This article provides further details on the recommendations of the Newton Public Schools (NPS) Math Curriculum Committee as presented by Asst. Superintendent Gina Flanagan with support from Director of Mathematics Jen Shore and Newton North HS Math Department Chair Jen Letourneauat the May 11 School Committee meeting (see Fig City News report), followed by a unanimous vote by the School Committee on May 18 supporting the recommendations (with one member indicating hesitancy around the high school plan).
Process
As part of the curriculum review cycle for Math, teams of teachers piloted units from two outside curricula. After the pilot, teachers and students were surveyed about their experiences with it. The Curriculum Committee also consulted with Special Education and English Language Learner teams and examined the units for culturally responsive elements. DESE guidelines on High Quality Instructional Materials and EdReports reviews were consulted as available.
Elementary School
The Final Curriculum Recommendation Form from February 27, 2026 notes that the Investigations program has been used as the curriculum for Grades K-5 since 2017, but regardless of NPS’s review, it is being sunsetted by its publisher, Savvas. Amplify’s Desmos curriculum and Savvas’s Experience Math were the two that were piloted in NPS to take its place. Gina Flanagan said that teachers overwhelmingly preferred Desmos, noting that it is well-aligned to using Desmos at the middle school level, and the recommendation is to adopt it for grades K-5.
Because of the amount of curricular change occurring at the elementary school level, the plan is to have a soft launch of the elementary school curriculum in fall 2026. All of the 42 teachers who piloted Desmos will be moving forward with it. Additionally, Professional Learning Communities (school-based teacher groups) were allowed to opt-in to start if they wanted to, so a total of 70 elementary school teachers will be using Desmos next year. The hard launch for all teachers to adopt it will be Fall 2027.
The Curriculum Committee said that while the overall usage of digital devices and screens at elementary schools is under review, teachers will be allowed to choose when they want to use Desmos’s digital lesson materials vs. paper-based materials. Every lesson has the option to be done with paper-based resources. Superintendent Anna Nolin noted she wants to separate out the discussion of using screens for specific instructional purposes vs. having indoor recess as screen time or using screen time as a reward for good behavior. At another point in the evening, Dr. Flanagan added that at the middle school level, many teachers are choosing to use paper workbooks instead of computers.
Jen Shore highlighted a central conundrum of modern teaching: “Amplify lessons are designed for 60 minutes. Differentiation doesn’t fit in 60 minutes, but if we put the differentiation in WIN, not everyone has access to it.”
Middle School
The Final Curriculum Recommendation Form from February 27, 2026 notes that “middle school teachers began using Desmos Math in September 2020 after having used the Open Ed Illustrative Mathematics resources for several years. Desmos is an interactive, digital version of Illustrative Mathematics. The curriculum publisher Amplify purchased Desmos in Spring of 2022 and integrated Desmos’ digital math activities with their version of Illustrative Mathematics. NPS has purchased Amplify Desmos licenses for all middle school students since Fall 2023.” Middle School teachers piloted Amplify Desmos and MidSchoolMath.
While certain Desmos units have been spread across Grades 6-8, the plan moving forward is to condense those into Grades 6-7 and bring in additional Desmos units to cover Integrated Math I, which will be covered in 8th grade. While Desmos has already been used in the district, the Curriculum Committee described that part of the formal pilot process including teacher teams using all of the resources available within the program. The Curriculum Committee indicated that at the middle school level, professional development around Desmos would include making sure teachers are prepared to use all of Desmos’s extension and differentiation resources and also to adjust the pacing to fit the new grade-level plan. As part of the recommendation to adopt Desmos, Dr. Nolin said that Desmos has “stretch” resources designed to help students who may be ready for additional challenges. She added that the Middle School Math Specialists’ job will be to watch assessment data and help teachers execute additional experiences based on student needs.
Middle School system transition
In addition to the presentation and discussion at the May 11 meeting on the long-term plan for math at the middle school level, the School Committee also spent significant time in the May 18 meeting discussing the results of the Grade 7 & 8 math placement assessments that were recently administered. These are assessments that are helping the district navigate transitional years between the current curriculum and the new curriculum plan. The 8th grade assessment was to determine which, if any students, were ready to skip Integrated Math I, which is the class that has been taught to 9th graders and includes concepts from algebra, geometry, and statistics. The 7th grade assessment was to determine which, if any, students were ready to skip Math 8, the course that has been taught to 8th graders.
As Dr. Nolin described: “The test was made by a professional testing company; teachers confirmed that they believed in the assessments as testing the courses that students were trying to opt out of. Both of these tests were to skip grades of mathematics, not for acceleration of the current coursework.” Both assessments were designed to allow any student who scored at least 90 (of 100) to skip the following sequence course. The results for those went out to parents between the two meetings.
For Grade 7, the memo indicates that 120 students (13%) opted not to take the assessment, 742 students (83%) took it but were not prepared to skip a course, and 36 students (4%) were prepared to skip the course. As the report details, 89% of test-takers scored between 0-59% on the assessment and 6% of students scored between 60-89% on the assessment. For Grade 8, they indicated 615 students (71%) did not take the assessment, 226 students (26%) took it but were not prepared to skip a course, and 26 students (3%) were prepared to skip the course.
Dr. Nolin responded to these numbers by saying, “This assessment was an affirmation of the work that our educators have been doing over many years. We taught up to 8th grade standards, and our students performed at the level that they are expected to be in chronologically. And our teachers told us this: We don’t see the level of super-duper advancement that we’re hearing about in the community. Now we have some testing data to tell us what the landscape looks like right now.”
There was significant discussion in the May 18 School Committee meeting around how to handle the logistics of the 36 students in Grade 8 who are slated to be assigned to the IM I class across the four middle schools, with the Committee assuming a roughly even distribution of 9 students in this situation at each school for discussion purposes. As Committee members discussed, to put these students in their own class at each school would make for an anomalously small math class at the middle school level, which would then make the other classes larger. Committee Member Jason Bhardwaj asked, “Is it helpful for 8th grade teachers to have a small class while trying out the new course? Or is it better to bend the model to push students up at edges, to have fuller classes?”
Committee Members Tamika Olszewski and Ben Schlesinger indicated they thought it would be challenging to defend the allocation of resources for such a small class size to the students who are the most ready, with Schlesinger suggesting he would be in favor of grouping some of the 6% of students who scored between 60-89% on the assessment with the 4% who passed. On the other hand, Committee Members John Greene and Victor Lee indicated they thought the district should stick with its plan to separate out only the students who exhibited full mastery, which is what was indicated in the district’s responses to School Committee pre-meeting questions. Dr. Nolin said that NPS would need to figure out how to maximize the effectiveness of resources, and that some students might be adjunct to a section with “intervention” as extension. In response to a question from Committee Member Linda Swain, Dr. Nolin said that no students would be bused to the high school for math class because during transport they would lose time from other classes.
The Committee did not discuss any issues around assigning Grade 8 students who passed the test to IM II, which is already offered by both high schools.
Committee Members Tamika Olszewski and Arrianna Proia indicated support for putting resources towards the 230 students who were assessed on STAR Math as being below benchmark. Dr. Nolin responded that Jen Shore already identified these students and invited them to an August boost program. She said that NPS is hoping students will take advantage of it. She added that as NPS puts the full MTSS model in place, there will be more instructional flexibility: “With more resources working to push everyone up, things should be different than what we are hearing about people’s experiences now.”
High School
At the high school level, teachers piloted CPM and Carnegie math curricula, but ultimately there was no consensus reached to adopt either of those programs. The Final Curriculum Recommendation Form from February 27, 2026 details that district staff had concerns about Carnegie being too algorithmic and repetitive, while CPM had intensive unscaffolded language requirements. Neither seemed to improve upon a core concern of the teachers to have a truly integrated math curriculum, rather than just alternating algebra and geometry units. Both had gaps in terms of being culturally responsive, and both seemed like they would require too many modifications to make it worth adopting either one.
Therefore, the curriculum Committee recommended working with a consultant, Coherent Math, to identify the best teacher-created units from each high school, augment them with sample units of their own, and develop common expected unit plans and common assessments as well as differentiated resources. The Curriculum Committee said that the entire school districts of Denver and Charlotte-Mecklenburg have worked with Coherent Math, and they put this in perspective by highlighting that Denver has 38 high schools. Dr. Nolin confirmed that this option would not change the pathways outline from what had already been presented. This was indicated as the choice that would be most acceptable to teachers at both high schools.
The Curriculum Committee described how the work with the consultant would be a collaborative and iterative process with department heads, Jen Shore, and teacher representatives. In addition to existing units used by various NPS teachers, Coherent Math staff have banks of samples they would provide in response to NPS’s goals. The district team would give feedback on what they like. This would be followed by opportunities to pilot various units. Teachers would be part of the vetting teams, while department heads would be doing some work on writing.
Budget
All of these recommendations are set to be covered by the budget already approved by the School Committee, either through the main budget allocation or Free Cash. Mayor Marc Laredo asked how long should any curriculum last, and Dr. Nolin responded that this is an outdated question because NPS is no longer buying textbooks, but rather buying the rights to use curriculum for a set amount of time, as well as buying student workbooks. The district has been paying $10,000 per year for the Investigations elementary school workbooks. The Curriculum Committee stated that with the consultant version, NPS would own the curriculum and would not need to pay for these rights going forward, although the district might need to budget money for modifications in the next five-year curriculum review cycle. Mayor Laredo indicated he wanted to make sure curricular needs were planned budget expenses going forward.
Dr. Nolin mentioned that there is a venture capital arm of a company that has wanted to support other groups using the same consultant. She said it wants to help NPS join together into a community with other districts to do this work.