by Sugi Sorensen
November 27, 2025
In La Canada Math Parents’ (LCMP) account of the first elementary math adoption parent meeting hosted by the La Canada Unified School District (LCUSD), the main point of contention during the meeting turned out to be discussion around the LCUSD Math Priorities Survey. LCUSD Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Jim Cartnal told parents during the meeting that the math priorities survey would be the primary instrument for informing a future “high-quality” instructional materials adoption rubric to guide the district’s elementary math curriculum selection.
The survey was described as a ~25-item instrument designed by Hanover Research, the district’s hired partner in helping to guide the elementary math curriculum adoption process. As Cartnal explained it, the intent of the survey is to capture what the three main stakeholder groups – staff, parents, and students in grades 7 & 8 – see as important in math instruction.
The key features of the Math Priorities Survey as described by Cartnal at the 11/05/25 meeting were:
- Introductory demographic questions such as the respondent’s role, school, and grade of child if a parent.
- A set of statements about math instructional priorities in the area of conceptual understanding, such as “connecting mathematical ideas through multiple representations”, “employing rubrics that value mathematical processes”, and “exploring mathematical patterns, structures, and reasoning.”
- A set of statements about about math instructional priorities in the area of computational fluency, such as building speed and accuracy with math facts, emphasizing step-by-step mastery of procedures.
- Respondents rate each statement along a 5-point scale from “Extremely Important” to “Not at all Important,” along with an “Unsure” option.
Discussion here focuses on the two sample questions shown to parents by Cartnal at the 11/05/25 meeting. Given more than 90% of the questions on the survey were never shown to parents, it is possible that many of their concerns will recede after they see the full extent of survey questions. For example, the slide Cartnal showed about the LCUSD Math Priorities Survey showed there would be a section on “Current Curricular Evaluation.”
One Survey Instead of Three
The bulk of confusion, disagreement, and tension in the room was the result of a fundamental design choice – Hanover Research and district staff decided to create one technical survey and then aimed it at three very different audiences.
That fundamental choice created predictable problems:
- Jargon and pedagogical terminology (e.g., “multiple representations,” “value mathematical processes as much as final answers,” “construct viable arguments”) make sense to teachers and administrators steeped in standards documents and math pedagogy (i.e. the method and practice of teaching.)
- For parents and students, those phrases are much less accessible. Many parents in the 11/05/25 meeting said, in effect, “I agree with the idea once you explain it, but I would not have understood what the survey was asking.”
In other words, the survey as designed is audience-inappropriate for at least two of its intended groups. A properly designed Math Priorities Survey would have recognized that different constituencies bring different knowledge, experience, and objectives.
Teachers: Teachers can comfortably engage with instructional strategies, pedagogical jargon, and fine-grained distinctions drawn from research. While some parents can as well, they are a distinct minority.
Parents: The vast majority of parents care more about the effectiveness of the chosen curriculum in teaching their child math, its clarity of design, ability to teach their child that math to mastery, home-related issues such as volume and design of homework and parents’ ability to help their children with homework, and their child’s math disposition – how their child feels about their math abilities and confidence to solve problems. All of these concerns should be addressed in the survey in direct, non-technical language and given clear examples.
Students: Students can talk about what helps them learn, what confuses them, and how they experience classroom activities, but they should not be expected to know, much less be asked to parse adult professional vocabulary.
Instead of a single survey instrument, Hanover should have recommended parallel but distinct survey instruments:
- A staff survey in professional language, calibrated to educator expertise.
- A parent survey translated into plain English (or multiple languages as appropriate), focused on the lived experience of their children and the outcomes they prioritize.
- A student survey written in age-appropriate language, centered on what happens in class and how it feels to them.
Instead, Hanover chose a compromise single survey that tries to speak to everyone at once—and therefore doesn’t truly fit anyone except professionals.
The only benefit of designing and administering a single survey instrument to three vastly different audiences is the ease of the survey administration and analysis. However, the trade-offs of such a choice vastly outweigh this single benefit.
What is particularly vexing about LCUSD’s choice to use a single math priorities survey for all three groups is that the district has conducted an annual end-of-year Panorama Education Survey for at least the last decade, and those surveys have always had three different surveys for each group – students, staff and parents.
Transparency vs Control
Because of this design mismatch, other tensions around voice and control were amplified. The district says it wants parent partnership and transparency, but the survey language, at least as presented in the two questions shown to parents at the 11/05/25 meeting, is hard for many parents to parse.
In addition, “Unsure” responses (which are likely to be common when the language is unclear) are effectively treated as non-data or as permission for staff priorities to dominate. From the parents’ perspective, this looks like:
- “You’ve given us a survey we don’t fully understand.”
- “Where we say ‘Unsure’ because of that, staff views override ours.”
- “Then later you’ll say ‘the data told us X.’”
If Hanover had started with audience-specific surveys, the district could still have done cross-group comparisons by mapping parent and student responses back to the same underlying constructs, but in a way that respects the different starting points of each group. As is the structure makes parents worry that the survey may be more about legitimizing pre-existing preferences than genuinely discovering stakeholder priorities.
Instrument Validity and Interpretability
All of this directly affects data quality. Jargon-laden items will produce more “Unsure” responses and more idiosyncratic interpretations (e.g., one parent reads “value process” as grading detailed work, another as simply appreciating thinking).
When “Unsure” is both common and down-weighted, the resulting “priorities data” can be easily skewed toward whichever group found the language most natural—namely, staff. This distinction came up late in the two-hour meeting on 11/05/25. Without audience-appropriate wording, at least one parent recommended distinguishing the ‘Unsure’ response between “I don’t understand this” and “I defer to staff judgment.”
Further, without some mechanism to elicit relative importance (not just “everything is extremely important”), the survey risks producing ambiguous or misleading signals.
A differentiated, audience-aware design would have prevented much of the meeting’s contention. Instead of spending so much time arguing about the survey itself, the group could have been arguing (productively) about substantive priorities.
Implications Going Forward
Given the above, the survey and future parent information nights are crucial opportunities for the district and Hanover to:
- Acknowledge that a single, jargon-heavy instrument for all audiences was a misstep.
- Show how parent feedback at the 11/05/25 meeting has led to different versions or at least significantly different wording for parents vs staff vs students, and clearer handling of “Unsure” (e.g., splitting into “I don’t understand” vs “I defer to staff”).
- Explain how they will interpret and weight data from each constituency in a way that feels fair and transparent.
Parents are not opposed to research-based practices or conceptual learning in principle amidst their kids’ math learning. Rather parents are asking for:
- Plain language.
- Honest, coherent weighting of different stakeholder voices.
- A process that treats them as partners who bring different but legitimate expertise to the table, not as quasi-professionals expected to decipher educator jargon.
- The ability to communicate all of their concerns and hopes about their children’s math education, not just those of interest to district staff.