Jan 26, 2004
I co-authored and collected endorsements of the 1999 open letter to former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley (posted at http://mathematicallycorrect.com/nation.htm#doesham). Two and only two people have ever contacted me to ask me to remove their names from the letter, and I removed their names immediately after receiving their requests.
One of these two people expressed agreement with the letter, but indicated that because of his official position he would prefer to avoid controversy. I removed his name promptly before the letter was published. The other person is Leon Lederman. He initially endorsed the letter and his name appears in the published version in the Washington Post, Nov. 18, 1999. Subsequent to publication, on Nov. 26, 1999, I received an email note from him requesting that his name be removed from the letter. I removed his name that very day from the web version (it was too late for the Washington Post version), and requested an explanation from him. I received no explanation of any sort. After publication in the Washington Post, several leading mathematicians and physicists requested to add their names to the letter, and those names appear on the web version.
I have not received any other expressions of regret for signing the letter, or requests to "un-sign" it. A request to remove one's name after so long a time as this would be inappropriate and disingenuous. One cannot normally sign a document and then unsign it. As to accusations that it has been misused, I know of no such examples, but even if there were such incidents, what conclusions follow? Certainly documents of any sort can be misused, even celebrated and important documents such as the Bible or the U.S. Constitution. The open letter says what it says and there is nothing misleading about it. The signers of the letter read it before adding their names to it.
The NCTM officially endorsed all ten "exemplary" and "promising" K-12 mathematics programs criticized in the open letter to Riley (for a text of the NCTM endorsement, see the appendix to A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century at: http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AHistory.html), and at one time that NCTM endorsement was posted on the NCTM web site. Johnny Lott's condemnation of the open letter as a form of "stalking" (http://www.nctm.org/news/president/2004-01president.htm) appears to be an attempt to side step legitimate criticisms of the current direction of mathematics education in the United States.
David Klein