I thought this was interesting in light of the recent thread on Common Core
Common Core Mathematics: background Liping Ma critiques the "strand" structure of U.S. mathematics curriculum. Common Core seems more of the same, at least in the way I'm seeing implemented in my DD's school.
A Critique of the Structure of U.S. Elementary School Mathematics The big influence of the first California framework, “The Strands Report”, published during the new math movement, was to fundamentally change the structure of U.S. mathematics content from a core-subject structure to a strands structure. During the past few decades, although the names of items changed from “strands” to “areas” to “standards”, the strands structure has remained. The damage this structure has caused to U.S. elementary mathematics education is the instability of content, discontinuity in instruction, and incoherence in concepts.
