This paper addresses the contested way that ethnomathematics has sometimes been received by mathematicians and others and what that disagreement might suggest about issues in mathematics education; namely, (a) the relation of ethnomathematics to academic mathematics; (b) recent efforts to reform secondary school mathematics so that it prepares…

The issue of leadership in mathematics education--always a matter of some contention--has been complicated by developments in the field over the past half century or so. When mathematics education began to emerge as an academic field at the beginning of the twentieth century, so few people were seriously concerned with either its practice or its…

The U.S. school mathematics curriculum changed slowly during the last century, and only in the past few decades have there been serious efforts to establish it nationally rather than having it be, at least in principle, locally determined. Waves of change have periodically swept the curricular ocean, but on the seabed, in the classrooms where…