California's New Math Framework Doesn't Add Up

With almost six million public school students, the state constitutes the largest textbook market in the United States. The battle over the 1992 California state framework, a document admired by math reformers nationwide, started slowly, smoldered fora few years, and then burst into a full-scale, media-enthralling conflict by the end of the decade. Traditionalists were satisfied with the Common Core requirement that students had to master basic math facts for addition and multiplication and the standard algorithms (step-by-step computational procedures) for all four operations-addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Addition and Multiplication Facts Fluency in mathematics usually refers to students'ability to perform calculations quickly and accurately.