Modern Mathematics Standards

The Center for Curriculum Redesign (CCR) released the modernized mathematics standards it designed over the past 3 years. CCR’s aim to design world-class mathematics standards that explicitly address the learning needs of students for life and work in the 21st century is now a reality, eight years after its launch conference in Stockholm.

CCR led mathematics experts and practitioners from the U.S., Australia, and around the world to develop an exemplar world-class mathematics curriculum that any country could use to inform their own curriculum design. It can be consulted at http://mathstandards.curriculumredesign.org/

The companion report, “Mathematics for the Modern World” is highly recommended reading.

The project draws on evidence collected and agreed on as part of the PISA Mathematics 2021 project, which CCR advised. “It is now internationally recognized that the school curriculum needs to allow more time for deeper learning of modernized discipline-specific content and 21st century competencies. In order to do that we had to selectively curate (add, emphasize, de-emphasize or remove) curriculum content so that the core concepts and essential content are focused on that will best prepare students for life and work in our changing world,” said Charles Fadel, founder and chairman of CCR.

He added, “revised mathematics standards had been high on jurisdictions’ wish-list, but efforts have consistently been derailed by lack of funding, insufficient time, politics, academic biases, etc. As a result, there has been a huge overhang of curation and modernization which has now been finally addressed. We warmly invite jurisdictions to contact CCR to compare these standards with their needs.”

Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD’s Education and Skills directorate, stated, “I commend CCR, a key reference for OECD’s work on Mathematics education for the past 10 years, for leading this endeavour to success. The issues this work deals with, such as more focus on essential and relevant subjects and topics, emphasis on modern branches such as statistics/probabilities, and explicit attention to 21st-century competencies such as reasoning, computational thinking, and resilience will also be highly relevant for the future of PISA.”

CCR is deeply grateful, for their trust and support, to: