Research Brief: Math
A new study found accelerated math outcomes for Black students, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities in Los Angeles after coherent instructional support from Leading Educators.
Read the BriefFostering Momentum in Math
Across LAUSD, educators are working to strengthen how math is taught by aligning curriculum, professional learning, and instructional leadership. In classrooms, this means students are spending more time explaining their thinking, engaging in discussion, and working through grade-level problems with support from their peers and teachers.
New findings from 19 middle schools supported by Leading Educators during the 2024–25 school year offer promising early evidence of what this approach can make possible.
Key Findings
Focus Student Populations on the Rise
District-identified priority student groups (Black students, multilingual learners, students with disabilities) in Leading Educators–supported schools in their first and second years of programming showed 3–5x faster math growth than students in the same groups in similar high-poverty schools.
- Black students in supported schools demonstrated nearly five times the growth of similar peers
- Multilingual learners and students with disabilities in similar schools grew at approximately three times higher rates
- Meanwhile, similar schools statewide experienced overall declines
What’s Driving the Change
These results reflect coordinated shifts in how instruction and professional learning are designed:
- Embedding opportunities for student reasoning, discourse, and sense-making into daily lessons
- Supporting teachers through job-embedded professional learning tied directly to high-quality instructional materials
- Strengthening instructional leadership to guide consistent practice across classrooms
- Using short improvement cycles to test, refine, and scale what works
LAUSD has partnered with Leading Educators since 2020 to support the implementation of Illustrative Mathematics (IM). Over time, this work has expanded beyond curriculum rollout to building coherent, cross-district professional learning systems—including Lesson Labs, coaching, and instructional leadership development.
Instructional practice and student mathematical discourse are advancing to higher levels of implementation year over year at partner sites. This strengthens students’ cognitive lift and ownership of their thinking.
The Takeaway
LAUSD’s early results suggest that improving outcomes requires more than adopting high-quality materials—it depends on building the systems that help educators bring those materials to life consistently across schools.
Read the Brief
Case Study: Supporting the Science of Reading in Harlem Community School District 5
