Resumen

Reform may be too strong a word to characterize any developments in mathematics education in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century to the beginning of the third millennium. School mathematics has continually changed (especially in terms of decisions that have been made in response to perceived changes in the school population), but change should not be confused with reform. The basic form of school mathematics remains much like what is was at the end of the nineteenth century. Even substantial attempts to unify the mathematics curriculum in the early 1900s and to modernize it in the 1950s and 1960s yielded only surface, temporary, or localized changes. The rhetoric of reform tends to paper over important differences among reformers, and attempts to implement reform have largely ignored the wider social, political, and economic context. As of 1995, when this article was first published, it was not clear that reformers in the standards movement of the late twentieth century would be any more successful than their forebears.