Bill McCallum, a lead writer for the Common Core math standards, and Kristin Umland, then a faculty member at the University of New Mexico, led the effort, which was supposed to last a year or two. 

At first, Umland said, the organization was focused on helping other groups, including the and testing companies, improve their products to meet the more rigorous standards. 

Eventually, she said, the group shifted to creating the curriculum — including lesson plans — that it felt best served students as they strove to achieve both a conceptual understanding of math, the why of how math works, alongside procedural fluency, the ability to solve problems. 

Illustrative Mathematics now encompasses 90 employees — all are remote workers — with no central location. For those states that still use it, the curriculum is aligned to Common Core standards — and there are also state-specific versions for those states that don’t.

“Our goal is to change outcomes for students, regardless of the standards they are using,” Umland said. “Math is math, and all states agree that kids should learn math.”

Select schools within the New York City system have been using Illustrative Mathematics for half a decade. A recent, massive rollout across hundreds of campuses has been met with sharp criticism from many teachers and  

Some said the curriculum and for students to practice what they’ve learned. One educator acknowledged these initial growing pains but said , one that helped students more easily understand abstract concepts.  

Umland has heard all of the complaints. While she acknowledges these early days struggles,  it doesn’t mean the move is a failure. Only that it needs more time, she said. 

“There’s no magic bullet,” she said. “If there was, somebody would have figured it out by now.”

Los Angeles, which adopted the curriculum in its middle and high schools in 2023, meanwhile, .

The 74 talked with Umland recently about the math wars, how her organization’s approach stands out from the rest and about Illustrative Mathematics’s bumpy New York City rollout.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where does Illustrative Mathematics fit into the math wars? And by math wars, I mean that push and pull between teacher- and child-centered learning? 

We always see ourselves as a third way. There’s no-one-size-fits-all for all students in all contexts. There are times when students need to understand and hear a direct explanation. And there are other times they should be given a chance to think about it for themselves, make sense of it, grapple with it and discuss it. So, it’s not either or. It’s what’s appropriate for what you’re trying to help students learn in the particular moment.

What type of lesson would require a direct explanation? 

So, a perfect example is when kids are learning to count. There’s no way they can figure that out on their own. Numbers are different in different languages. That’s a completely cultural thing. That’s something you have to learn by hearing other people say the number to you. 

But when you’re starting to do addition, once they understand what three is and what two is, you can say, “If I have three marbles and two marbles, how many marbles do I have altogether?” 

The things that are cultural have to be taught directly. But once you understand what the meaning is, you can figure it out. 

How does Illustrative Mathematics’s approach to teaching and learning compare to most other curriculum methods?

A lot of folks learn mathematics from an “I do, we do, you do model,” where the teacher does an example question, then they work together with the students, and then the students go practice.

Our method sort of flips that model on its head, allowing students to think about a problem so they can get oriented to it. And then there’s discussion where they make sense of it. 

And, finally, the teacher brings it all together. It gives students a chance to think for themselves before being shown something. 

I can show you how to do two plus three by counting it all myself, or I can say, “Here’s a picture that shows two marbles and three marbles. How many marbles do you see altogether?”

Some kids will know how to count it and will do it. And some kids won’t. They’ll talk about it, share their strategies, and then the teacher can make sure that the student who does it correctly shows their solution. Or if none of the students do it, they can show them how.

Illustrative Mathematics had a rough rollout in New York City. What went wrong for some teachers/schools? 

A lot of the complaints weren’t necessarily about the curriculum itself, but about the rollout or the implementation. 

Teachers need to have professional development where they get oriented to the design structure and they get a chance to experience what a lesson feels like. They need a chance to practice.

Ideally, they have opportunities to collaborate with their colleagues on planning and they have coaching support as they go. It’s just sometimes hard to coordinate all of those pieces.

A lot of teachers, in the first couple of months, are still trying to understand how it works. But once they get to the second or third month, then they start to see how it works. When something is new, it’s harder. It doesn’t necessarily make sense. And it takes time for people to get oriented to it. 

We’re seeing the best success in the places where they’ve been doing it longer. They’ve put in a lot of time to support it and when they get to that phase, then they’re really seeing the outcomes for students.

What do you want to fix about mathematics education in this country?  

A lot of school districts have come to realize that they need high-quality instructional materials. They’ve made that commitment. Then they start to ask themselves, “OK, so what do we do for (struggling students)?”

In a multi-tiered system of support, tier one instruction is the core instruction that all students receive. Students identified as needing additional support will receive tier two instruction. Often, this means they will be pulled for small group instruction or additional instruction.

One of the problems is that for many of these students, it’s like they’re on a highway and then they get pulled off onto the frontage road — only they never find a way back. They end up on a parallel track. What we want is to figure out how to support these students.

How might you help kids stay on track? 

Right now, we’re really focusing on early math. We are currently developing a pre-K math curriculum. It will be available next school year. If you can get to students early, it has an exponential impact on them before they head on to later grades. If we can do a better job with the youngest math learners, they won’t have the problems that we see at the secondary level in the future. 

Mayor Eric Adams and schools Chancellor David C. Banks unveiled the initiative, “,” earlier this week, saying they hoped to build off the success of “NYC Reads.” 

Starting in the fall, 93 middle schools and 420 high schools will use the , open-source Illustrative Mathematics curriculum, which is . Schools in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle also use the curriculum.

Like many school systems across the country, New York City, the nation’s largest, has long struggled with the subject. in 2023, but the figure is stubbornly low and is even worse for some student groups: of the city’s Black and Latino children are not performing at grade level in the subject. 

“Schools all over the city, even on math, were just kind of doing their own thing — people just creating their own curriculum,” Banks said during a televised press conference. “That’s no way to run a system.” 

I’m proud to be following the groundbreaking rollout of ‘NYC Reads’ with ‘NYC Solves,’ reimagining math education and ensuring students and educators have access to high-quality instructional materials and support.

— Chancellor David C. Banks (@DOEChancellor)

The chancellor did not blame teachers, administrators or students for their struggle, saying they just needed a better framework. Marielys Divanne, executive director of Educators for Excellence-New York, said her group has been pushing for change for years: More than 1,000 of her 16,000 members signed a petition urging the city to act on the issue.

“Our educators feel that NYC Solves is a much-needed step forward in making progress in addressing our crisis in math instruction,” Divanne said, adding that the previous, school-by-school approach left “thousands of students with low quality instructional materials and uneven support for educators.” 

In addition to the mathematics initiative, Adams also announced the creation of the Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning, which aims to support multilingual learners and students with disabilities. The division will have a $750 million budget — and roughly 1,300 staff members.

Maria Klawe, president of Math for America, a non-profit organization founded 20 years ago to keep outstanding math teachers in the classroom, lauded the city’s choice of Illustrative Mathematics, calling it a very strong curriculum. She had already reviewed some of the materials and praised its approach in taking math from the theoretical to the practical.

“The whole idea is trying to help students understand that a mathematical concept, even if it’s abstract in nature, is actually something that you encounter in your daily life,” she said. “You have a sense that what you’re learning is … something that you can actually use.”

William McCallum, Illustrative Mathematics’s CEO and co-founder, was a lead writer of the Common Core State Standards in math. He said, through a spokesperson, that IM’s work “has evolved far beyond its original focus on illustrating the standards.”

The Common Core had a bumpy roll-out, was maligned by some parents and . The math portion became a , though it has won favor in academic circles.

McCallum strongly recommends teacher training for those who seek to implement Illustrative Mathematics. 

“The curriculum supports a problem-based instructional model that is a shift for many teachers, and they have the most success when they have the support they need to make that shift,” he said. “IM and its partners offer professional learning for those districts that want it.”

Klawe also credited Department of Education officials for making the curriculum the standard for schools. She said it allows teachers to work together across the city to share best practices. 

“It’s also very helpful for students who move from one school to another,” she added. 

New York City officials say each curriculum has been reviewed and recommended by , a nationally recognized nonprofit organization. The curriculum also has undergone a formal review by a committee of New York City Public school educators including those with expertise in mathematics, special education and multilingual learners — in addition to district-based mathematics specialists. 

Minus charter schools, there were close to in the NYC school system as of fall 2023. Nearly 73% of students were economically disadvantaged. 

Like Klawe, , executive director of The Education Trust–New York, favors the uniform curriculum, though she notes it might not be the preference for all. 

“Different schools have different feelings about that,” she noted. She added that the approach does, however, relieve teachers from the arduous task of having to develop their own curriculum, allowing them to instead focus on implementation.

But teacher Meredith Klein, who worked for more than a decade at before switching to West Brooklyn Community High School, which serves under-credited students, said the new curriculum might not satisfy all kids’ needs. 

“I’ve always worked with a really specialized population of students and the curriculum is usually not designed with them in mind,” she said.

Klein has spent the past year implementing Illustrative Mathematics as part of the pilot program and said she struggled to adapt the materials for her students. While the city initially pushed for strict adherence to a pre-set learning schedule, the coach who visited with her to help with the rollout soon recognized the need for adaptation. 

“The curriculum is written like a story and you need to teach the full curriculum without any alterations for a full year,” she said, but that’s not the educational experience of so many of the students she’s served. “There wasn’t any guidance about how to break it up … how to retrofit it to our existing system. Not all students are the same.”