Mission and Purpose

COMPASS is a secondary school implementation project funded in part by the National Science Foundation. Our goal is to assist schools, teachers, administrators, parent groups, and other community members and constituencies interested in improving secondary school mathematics opportunities and experiences for their students.

The need for reform, particularly in K-12 mathematics education, is supported by hundreds of teachers, teacher educators, mathematicians, school administrators and other policy makers. For those interested in details, we have included a brief and introductory bibliography of references describing this need.

The mission of COMPASS is to focus on the implementation of five multi-year, comprehensive high school curriculum development projects. The curricula provide a wide range of options in high school mathematics and have been designed to address the challenges and standards set forth by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM) 1989 publication Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics, as well as the updated Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000).

How can COMPASS help?

That depends on where you are in the reform process. Implementation of any of these programs is a systemic undertaking requiring many considerations in order to get the most out of each program. In particular, each program implementation should be accompanied by some serious form of professional development. You can access more information by going to the Choosing a Curriculum portion of the COMPASS site.