctions between true belief and heresy.
Little evidence appears of any widespread use of calculators, computers or mathematics projects.
All of which is another reminder that American schools often have a hard time chewing and patting their heads at the same time. The question now is whether the board, through its influence in the writing of textbooks and curricular guidelines, and through the larger message that its actions send to local boards and parents, can correct the state's course without a whole-hog lurch in the other direction. In that effort, unfortunately, it is bucking not only a whole generation of teachers, many of whom are sadly deficient in their own understanding of math, but a generally unsympathetic state education establishment, both at the state Department of Education in Sacramento and in the teachers colleges. That establishment has enormous capacity for putting its own spin on whatever the politicians and policy-makers demand. It's for that reason that both parties in this fight so often behave like medieval scholastics disputing esoteric points of doctrine.