Though the State Board of Education (SBE) won’t approve instructional materials for mathematics until November 2025, school districts can start preparing now for a seamless textbook adoption process that will be sure to meet local needs.
During CSBA’s Oct. 16 webinar, “Before the adoption: Creating the conditions for a high-quality mathematics program,” Mary Gardner Briggs, CSBA senior director of Research and Education Policy Development, facilitated a conversation on these strategies with Mike Torres, director of the California Department of Education’s Curriculum Frameworks and Instructional Materials Division, and Ellen Barger, the associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction at Santa Barbara County Education Office who also serves as chair of the Curriculum and Instruction Steering Committee Mathematics Subcommittee and mathematics content lead for California Mathematics, Science & Computer Science (CAL-MSCS) Learning Partnership.
“The time to start is not November of 2025; the time to start is now,” Barger said.
The Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools: Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve was adopted in July 2023 and planning is currently underway to solicit instructional program submissions from publishers/developers, establish a team to review and recommend the materials and collect feedback from the public before the SBE acts in late 2025. This process ensures materials address grade-level content standards and align with the framework.
While local educational agencies aren’t mandated to use SBE-adopted content, when considering programs, trustees must weigh how instructional materials will or won’t meet the needs of their educators and students.
For school board members, “the work of supporting a successful adoption begins long before you are considering programs from the dais and even before a pilot program is selected,” Briggs said.
During the webinar, Torres and Barger described the conditions necessary for a successful adoption, offered an overview of the framework and detailed the school board’s role in implementation.
Background
Governing boards are required by California Education Code to adopt instructional materials in accordance with provisions in section 60040. Additionally, section 60002 requires LEAs to allow for the involvement of teachers, parents and community members.
High-quality instructional materials are necessary but not sufficient for building a high-quality mathematics program, Barger noted. To improve learning, changes are needed at the instructional core, which is the intersection between teachers and their knowledge and skill, students and their engagement, and content and its rigor and relevance.
The 2023 framework, which sits at roughly 1,000 pages, provides guidance by grade band, centers equity and engagement in instruction, and highlights relevant resources. It supports multidimensional learning, encouraging students to explore big ideas that further their conceptual understanding as well as mathematical progressions as they move through the TK-12 system and mathematical practices. Educators will also need related professional development opportunities to prepare for the instructional shifts detailed within the new framework.
Overall, the new framework represents best practices that have emerged since the 2013 framework — some of which LEAs may already adhere to.
School boards
Trustees can support collaboration among all education partners to address instructional, structural and cultural dimensions of the district vision for math.
Chapter 10 of the framework delves into in-depth supports, systems and structures and asserts that boards can help administrators lead and operationalize new math programming via leadership beliefs, policies and practices around instruction; program-level considerations; review of system coherence and mathematical progressions; analysis of program structures; and engaging families, partners and the community.
Barger explained that statewide supports are being developed now via the CAL-MSCS initiative with a goal of developing and expanding support structures statewide for coherence. So far, communities of practice have been convened by county offices of education to create tools and networks to assist districts with rollout.
Torres and Barger advised board members to prioritize professional learning now, well before adoption. “It can be intimidating to get a whole new instructional material program and not have any background knowledge or any level-setting that had occurred prior to decision-time,” Torres said.
The framework can be used to draft a district’s vision for math instruction. Data, both quantitative and qualitative, can be used to assess where the district stands and shed light on existing assets or areas for improvement in the vision. Recently published California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress results, sortable by district, can give LEAs a baseline for local math performance. The CDE also has data that isn’t publicly available it can share with districts.
Barger said that COEs have been helping districts in their efforts to identify a vision.
The time, resources and supports necessary to implement “this shift in mathematics teaching and learning and get us to move that needle,” must be acknowledged as well, Torres added.
A recording of the webinar and the presentation slides are available to view online.
Thanks to support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CSBA is cultivating a series of resources on instructional material adoptions for governance teams, with a focus on implementation of math programming. The association has a variety of content already on its website. Additionally, several updates to math policies were included in the September packet update for GAMUT subscribers.
CDE has a guidance document for instructional materials adoption that can be downloaded here.
