by Sugi Sorensen
November 25, 2025
Overview
On Wednesday, Nov. 05th, 2025, the La Canada Unified School District (LCUSD) hosted the first of three planned elementary math adoption parent meetings in the district’s Governing Board meeting room. The two-hour meeting, originally planed for 90 minutes, was led by Associate Superintendent Jim Cartnal and featured a panel of district staff including principals David Santiago-Speck of Palm Crest Elementary School and Carrie Hetzel of Paradise Canyon Elementary School, elementary teachers Mandy Redfern (LCE) and Camilla Hartman (PCR), high school math department chair Juan Nuñez, and at various times additional district cabinet members – Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Debra Cradduck and Associate Superintendent of Tech Services Jamie Lewsadder. Approximately 40 parents attended to learn about the district’s K-8 math curriculum adoption process, though roughly 90 had RSVP’ed.
After welcoming parents and presenting the evening’s agenda, Cartnal explained that the meeting had originally been billed as a Parent Advisory Committee meeting, but after receiving feedback that there was in fact no parent advisory committee, rather a series of three open meetings for whoever showed up, he changed the meeting title.1
Purpose, Key Timeline and Process
Cartnal then introduced the panel of district staff also in attendance, polled parents about which schools their students attended, and then presented the purpose of the meeting, stated succinctly in slide 4 of his presentation slides:
Cartnal emphasized that the district values transparency and said the district plans to give regular updates to parents about the work of the LCUSD Math Adoption Committee, which consists solely of teachers and administrators. About the parent information meetings Cartnal said, “we want to use these as venues to gain feedback and insights from you all because we believe that partnering together we can achieve improved outcomes for our students, support them so they can be successful.”
Cartnal then presented the district’s timeline for the adoption of a mathematics curriculum for grades K-8:
Three-Year Adoption Plan:
- 2025-26: Determine district math priorities through surveys and committee work
- 2026-27: Pilot two selected curricula across elementary schools (K-5)
- 2027-28: Implement new textbooks in classrooms
Cartnal acknowledged that the district had received voluminous critical feedback about the district’s current K-5 mathematics curriculum – Everyday Mathematics – published by McGraw-Hill, formally adopted by the district Governing Board in the 2015-16 school year. Areas of weakness Cartnal acknowledged hearing from parents about included operational, computational, acquisitional, and procedural foundations. The myriad substantive problems with Everyday Mathematics both within the district and in dozens of school districts around the country have been thoroughly documented on this website since it was first considered for adoption in 2014-15 (see here, here, and here) and after it was formally adopted in May 2015 (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
In light of this background, it was not surprising then that Cartnal declared that several critical decisions had already been made about the district’s new K-8 elementary math adoption:
- Math In Focus: Singapore Math by Marshall Cavendish will be retained for grades 6-8.
- The adoption will focus only on K-5, keeping or replacing the current Everyday Mathematics curriculum.
- There are no plans to implement leveled math (i.e. different pathways for students of different abilities) at the elementary level.
About the first point – that the district has no intent to review math priorities in grades 6 through 8 – Cartnal said the following:
“We have a remarkable 6th, 7th and 8th grade program that our teachers completely believe in. The title is called Math In Focus and we’re not going to go away from that. We want that to stay. Our teachers love it. It’s successful.”
Parent Feedback Opportunity
A third of the way into the meeting, district staff passed out pencils and a form to each parent in attendance to provide feedback on what they thought a successful math adoption would look like, and feedback about their child’s K-8 math experience. Parents spent about 10 minutes individually completing the form summarized in the following slide:
The Elephant in the Room
Unmentioned by Cartnal and left undiscussed was the burning question of how a top-performing public school district in California selected a controversial, constructivist, inquiry-based curriculum – Everyday Mathematics – that parents and 2nd and 6th grade teachers strongly opposed adopting in the first place in 2015, preferring instead Math In Focus, and wound up ten years later in exactly the place parents had warned about. There is unanimity among parents and teachers that Math In Focus is a rigorous, sound curriculum appropriate for the district’s students, and there is no appetite to adopt something new in grades 6 through 8. Yet the exact opposite situation – years of controversy and complaints, legions of parents turning to outside supplementation to compensate for Everyday Math’s weaknesses, plus strong interest in adopting a replacement – exists with the curriculum adopted in grades K through 5 – Everyday Math.
Cartnal bafflingly refused to acknowledge the elephant in the room when asked to summarize K-5 teacher sentiment about their current math situation, “Everyday Math is not something that I think we’re completely, you know, against, if you will.”
As if the feedback documented on this website or the feedback Cartnal acknowledged receiving prior to the meeting was not enough, a flurry of parent complaints were voiced during the parent feedback portion of the meeting about Everyday Mathematics.
Frustration with EM’s multiple methods Approach:
Several parents expressed frustration with the current Everyday Mathematics curriculum requiring students to learn multiple approaches (partial quotients, partial products, etc.) before mastering the standard algorithms. Parent John McArthur articulated this clearly: “It was just frustrating to watch my kids try to figure it out and figure out all the other ways of doing multiplication, all the other ways of doing division… When you start learning something, keep it simple. Just one way, the right way. That way everyone does it the same way. It’s just one way.” He added that in later grades after students had mastered the standard algorithms students could learn shortcuts or alternate algorithms. McArthur is a professor who teaches Aeronautical Engineering at USC.
Parent Larry Brown echoed this frustration with a personal anecdote from his child, a first grader at La Canada Elementary:
“I have a child who’s six and a half years old and some of the homework I was sent home – he was given multiple different ways he could solve something and he’s six and a half. I’m like, this is ridiculous. How about just the best way to solve this and just do that? At age six and a half, to me, (is) way too early to be giving multiple different things. Let’s think about how to do it. How about just the best way and just do that and master that and then move on?”
Mastery-Based Learning:
Parent Alex Gutierrez emphasized that math “requires mastery. If a child doesn’t have a concept truly mastered… it just compounds and becomes a chronic deficit over time.” He pushed for structural changes that could adapt to individual student needs, though Cartnal clarified that leveled elementary math was not within the adoption’s scope.
Math Diagnostic Screener Announced
Not all interactions were contentious. Parents enthusiastically greeted the revelation by Cartnal that the district is actively looking for a new universal math screener/progress-monitoring tool as part of its elementary math adoption process. The purpose of the math diagnostic program is to screen students for learning differences and gaps in learning math standards and what Cartnal called “conceptual deficits.” Cartnal acknowledged that the inspiration for this effort was the success observed by district’s recent adoption of the DIBELS reading fluency screener.2
A parent asked how often the math screener would be administered to students through the school year. Cartnal responded that the various tools under consideration from different publishers and developers differ in format, but most follow a standard assessment sequence of beginning of the year, mid-year, and end of the year.
Though Cartnal did not go into more detail, members of La Canada Math Parents have communicated with the district in the past and shared information about math diagnostic tools and universal screeners, including names of tools and contact information for experts in the area of math intervention.
LCUSD Math Adoption Committee
Following the revelation about the math diagnostic screener search, Cartnal disclosed the twenty-two members of the LCUSD Elementary Math Adoption Committee:
Note that the committee consists solely of district staff – no parents were included. Cartnal added that they decided to include teachers from the middle and high school since the adoption originally was planned to cover grades K through 8 before the decision was made that 6-8 is off the table because all stakeholder groups are in agreement that Math In Focus should stay. In addition, teachers from high school see the product of the earlier K-8 math instruction so have an important perspective on the preparedness of district elementary students for higher math.
Cartnal then spent several slides detailing the activities of the LCUSD Math Adoption Committee so far – two meetings held to date laying out the timeline, a discussion of the state’s California Mathematics Framework revision in 2023 and K-8 instructional materials adoption process that will culminate the next week (i.e. Nov. 7-8, 2025) in recommended materials from curriculum publishers being presented to the California State Board of Education (SBE) for official approval, and preliminary discussion of a vision statement on mathematics for the district.
Cartnal showed one possible draft vision statement to parents:
There was little if any parent feedback during this portion of the presentation. Alas, it would not remain this way for long.
The Math Priorities Survey Controversy
The most contentious portion of the meeting centered on the forthcoming LCUSD Math Priorities Survey developed with contractor Hanover Research, announced by Cartnal to launch November 17th, though it was learned after the meeting that the release of the survey would be delayed given the significant parent pushback.
Cartnal described the purpose of the Math Priorities Survey in slide 14 of his presentation deck:
Cartnal disclosed that the same survey will be given to three different respondent groups: teachers, parents, and students in grades 7 and 8. The intent of the survey is to establish what the various stakeholder groups do not like about the present curriculum – Everyday Mathematics – and discern their priorities for what they would like to see in a replacement, if one is determined to replace EM.
Cartnal said that their consulting partner – Hanover Research – in addition to writing the survey, would help the district disaggregate the data and along with the LCUSD Math Adoption Committee create a “high-quality” instructional materials adoption rubric that would be used to help the district winnow the candidate curricula down to two that will be piloted in the 2026-27 school year:
The meeting turned contentious when Cartnal previewed questions – 15 and 17 – from the draft Math Priorities Survey, which triggered significant pushback from parents. Shown below is question 15 from the survey:
Note that respondents will be asked to rate the importance of each statement on a five-point scale from “Not at all Important” to “Extremely Important,” with an “Unsure” option.
A flurry of questions and critiques were raised by parents in response:
- Incomprehensible Jargon: Parent Greg Alexanian was particularly blunt: “I consider myself a fairly well-educated person. Those are very ambiguous questions. I really didn’t know what you were trying to ask… there were a lot of code words that were used, and there wasn’t enough plain English to describe what was going on… you can’t sit there and expect to get real answers from people when they don’t know what the hell the questions are asked.” Another parent revealed that she was valedictorian of her college yet did not know what parts of survey question 15 were asking.
- The Unsure Problem: Multiple parents noted that the Unsure option effectively discards parent input. One parent stated, “That tab doesn’t collect your data.” Another observed that parents who misunderstand the question won’t select Unsure – they’ll answer incorrectly, skewing results.
- Educator vs. Parent Language: Parent Stéphane Valladier pointed out: “The intended audience for this is educators… but the target audience is parents.” When teacher Mandy Redfern attempted to explain one question, her detailed explanation of multiple representations (matching equations to pictures to word problems) was nothing like what parents understood from the survey language.
- Contrast with Computational Questions: When Cartnal showed slide 17 on computational understanding (e.g. “building speed and accuracy with math facts,” “step-by-step mastery”), parents immediately noted they were ‘MUCH better’ and more comprehensible. This contrast highlighted how the conceptual understanding questions used impenetrable jargon.
- No Mechanism for Trade-offs: I noted during the meeting that the survey provides no way to express conditional priorities: “I may think that connecting mathematical concepts across multiple representations is important, but not at the expense of other things like building fluency.” I pointed out that the survey questions shown to us do not allow for ranking priorties, though in response Cartnal said that later survey questions not shown to us would ask respondents to rank-order curriculum priorities.
- Missing Critical Data: Parent Meghan Balding asked Cartnal if the suvey will ask if students are seeking outside help in math, to which Cartnal answered no – they had considered it but decided it was outside the purpose and intent of the survey. Surprised at this deliberate omission I criticized the decision not to ask about outside tutoring/supplementation by pointing out that in the 2017 survey La Canada Math Parents conducted of elementary math parents in the district, we found that 57% of respondents were supplementing or tutoring in math, so the district by omitting the question would not know whether the curriculum or the outside tutoring/supplementation was responsible for observed performance metrics.
Staff Attempts a Defense of the Survey
With the forward progress of the meeting stopped cold by the parent pushback on question 15 of the survey, district staff attempted a defense of the survey process. Cartnal suggested parents could simply select ‘Unsure’ if confused, prompting parent pushback that this renders the feedback meaningless. Cartnal also appeared to suggest that parent feedback on these technical questions was less important than teacher responses, stating, “if we find that there’s agreement in parents that are disagreeing with the teachers, the teachers will take that into account” – thus implying teacher opinions would supersede parental input.
Parent Larry Brown then asked Cartnal straight up how the input of parents, staff, students, and the consultant would be weighted in the final determination of curriculum. Cartnal first responded that the consultant Hanover Research would have no say in the decision and was merely helping with the Math Priorities Survey and materials evaluation rubric. Then he admitted that, “the staff is going to make the recommendation for which title that they say is best for our kids to adopt…”, but ultimately the Governing Board would have to officially approve the teacher recommendation.
This elicited a follow-up question from an incredulous parent that almost derailed the entire meeting. Parent Greg Alexanian asked, “you’re saying basically the teachers’ opinions are the only ones that really count. It doesn’t matter with the ‘Unsure,’ why put the question up there for the parents to answer?”
Teacher Camilla Hartman responded that it was best that teachers make the determination because, “ultimately we know the students best,” though she assured parents that they really wanted to hear what parents thought.
With the progress of the meeting halted, Cartnal proposed that he finish presenting what he had planned to present, then invite any parents who wanted to stay after the allotted 90 minutes to provide further feedback on the Math Priorities Survey questions that had been shown. Note that only two of a reported two dozen questions were revealed to parents during the meeting.
Questions and Concerns About the Pilot
During the scheduled Q&A portion of the meeting, several parents raised practical concerns about how piloting would work without disrupting student learning across curriculum transitions. Staff initially dismissed the concerns stating that all curricula cover the same standards, thus implying that the curriculum used doesn’t matter. When the absurdity of the assertion was pointed out, staff backpedalled and then acknowledged the concerns and retreated to the position that the specifics of how the pilot would be carried out remain to be determined.
Additionally, parent Stephanie Avanessian requested that all committee materials and rubrics be made publicly available. Cartnal indicated this would come at the next January 28th parent meeting.
Regular Meeting Adjourns, Stalwarts Press On
Cartnal thanked parents for attending and adjourned the meeting at the 90-minute mark, inviting those who wanted to stay to attempt to untangle the mess of the Math Priorities Survey questions that had been shown earlier (i.e. questions 15 & 17 from the draft survey.) Most parents left, but about half a dozen soldiered on.
Parents and the staff who stayed continued discussions for another 30 minutes whereupon parents made the following concrete suggestions with regard to the survey:
- Add parenthetical plain-English explanations for each technical term.
- Include a “hover” tooltip feature for the online survey questions.
- Add “Is this question clear? Yes/No” after each question.
- Redefine or split the ‘Unsure’ option (e.g. ‘Unsure – Defer to teachers’ vs. ‘Don’t understand.’) This elicited a mixed response from different parents.
- Delay the survey launch to incorporate feedback.
- Include questions about tutoring/supplementation.
Analysis and Observations
Communication Disconnect: The meeting revealed a fundamental disconnect between district staff and parents. The survey questions, written in educator jargon, were presented to a parent audience without apparent recognition that the language was inaccessible. Teacher Redfern’s improvised explanation of the “connecting mathematical ideas across multiple representations” question demonstrated how far the written questions were from plain English.
Defensive Posture: Rather than acknowledging the validity of parent concerns, Cartnal’s responses tended toward explaining why the current approach was acceptable. His suggestion that parents uncomfortable with technical questions could select ‘Unsure’ – effectively opting out of providing meaningful feedback – was particularly tone-deaf given the stated goal of gathering community input.
Teacher Authority vs. Parent Input: A tension emerged around who ultimately decides curriculum. While Cartnal emphasized parent engagement, he also made clear that “staff because they’re credentialed will make this decision.” Teacher Camilla Hartman stated that teachers “know the students best” and will ultimately decide “with the influence of parents.” This framing positions parent feedback as advisory rather than determinative.
Structural Issues with Survey Design: The survey’s design appears to stack the deck in favor of the status quo conceptual approach of Everyday Mathematics. Parents fear the jargon-laden and pedagogical questions will elicit excessive ‘Unsure’ responses, and be misinterpreted as deferral to teacher preferences when parent input would be useful had the survey been better designed.
Missing Baseline Data: The decision not to ask about tutoring/supplementation represents a significant methodological blind spot. Without this data, the district cannot distinguish curriculum effectiveness from the effects of widespread private tutoring in the community. The behavior of knowledgable and well-resourced parents to compensate for the observed deficiencies of a poor curriculum, known as the Twinkie effect, is little known among educators but emerged during the Math Wars of the 1990s and 2000s and is described in detail here.
Conclusion
The meeting exposed significant process concerns. Parents who attended and self-selected as highly engaged struggled to understand the survey questions that will be sent to the broader community. The district’s partnership with Hanover Research produced instruments apparently designed for educator audiences, not parent respondents. While staff acknowledged the feedback and promised to explore modifications such as hover explanations and clarifying language, no concrete commitments were made to delay the survey or substantially revise the questions before the survey release.
- Here is slide 31 of Cartnal’s slides that he presented to district parents at the LCUSD Elementary Parents Presentation: 7-12 Math Pathways, Acceleration, and Placement Policy on September 30, 2025 in an online Zoom webinar:
↩︎ - DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is a set of short, standardized assessments designed to measure foundational reading skills in students from K through 6th grade. It functions primarily as a universal screening and progress-monitoring tool, allowing schools to identify children at risk for reading difficulties early enough to intervene effectively. To read more more about it, see this summary from Claude.ai. ↩︎