Stakeholder #1

WikimediaImages, Departamento de Obras, 8/22/2015 via Pixabay Public Domain Distribution License

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is an organization that is most concerned with mathematics education. It tasks itself with raising awareness of the triumphs and struggles of national math education and support the teachers to any extent. Furthermore, the organization tasks itself with finding the best way to teach math to public school students. Currently, the organization has over 80,000 member worldwide, making it the largest association concerned with math education specifically. The majority of its members consist of teachers, however there are additional anonymous members of council as well. Since it is such a huge group, the council doesn't hold meetings, but rather posts journals online (on an irregular monthly basis) describing their points of view and ideas concerning education in the United States. All of their journals can be found online on their website, but require being a member to fully view the entirety of the listed documents. Lastly, the council is responsible for publishing the book Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics.

Claims and Validation:
Note - The journals contain other quotes from various members of the council; such quotes are cited via parentheses.

Challenge to the Common Core
"In particular, we consider this to be an opportune time to purposefully focus on improving the mathematics education of low-income students and culturally or linguistically diverse students2 who have historically been denied access to a high-quality and rigorous mathematics education in the United States (e.g., Jacobsen, Mistele, & Sriraman, 2013; Kitchen, DePree, Celedón-Pattichis, & Brinkerhoff, 2007; Leonard & Martin, 2013; Téllez, Moschkovich, & Civil, 2011).

Validation: We can say that this quote is credible and a good point to what the council is thinking since this a quote from important members of the organization from the journals that the council also publicly shares. This claim is to show what goals in math education are important in regards to the Math Wars, in this case, its the education of low-class students so that they can fully experience a quality math education.
Relationships between Students
"To understand relationships between students’ fractional knowledge and algebraic reasoning in the domain of equation writing, an interview study was conducted with 12 secondary school students, 6 students operating with each of 2 different multiplicative concept... Students operating with the second multiplicative concept had not constructed fractional numbers, but students operating with the third multiplicative concept had; students operating with the second multiplicative concept represented multiplicatively related unknowns in qualitatively different ways than students operating with the third multiplicative concept."

Validation: This claim by the council is a little bit shaky since the interview that the organization claims to get its information from is not cited in the document. Although the council has an incredible amount of credibility behind its name, there isn't much that can be said about the credibility of this statement since there is not information about the interview given. However, this claim still shows the effort and passion that the council has for the education of public school students.

Understand in the 4th Grade
"After observing the decreasing variation from the theoretical probability as the sample size increased, students developed a deeper understanding of the relationship between relative frequency of outcomes and theoretical probability as well as their respective associations with variation and expectation"

Validation: This claim is in the same rut as the last one. A study mentioned in the journal is said to have helped fourth graders better understand some of the principals behind mathematics when the focus of their learning was switched to foundatioal concepts on statistics. Again, the problem is that this study is not cited in the journal specifically, so its difficult to give this quote credibility.

Comparison to other Stakeholders:

The council is a third-party organization that is not involved with education in any way, but is an advocate none the less. The biggest thing about the council is that they indirectly started the Math Wars, but will suffer the least amount of consequences whether there is a reform of the common core or not. Whether there is a reform or not, the council will be unaffected and continue to advocate for the best way for teachers to give lessons most effectively. Furthermore, the council doesn't really advocate or criticize change in respect to the Math Wars. the council bases their opinions strictly off of statistical data (that they seem to have trouble referencing towards). All they want is what they think is best for the children; their opinion comes straight from data.