by Sugi Sorensen
May 13, 2025
| UPDATE (May 14, 2025): At the LCUSD Governing Board meeting on May 13, 2025, the Board voted to remove item 12.n from the Consent Agenda and table it to an as-yet-unspecified future meeting. This was what I recommended at the end of this article. |
Background
On Monday May 12, 2025 I became aware that the La Cañada Unified School District (LCUSD) Governing Board will be asked to approve a $43,500 contract with the UCLA Curtis Center at its regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday, May 13, 2025. Unfortunately, the agenda item is buried in the consent agenda of the 05/13/25 meeting, meaning no Board discussion will take place, nor will the public be allowed to ask questions or voice concerns.
The agenda for the LCUSD Governing Board 05/13/25 meeting may be found here. The agenda item in question is 12.n – UCLA Curtis Center Partnership with LCUSD, R178-24-25. The board agenda item is described as follows on the board’s agenda website:
“The UCLA Curtis Center for Mathematics and Teaching is a mathematics education group in the UCLA Department of Mathematics. Since its inception, The Center has partnered with local school districts, including LCUSD in 2015-2018, to create, disseminate, and apply knowledge of K-12 mathematics, instruction, and assessment. LCUSD leadership reached out to the Center seeking a partnership that could help advise, coach, and guide the LCUSD elementary mathematics textbook adoption that will take place across the 2025-26 school year.”
The Current Considerations portion of agenda item 12.n, further states:
“Organized in three phases of professional development, the Center will partner with LCUSD staff to clarify priorities, narrow the pool of potential instructional resources, and make a data driven selection of textbook finalists that will be piloted by LCUSD teachers. The various phases of professional development also will clarify significant updates to the California math framework, facilitate textbook evaluation using a modified Center evaluation rubric so that staff will be positioned to make a strong recommendation for adoption.”
I also learned separately in conversation with LCUSD staff on 04/25/25 that the district has started the process of a new LCUSD elementary math adoption. As background, LCUSD currently uses the Everyday Mathematics curriculum from McGraw-Hill in grades K-5, and Math In Focus from Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) Publishing in grade 6. Both curricula were adopted by the LCUSD Governing Board in Spring of 2016 after a two-year selection process. This adoption process was enormously controversial and has been documented voluminously on the La Cañada Math Parents website (here, here, here, here, and here.)
Everyday Mathematics has been in use in LCUSD since the 2016-17 school year and is due for renewal or replacement as the typical lifespan of an elementary mathematics textbook curriculum is 7-10 years.
As the agenda item description above discloses, the textbook adoption is currently announced to take place across the 2025-26 school year. LCUSD elementary teachers have been notified of the effort. As yet unidentified LCUSD teachers have been invited to be on an Elementary Math Textbook Adoption Committee, and among the first events to be scheduled for this committee is a meeting where “a Curtis Center Mathematics Specialist will meet with the La Cañada School District K-6 mathematics textbook adoption team for one day (6 hours) in May…to build shared understanding of the California Mathematics Framework, Content Standards, and establish district priorities relative to mathematics instruction and textbook adoption.” I have since learned that this initial meeting is scheduled for Thursday, May 22, 2025. Keep in mind that the Curtis Center has not even been hired yet. Staff must have high confidence the consent agenda item would be approved without objection.
Concerns About the Curtis Center
A number of concerns arise after researching the Curtis Center at UCLA, its previous work with LCUSD in 2015-18, its record of work with other California public school districts as gleaned from the Curtis Center website, and its stated position on mathematics instruction and the California Mathematics Framework in particular.
The advice provided by Curtis Center consultants to LCUSD in the 2015-18 time period to help the district modify its middle and high school courses and curriculum to meet the then recently adopted California Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSS-M) and 2014 California Mathematics Framework was problematic and indicates the organization should not be trusted to work with again, unless past performance deficiencies have been corrected. Among the misguided decisions LCUSD made during its CCSS-M adoption that were likely influenced if not outright recommended by Curtis consultant(s):
- LCUSD was advised and implemented the recommendation to move Algebra I from 8th grade to 9th grade, even though the CCSS-M allowed districts to keep Algebra I in 8th grade as several other high performing school districts did in their CCSS-M transitions. LCUSD cabinet members as recent as 2019 expressed the mistaken belief that the CCSS-M required all public schools in California to move Algebra I to 9th grade.
- La Cañada High School was bizarrely advised to change its high school math course names to Integrated Pathway course names (e.g. LC Math 1, LC Math 2, LC Math 3), even though the school chose to implement Traditional Pathway courses (i.e. Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II) as allowed in the CCSS-M. This mistake alone has caused and continues to cause untold confusion and problems for dozens if not hundreds of LCUSD students as LCMP first brought to light in 2018.
- LCUSD implemented a 4-to-3 compaction of high school math courses in its Advanced College Prep pathway at LCHS in order to allow some of its students to reach Calculus before the end of high school without taking extra courses outside of school or accelerating in math by taking the middle school math placement exam. While this was a rational choice at the time also followed by some other districts in California, it involved difficult trade-offs that are just now being rectified by recent changes to the 7-12 math pathways and course sequence (discussed by LCMP here, here, here, and here.)
While it is unknown to what extent Curtis Center influenced the decisions that led to the above problems, it is known that LCUSD worked extensively with Curtis staff during the 2015-18 timeframe and allowed Curtis staff to lead professional development of LCUSD teachers and give presentations to LCUSD parents:
Materials on Curtis’s own website do not instill confidence that it has learned from its past mistakes. For example, on the Case Studies section of its website, where it presents examples of its work with K-12 public districts in California, it discusses work done with Corning Union High School. The ‘challenge’ presented to Curtis is described as:
“Corning Union High School is the only comprehensive high school in the rural Northern California town of City of Corning, CA; population 8,000. As part of the a federal Promise Grant awarded to the Paskenta Band of Nomiaki Indians, the high school enlisted the help of the UCLA Curtis Center to support their math teachers. The high school mathematics department wanted to incorporate more mathematical modeling in their instruction and a thought partner for identifying the priority content of their units. Additionally, a goal of the Promise Grant was to increase student success on the California Assessment of Student Progress and Performance by 3% per year. Finally, the Corning High mathematics faculty requested the Curtis Center facilitate articulation with the Corning Union Elementary District’s middle school mathematics faculty.”
The website then describes Curtis’ action plan and work done starting in 2019. How successful was Curtis in reaching its challenge goals? Here is how Curtis presents the results of this collaboration:
Remember they were asked to increase student success on the CAASPP by 3% per year. What did they actually achieve? I looked up Corning Union High School District’s CAASPP scores from before they began working with Curtis to now:
While it is unknown how long Curtis worked with Corning Union, and to what extent Corning staff followed their advice, they did not achieve their +3% increase per year goal and since 2021-22 have regressed to far below where they were prior to the COVID pandemic.
It is possible that Curtis would do a fabulous job guiding LCUSD in its elementary math adoption, however available evidence does not elicit confidence in the choice.
Concerns About the Elementary Math Adoption Timeline
There are also concerns about the proposed timeline for the LCUSD elementary math textbook adoption currently scheduled for the 2025-26 school year.
LCUSD is currently in the midst of a budget crisis as recently elucidated by LCUSD Governing Board President Caroline Anderson in a letter to the district community that was re-printed in the La Cañada Outlook:
While $43,500 may seem an insignificant amount, President Anderson, other Board members and other district leaders have consistently conveyed the message that painful cuts lie ahead:
“The district has proposed more than $2 million in budget reductions for the 2025-26 school year as a first step toward closing the projected deficit. The proposed reductions impact several areas. Class sizes in kindergarten through sixth grades will increase. Elementary Spanish will be eliminated. Staffing will be reduced across administrative, clerical, technology and maintenance roles. The district will also reduce its spending on classroom supplies and contracted services and scale back hours for counselors and therapists. Adjustments will be made to scheduling at the middle and high school levels.
These decisions are incredibly difficult.”
And while $43,500 is a drop in a $67 million budget bucket, the initial purchase which will inevitably follow at the end of the elementary math textbook adoption process is likely to be several hundred thousand dollars, require annual maintenance and supplemental material purchases, and over the lifespan of the curriculum will cost the district around half a million dollars or more.
There is no urgency to proceed forward with the elementary math textbook adoption at this time as LCUSD continues to do well in measures of academic success, particularly in mathematics, and there is no legislative requirement to adopt instructional materials aligned with the recent Framework adoption by the State Board of Education (SBE) in July 2023. In fact, the California Department of Education (CDE)is currently in the midst of its 2025 Mathematics Instructional Material Adoption process and is not scheduled to complete its reviews of publisher submitted curricula and make its recommendations until November of 2025.
In fact, it would be imprudent for the district to start its adoption process now, before the CDE finishes its review. Presumably Curtis and district administration will start the textbook selection process with the CDE’s state-approved list before it enters Phase 2: Narrowing the Pool as described in their proposal attached to the Board meeting agenda item. Phase 2 of the selection process as described in Curtis’ own proposal begins with four candidate curricula, yet no detail is provided about how those four will be downselected from available curricula. Why start selecting curricula before they have been thoroughly reviewed by the CDE’s Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) reviewers?
Another issue with starting the elementary textbook adoption this year is that if LCUSD follows the pattern of other districts’ early adoption of K-8 math materials still under state review, they will select new curricula, which have dominated recent adoptions I have participated in or observed. As any experienced teacher who has endured textbook adoption knows, working with first edition of a textbook or curriculum invites being an unpaid tester for the publisher. First editions will have mistakes contained in them and it will be the responsibility of district teachers to be on guard for them. Publishers are known to send out errata to customers saddled with first editions.
A final issue worth mentioning is that after reviewing Curtis’ proposal to LCUSD and contract that the Board will be asked to approve (without discussion) at their 05/13/25 meeting, they seem unaware that textbook products that appeared on the CDE’s last K-8 Math Instructional Material Adoption in 2014 are still perfectly acceptable to continue using given the CCSS-M Standards did not change — only the California Math Framework was revised. Further, the Framework is advisory and does not need to be followed. In fact, this leads to the most urgent reason to delay the hiring of Curtis.
Curtis appears to fully support the California Math Framework (CMF) as approved by the SBE in July 2023 without reservation and believe its recommendations should be followed by all K-12 public school districts. This is a serious concern for anyone familiar with the history of the adoption of the 2023 CMF and who has actually read it. Unfortunately, most teachers, administrators, and Board members I have interacted with over the past 1.5 years up and down the state are unaware of the problems with the CMF as approved by the SBE. I have attempted to keep LCMP parents apprised of the issues with the CMF. I’ve written or published multiple articles on it and held an LCMP Information Night on “The State of Math in K-12 Public Schools and the California Math Framework” on 03/26/24, but very few if any LCUSD board or staff members have read or attended the webinar.
Before locking the district into a contract with an organization that will set the ball rolling on a multi-hundred thousand dollar curriculum adoption, district staff, parents, and the community should resolve the question of whether it is in the best interest of LCUSD students to follow the advice and prescriptions in the CMF. Remember that the CMF is advisory and does not have to be followed. The district should postpone the selection process until it has had a healthy debate about whether it should align its next curriculum with the CMF or not.
I have begun what I hope is a series of meetings with district administration to inform them of LCMP’s concerns about the CMF. To begin the adoption process now risks endangering LCUSD’s generally positive math instruction trends over the past half dozen years. LCMP will also host a series of webinars and/or meetings with its parents, other LCUSD parents, and anyone else who wants to attend to discuss the known issues with the CMF.
Recommendations
Given the concerns elucidated above, it is recommended that the LCUSD Governing Board do the following at its 05/13/25 meeting:
- Pull item 12.n off of the Consent Agenda and move it to Section 11 – First Reading Items.
- Staff can then present their reasoning behind hiring Curtis now and placing the item in the Consent Agenda.
- The Board can then discuss the concerns brought to light above as a First Reading Item.
- The Board can then bring this item back at a future meeting and decide whether to proceed ahead with the elementary math adoption next school year, or delay it further, at least until after the SBE finishes its 2025 Mathematics Instructional Material Adoption and until after the soundness of the CMF has been debated openly within the district.
I am happy to give as many presentations as the district finds necessary to present the concerns about the CMF and the potential harm it might cause to district elementary students if its advice is followed and a CMF-aligned K-5 math curriculum is purchased.
History has shown that the district should take its time with instructional material adoptions. There is no urgent need to change the elementary math curriculum to something at this point in the current fiscal climate, particularly since the likely curriculum chosen to replace it if the Curtis Center is hired to guide the process will most likely be far worse than the Everyday Math curriculum it is supposed to replace.