Struggles with the Beginnings of a National Curriculum in the United States

Over 100 years ago, E. H. Moore (1903), in his presidential address to the Mathematical Association of America, called for a unified mathematics curriculum built around the notion of functions but rejecting a completely axiomatic approach at the secondary level. Moore's address followed a major move to standardize the secondary school curriculum in 1894 in the report of the "Committee of Ten." Successive other calls for change and unification came across the decades but until 1989, the United States had little national direction about what the mathematics curriculum either could or should be at the pre-collegiate level. Since 1989, there has been a growing move to establish a national curriculum for the country, but the move continues to struggle. This paper outlines some of the recent history of the movement and suggests some barriers still in the way of achieving it.