The author, director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project, tackles the following question: Should the United States have national standards with teeth, that is, a single set of standards tied to assessments and agreed to by the states? Proponents advance five main arguments for implementing such a standard. In his rebuttal, the author points out that a single set of national standards in mathematics assures neither high student performance nor a healthy economy, that mathematics curriculums are fairly prescribed and uniform across states, that a national curriculum won't resolve the equity issue or speed up change in schools, and that the politicization of education in the United States has resulted in a loss of expert guidance in mathematics at the national level. (Contains 4 endnotes.)