For nearly two years, the 24-member National Mathematics Advisory Panel has labored to produce a report with the primary objective of soothing a math community raw from nearly 20 years of conflict. Would that it had the political independence to have directed its energies instead to keeping America students from slipping further behind their international counterparts.

For decades, the two sides in the Math Wars have waged battles as heated as those in the Reading Wars (and often wielded with viscously low blows) over 1) whether standards algorithms should be emphasized in the classroom; 2) how much attention to give to basic skills and how much to give to problem-solving; and 3) whether instruction should be 'child-centered' or 'teacher-centered.' On the first issue, the panel's report supported outright the traditionalists and their allegiance to standard algorithms. On the second, the panel endorsed computational fluency, conceptual understanding and problem-solving as all equally important--a stand that effectively gave points to the traditionalists, because the opposing camp had always painted the basic skills as somehow incompatible with more conceptual skills. On the last, child v. teacher, let's call it a draw.

The Task Group on Teachers and Teacher Education contributed a report with seven recommendations, of which five were hardly more than a refrain about the need for more research to figure out how to prepare teachers so that they can be more effective. This task group struck with a broad brush, even weighing in on the issue of giving more pay to math teachers, as differential pay for math teachers was cautiously endorsed. Perhaps the most unequivocal endorsement should well have been a no-brainer, that the nation needs to attract "mathematically knowledgeable teacher candidates."

Will teachers soon see calls to put oversized textbooks on a diet, end spiraling curricula, and periodically lock up calculators--all in keeping with recommendations of the panel? Considering that the National Reading Panel had some difficulty gaining policy traction with its 2000 report's much more tangible endorsement of scientifically based reading research (SBRR), it's no surprise that the answers to these questions remain obscured in the smoke still rising from the battlefield.