Educational Standards
Local standards usually define the educational methods and content included in the elementary level of instruction. In the United States and Canada, controversial subjects include the amount of calculator usage compared to manual computation and the broader debate between traditional mathematics and reform mathematics.
In the United States, the 1989 NCTM standards led to curricula which de-emphasized or omitted much of what was considered to be elementary arithmetic in elementary school, and replaced it with emphasis on topics traditionally studied in college such as algebra, statistics and problem solving, and non-standard computation methods unfamiliar to most adults.
Read more about this topic: Elementary Arithmetic
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