choosing to change

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is one of the largest and most complex school systems in the U.S., serving hundreds of thousands of students. Most are from low-income households, many of them multilingual learners, and a significant number performing multiple grade levels below expectations in math. For years, the district’s approach to math instruction was fragmented: teachers working in isolation, drawing on a patchwork of materials, in classrooms that rarely shared a common language or practice.

Change was urgent, but taking action was tricky. LAUSD was between formal textbook adoption cycles, which meant the district’s budget allotment for new textbooks was years away. To solve the problem, LAUSD and its partners used a creative approach: offering schools voluntary, off-cycle curriculum adoption in order to move toward research-driven, student-centered materials for schools who opted in. Over six years, without a formal adoption, LAUSD managed to bring almost every middle school onto a shared, high-quality math curriculum by invitation alone. This is the story of how they did it—on their own terms, and on an unconventional timeline.