A teacher checks in on her 1st grade students during a math test at Robbins Elementary.
Photo: Sydney Johnson
Most of the ink spilled on the new California Mathematics Framework was focused on two debates that have persisted in K-12 education for decades: whether progressive or traditional forms of pedagogy serve students best and how to navigate tensions between equity and excellence.
Meanwhile, one of the more transformative shifts initiated by the state’s new guidance on K-12 math instruction has flown under the radar.
The change is captured by two words that appear together 36 times in this framework but not once in the prior version: grade bands.
The adoption of an instructional approach that teaches to grade bands — that is, learning progressions within mathematical concepts across multiple grade levels — departs from the prior framework, which focused exclusively on individual grade levels. Up to now, California policy was designed to ensure fourth-grade classes kept a strict focus on fourth-grade skills, fifth-grade classes on fifth-grade skills, and so on. It’s a logical and coherent approach, but also deeply problematic when students begin a grade with learning gaps in key foundational concepts that prevent them from accessing grade-level instruction. The net result is that learning losses accumulate and students fall further behind.
With the introduction of grade bands, California gives schools permission to better address individual student needs. So, if an eighth-grade student is missing a key foundational skill from the sixth or seventh grade, a teacher can now focus on addressing that gap in service of helping that student get caught up. That may seem obvious, but in many schools, teachers are discouraged from focusing instruction on learning gaps from earlier grades in order to prioritize access to current grade-level content.
It’s not only students who are catching up that stand to benefit from this shift. If a seventh-grade student is ready for eighth-grade instruction, the framework would give teachers permission to push that student beyond grade-level standards. By allowing instruction across grade bands, the framework empowers schools to match each student with the learning they need without incurring the consequences of tracking them into hierarchical course pathways.
The fact that most of California’s students have learning needs that don’t fit neatly into grade levels makes the switch to grade bands all the more important. For example, only 23% of the state’s eighth grade students perform at grade level in math, with many students multiple grades away. Nationwide, the average U.S. fifth grade classroom contained students across seven different grade levels before the pandemic, according to research from NWEA. In the wake of the pandemic, that spread is now estimated to nine grade levels. New thinking is required to match this reality.
Critics will argue that expanding instructional focus from grade levels to grade bands is tantamount to lowering expectations. It’s not. The expectation remains that all students will graduate ready for college or a career. But shifting to grade bands acknowledges what math teachers will tell you: For many students, achieving that goal often requires time to squarely address critical and relevant pre-grade learning gaps. That’s just how math works.
And the research supports this conclusion. A Rand study found that students who received two years of instruction tailored to their individual needs increased 11 percentile points on a national math assessment. Another study conducted on the programs our organization operates also found substantial benefits to instruction across grade levels.
The switch to grade bands moves California closer to realizing the benefits of personalized learning, but it also bucks up against federal education policy. Specifically, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires school accountability to be based on grade-level tests. Even the Smarter Balanced assessment system, which was initially conceived to assess both on and off-grade items, is overwhelmingly focused on grade-level items in order to ensure full compliance with the law and its provisions around comparability. So even though the framework might provide permission to teach off-grade skills, the accountability system will only take into consideration grade-level skills that students demonstrate. Some schools may not be so comfortable taking advantage of these new flexibilities until federal policy catches up.
But there are steps California’s education leaders can take to help schools make the most of the opportunity this framework presents. Now that it has passed, it will be essential for the California State Department of Education, the State Board of Education, and organizations like the California Math Council to strongly encourage schools and districts to take advantage of this flexibility. The use of grade levels goes back a century and will not be dislodged by the framework alone. Persistent state-level advocacy then must be complemented with what teachers need in order to take full advantage of this new flexibility: new curricular materials, learning tools, and extensive training on how to shift from grade-leveled classrooms to grade-banded ones. Absent any of these ingredients, California math classes will continue to revolve around grade-level instruction regardless of what the framework says.
The new California math framework begins to create the possibility for schools to meet each student where they are and accelerate them to where they need to be. Perhaps that philosophy is something people across the ideological camps of education can agree is what would serve students best.
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Joel Rose is co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit New Classrooms and the co-author of Out of the Box.
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