As it usually does, the fall season brought another shower of blue-ribbon reports about the sorry state of American education. You could hear the cluck-clucking and tut-tutting from one coast to the other. But two reports in particular caught my eye, one for what it didn't say and one for what it did, boldly. Strangest of all, both reports came out of sectors of the education establishment that are not accustomed to self-criticism. The first was the work of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which issued a paper calling for "more coherence (in) the very diverse mathematics curricula...