by Sugi Sorensen
June 19, 2026
At its regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday, June 09, 2026, the La Cañada Unified School District (LCUSD) Governing Board voted to adopt Math in Focus as its core math curriculum for grades K-5 beginning in the 2026-27 school year, replacing Everyday Mathematics (EM), which had been in use since the 2016-17 school year. Thus ends an unfortunate decade of sub-optimal mathematics instruction in an otherwise high-performing California public school district.
The Board vote was unanimous with all five Governing Board members (i.e. Caroline Anderson, Josh Epstein, Dan Jeffries, Joe Radabaugh, & Octavia Thuss) voting yes on the 5-year contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) with a total value not to exceed $415,000. The contract includes student and teacher printed materials (i.e. Teacher Edition and Student Edition sets for all grades K-5, along with student and teacher digital licenses, and Student Extra Practice and Homework sets, supplementary Classroom Manipulative sets, Math Fact Fluency books, and in-classroom posters and student and activity cards). Included in the purchase agreement was four hours of Getting Started online professional development (PD) and one hour of Leader Success Live Online training. Note that additional PD by an outside Singapore Math consultant was included in a separate agenda item (item 13.l on the agenda) also approved at the June 09th board meeting.
Background
For readers new to this saga, this adoption is the closing chapter of a decade-long story that turns on a single, fundamental difference: how the two curricula teach. Math in Focus is built on the Singapore method: explicit, mastery-based, teacher-directed instruction that carries students through a deliberate concrete-pictorial-abstract (CPA) progression and does not advance until a concept is mastered. Everyday Mathematics is a constructivist, inquiry-oriented curriculum that takes the opposite approach: it encourages students to figure out solutions for themselves and is built on a ‘spiral’ design that introduces a topic, moves on before students reach proficiency, and circles back to it across later grades on the premise that repeated exposure will eventually produce understanding. The spiral too often leaves gaps that are never closed, because the curriculum is built to revisit a topic on a schedule rather than to carry any student to mastery the first time.
That those gaps rarely surfaced in the district’s aggregate test scores is itself part of the story. LCUSD’s high CAASPP results have long been propped up by something other than the district’s adopted curriculum: families who could afford it quietly backfilled at home and through private math enrichment programs — Kumon, Mathnasium, JEI, Russian School of Mathematics (RSM), AoPS, and individual tutors. I have called this the Twinkie Effect — a shiny score with little nutritional value, sustained by parental supplementation rather than by what happened in the classroom. A decade of Everyday Mathematics did not come free. It came with a bill, paid in tutoring fees, in parents’ evenings spent reteaching the day’s lesson, and most quietly in the students whose families could not afford to compensate at all.
Skipping the Pilot
Prior to the June 9th Board meeting, district staff had decided to skip the piloting of the two finalist curricula – HMH’s Math in Focus and Savvas Learning’s enVision+ – during the 2026-27 school year. LCUSD Associate Superintendent of Curriculum & Instruction Jim Cartnal had reported at the Governing Board’s May 12, 2026 meeting (video here) that the Elementary Math Selection Committee and staff had decided at their last meeting of the school year in April to skip the pilot and proceed directly to adoption of Math in Focus for several reasons, primary among them that most on the selection committee (15 of 20 teachers) and all ~30 parents who submitted curriculum rubrics or preferences favored Math in Focus over enVision+. Cartnal also cited both parent and teacher concerns about juggling three math curricula at once (i.e. the current Everyday Mathematics, Math in Focus and enVision+) during the pilot year as a reason to skip the pilot. Cartnal said that the teachers on the selection committee were concerned that conducting a pilot would be disruptive to students because of the vast differences in scope and sequence and in instructional approaches of the three curricula.
It should be known that the decision to skip the pilot had been conveyed to me by Cartnal in a private meeting on May 7, 2026. I originally expressed concern about the decision to skip the pilot, a sentiment I echoed in my public comment to the Governing Board at their meeting on May 12th. I pointed out to the Board and staff that piloting is an important step in any curriculum adoption because a well-done pilot will surface issues that remain hidden during evaluation of sample materials and publisher presentations alone. The concern was set aside as less important than the anticipated disruptions that piloting three vastly different curricula would present.
Diagnostic Screener Fumble
Conspicuously absent from the contract, however, was the bundling of HMH’s math diagnostic screener MAP Growth. Instead, the Board was asked in a later agenda item (13.f) at the June 09th meeting to approve an online math diagnostic screener from a competing publisher – Amplify Education – called mCLASS Math Diagnostic, bundled with a digital intervention tool called Amplify Boost. I spoke out in opposition to the proposal to purchase Amplify mCLASS Math and Boost (my public comment can be viewed on YouTube here). The Board adopted half of my recommendation — declining to purchase Amplify Boost — but rejected the other half, deciding to try mCLASS Math for one year. The reasoning behind the mCLASS Math selection was so deficient that it warrants a separate article, forthcoming.
The End of a Regrettable Era
The minor fumble on a diagnostic screener should not overshadow the significance of the Board’s approval of Math in Focus. The June 9th decision bookends a completely avoidable, dark chapter in LCUSD’s history that the Board started almost exactly a decade ago, on May 26, 2016, when it unanimously approved adoption of Everyday Mathematics for grades K-5, while hedging its bets and at the same meeting also adopting Math in Focus, but only for grade 6. Readers should take note of the Board members who made that initial decision – Board Vice President Dan Jeffries, Clerk Kaitzer Puglia, member Brent Kuszyk, and member Ellen Multari (Board President David Sagal was absent on the night of the vote.) Note that of current LCUSD Governing Board members, only Jeffries was serving in May 2016, so he holds substantial responsibility for the decision. Jeffries and the Board at the time had multiple opportunities after that initial decision to course correct — when parents forced staff, and thus the Board by extension, to monitor the Everyday Mathematics adoption, which subsequently surfaced substantial reports that EM was deficient. Yet Jeffries and the Board at the time refused to take action to correct their mistake for several years after the initial adoption. To his credit, Jeffries ultimately voted to correct the misstep he had a hand in creating.
The Governing Board and cabinet’s obstinacy in refusing to acknowledge, much less address, any of the myriad problems Everyday Math caused, reflects a long tradition among LCUSD leadership across multiple boards of digging in their heels when mistakes are made, and of never acknowledging that the mistake was made in the first place. The issues caused by EM’s adoption were left solely on the backs of teachers and families to mitigate. District leadership to this day denies there were any substantive issues to address. Even in Board and cabinet’s comments at the June 9, 2026 meeting, there was no admission of past mistakes or acceptance of responsibility.
As if to cement its blasé attitude that papers over and denies past mistakes, district leadership exhibited the same behavior at the June 9, 2026 Board meeting on another agenda item (13.e) – the adoption of TCI’s Bring Science Alive science curriculum for its middle school. LCHS Middle School Principal Jarrett Gold during his presentation of item 13.e made it seem as though the decision to replace Accelerate Learning’s STEMscopes was merely an opportunity to update the science curriculum. He claimed STEMscopes had been in use longer than it actually had, having been formally adopted by the Governing Board at its June 2020 meeting and deployed in classrooms in August of 2020. For context, the life expectancy for a middle school science curriculum in California public schools is 8 to 15 years, with a practical average of 10-13 years. So abandoning STEMscopes after six years is a clear sign that the adoption failed, an observation I fully explain in this article published last month. In brief, parents raised strong objections to the selection of STEMscopes in January of 2020, detailing voluminous scientific errors and the lack of a student textbook, causing the Board to delay the decision for five months. The parents overwhelmingly preferred TCI to STEMscopes. The Board ignored the parent concerns, adopted STEMscopes based on the teacher selection committee’s preference, and now must eat the cost of abandoning the curriculum halfway into its planned life expectancy for the very reasons parents warned in 2020.
A Bright Future
The ultimate decision to adopt Math in Focus finally aligns the district’s K-5 math curriculum with grades 6-8 given that Math in Focus has been in use in 6th grade since 2016, and in grades 7 and 8 since the 2017-18 school year. This was cited by Cartnal as a fundamental requirement of its K-5 elementary math adoption – smoothing the difficult transition between Everyday Math in 5th grade and Math in Focus in 6th grade. Cartnal called this a “significant misalignment” in his report to the Board on May 12, 2026.
The one concern that La Cañada Math Parents (LCMP) foresees, and I expressed in my public comment supporting the Math in Focus adoption at the Board’s May 12th meeting, is that the district decided to deploy all six grades K-5 in a single year. I had advised doing a phased transition, deploying one or two grade levels per year over several years. However, Cartnal and the elementary teacher selection committee decided to deploy all six grade levels at once due to trade-offs. Among the trade-offs of a multi-year phased transition is that if the new curriculum proves superior to the old, students and their families still on the old curriculum during phase-in will feel short-changed. This is a valid concern and in the end I told both Cartnal and the Board that I understood their reasons for the single-year deployment. Nevertheless, I retain my concern that skipping the pilot — and rolling out all six grades at once — introduced risk that a properly conducted pilot could have mitigated.
Pilot or not, it is now up to LCUSD staff to tackle the not insubstantial task of transitioning from Everyday Mathematics to Math in Focus for six grades in roughly two-and-a-half months. LCMP made a promise to the Governing Board, the staff and the community at the May 12, 2026 meeting that we would do everything in our power to try to make the transition successful. LCMP is in the process of developing grade-level transition guides for parents of at least 4th and 5th graders to identify potential gaps in students’ math knowledge, and resources that parents can avail themselves of to better ensure that their students aren’t tripped up when they arrive in 4th and 5th grade in mid-August with a much more rigorous, mastery-based curriculum.