According to the California Department of Education (CDE):

“Curriculum frameworks provide guidance to educators, parents, and publishers, to support implementing California content standards.” (https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/)

Yet, the 2022 framework second field review draft (SFR draft framework) devotes only 5.8% of its text (1,137/19,501 lines of text) to implementing math content standards. One would think the proposed math framework would focus on describing how to convey the required math subject content in detail, but unfortunately it does not.

In contrast, the 2013 CA Math Framework devoted approximately 66% of its total text (approximately 7,200/10,900 lines of text) to implementing math content standards.

The SFR draft framework actually advocates not organizing around the CA math content standards:

“This framework reflects a revised approach, one that advocates for publishers and teachers avoiding the process of organizing around the detailed content standards” (Ch. 1, Lines 437-438)

Instead, the authors state, “The framework no longer needs to provide as much expansion on the individual standards; rather, curriculum designers and California educators need guidance for creating mathematics experiences that provide access to the coherent body of understanding and strategies of the discipline.” (Ch. 1, Lines 427-431)

Staying true to this revised approach, the SFR draft framework does not list all or much of the CA math content standards anywhere throughout its 900+ pages. Typically, a curriculum framework would orient around the content standards regarding when and how they should be taught -- to provide guidance to educators, parents, and textbook publishers. The SFR draft framework does not.

The SFR draft framework instead suggests the following:

• “Students need to be engaged in “authentic activities.” An authentic activity or problem is one in which students investigate or struggle with situations or questions about which they actually wonder.” (Ch. 1, Lines 573-574)
• Teach to Big ideas: “Big Ideas, elicit wondering in authentic contexts, and necessitate mathematics.”(Ch. 6, Lines 1287-88)
• The goal “is for students to view mathematics as a vibrant, inter-connected, beautiful, relevant, and creative set of ideas.” (Ch. 10, Lines 55-57)
• Students need to experience the “wonder, joy, and beauty of mathematics.” (Ch. 7, Line 70)
• Teachers need to “include the development of positive identity for all students in their learning of mathematics.” (Ch. 7, Line 71)

While “authentic” tasks can be useful as meaningful learning opportunities and we want students to view math positively and experience the beauty of it, there is also a need to focus on specific math content standards that must be taught to ensure equity, opportunity, and proficiency for all students.

For example, what if students never wonder about factoring or multiplication tables? What if students never wonder about other important math content standards? Given the SFR draft framework’s guidance, would educators just skip the teaching of anything students do not wonder about?

Rather than explain what specific content standards actually mean and look like in teaching, as prior adopted frameworks have done, the SFR draft framework describes mathematical investigations where students “might” or “may” notice important math (concepts). In fact, it’s only “likely” that they will learn math content standards: “Tasks can then form the basis of a course and, if the tasks are rich enough, they likely include many of the smaller methods and ideas set out in the standards.” (Ch. 2, Lines 364-366). There is no mention that students “must” master math content standards, however, in the SFR draft framework. In fact, a word search finds the words “might” and “may” appear 375 times in the SFR draft framework.

The following are a few examples:

• “Students might notice during a mathematical discussion that interior angle sums regularly increase in relation to the number of sides in a polygon and use this repeated reasoning to conjecture a rule for the sum of interior angles in any polygon (Ch. 4, Lines 833-835)
• “A student might notice that four sets of six gives the same total as six sets of four, and that this applies to three sets of seven and seven sets of three, and so on, to conjecture about the commutative property during a number talk” (Ch. 4, Lines 608-670)
• “They may also attempt to identify a constant of proportionality, (Standard 7.RP.2.b)” (Ch. 3, Lines 1516-1517)
• “Upper elementary students might notice when dividing 25 by 11 that they are repeating the same calculations over and over again, and conclude they have a repeating decimal." (Ch. 4, Lines 412-415)
• "By paying attention to the calculation of slope as they repeatedly check whether points are on the line through (1, 2) with slope 3, middle school students might abstract the equation (y – 2)/(x – 1) = 3." (Ch. 4, Lines 415-417)
• "Noticing the regularity in the way terms cancel when expanding (x – 1)(x + 1), (x – 1)(x² + x + 1), and (x – 1)(x³ + x² + x + 1) might lead them to the general formula for the sum of a geometric series.” (Ch. 4, Lines 418-420)

Can we leave the learning of math up to chance -- based on what students might notice or might wonder about? Without the requirement that students must learn specific math content standards, how will students gain needed education? The SFR draft framework doesn’t answer these questions.

Ironically, although the SFR draft framework itself suggests avoiding the math content standards, Ch. 13 of the draft framework sets the criteria for textbook adoption around the content standards:

• “Materials that fail to meet all of the criteria in category 1 (Mathematics Content/Alignment with the Standards) will not be considered suitable for adoption.“ (Ch. 13, Lines 184-185)

While the focus for math textbook adoption is on “Mathematics Content/Alignment with the Standards,” the SFR draft framework itself does not explicitly list all the math content standards, or when each one should be taught; information that textbook publishers rely upon to craft their textbooks.

With a focus on “authentic tasks about which students wonder” and developing positive math identities as the drivers for instruction rather than math content standards, the SFR draft framework has relegated the learning of specific mathematical content and procedures to minimal status. Math classes no longer have math standards as their primary focus.