Eureka Math² Brings Positive Change to Southern California District

Change is under way in the Beaumont Unified School District, and Dana Gonzalez is excited about what she's seeing.

"The view of math is much more positive around the district. We're moving in the right direction," said Gonzalez, Beaumont's TK–12 math specialist.  

Gonzalez, who oversees math instruction for the roughly 12,000-student district in Riverside County, described a math week the district held recently in which students participated in math activities outside the classroom, a parent academy leaders are developing to engage families in mathematics and other subjects, and—critically—major shifts in teacher practices. 

"One thing I really like is that I see manipulatives being used on a daily basis. So that’s a sign that we’re moving away from the need to be in front of a screen all the time. Before, we sometimes had teachers who moved students in a one-hour period of math between four different electronic programs," Gonzalez said. She noted that members of the district's K–8 math support team use a photo sharing app to exchange pictures of the shifts they're seeing in classrooms.

Teachers are trailblazing with Eureka Math² and hands-on math activities.

Time for a Change 

Beaumont Unified is early in its selection of Eureka Math²®. Gonzalez and her team rolled out the curriculum last year in grades K–9. Previously, the district downloaded and printed an open-source version of Eureka Math®, developed earlier by Great Minds PBC®. However, Gonzalez said teachers used that curriculum inconsistently across grades. 

"What we were doing wasn’t working. Many teachers were using Teachers Pay Teachers or other online resources, and they were kind of using Eureka Math as a guide rather than a core curriculum," she said. Gonzalez added that teachers previously didn't have the coaching and professional development they needed to use all the elements of the curriculum, including important instructional routines. For example, she said they often skipped the Launch activity that's designed to activate students' prior learning before diving into new material and went straight to problem sets. 

"It’s not that they don’t want to do the lessons as called for in Eureka Math. They honestly didn't know how. We’ve been working to rectify that," she added. 

Today, district coaches work with teachers to help them backwards map and plan lessons by looking at Eureka Math² modules, topic quizzes, and exit tickets before providing students with instruction to really understand what students need to know and be able to do.  

They also look at student performance data to ensure they're addressing any learning gaps. For example, Gonzalez said the fifth-grade team at Summerwind Trails School recently gave a topic quiz on a module, and students performed poorly on a problem that most should have been able to do. The teachers checked the module assessment, saw it would show up in that test, and then decided to reteach the topic across fifth grade, adding in fluency activities and additional supports. The approach worked; on a retake students did much better. 

Why Eureka Math², Why Now 

She noted that embedded assessments are among the features in Eureka Math² that convinced the district to select the curriculum ahead of a statewide math materials adoption. While California has approved a new math framework, it plans to provide states with a list of approved instructional materials in the 2025–2026 school year.   

"If we waited, we still wouldn't have something new yet," Gonzalez said, adding that the district was ready for a change. Districts can choose to use high-quality materials ahead of the state's release of its approved list so long as the curriculum selected is aligned to state standards and the choice was made using a strong internal review process.   

Other features of Eureka Math² that Gonzalez says are driving progress in Beaumont include the right balance of digital and print resources. "We were pleased that the level of technology was appropriate," Gonzalez said, noting that she liked the digital assessments and context videos that boost student engagement and help students connect math in school to the world around them. "But not everything is digital, which we like,” Gonzalez added.   

She said the readability of the curriculum is supporting students, especially those with reading-related learning disabilities and multilingual learners. And she said available Spanish-language materials were getting good reviews from Spanish-speaking educators and students.  

Across the board, the curriculum is bringing much more student discourse to math classrooms, which supports student learning and is called for in the California framework. "Discourse is really built in through curricular tasks," Gonzalez said. She added that coaches have been modeling some of the activities built into the curriculum that spark conversations, such as "Which one doesn't belong." In that activity, students are presented with a set of numbers, shapes, or data sets and then explain which one doesn’t belong and why.    

"Somebody has to help demo these kinds of practices with teachers so they can experience them," she explained. 

Gonzalez also said the consistent use of math models and strategies across the grades in Eureka Math² is supporting Beaumont students. She noted that the regular use of a strategy that asks students to work through problems in a concrete way through manipulatives, pictorially using drawings, and abstractly with symbols has helped develop students’ conceptual understanding of key math concepts.  

The district is working with California State University, San Bernardino to ensure teacher practices align with the California math framework. During a session with a Cal State professor recently, a lesson called for understanding the use of fraction strips, rectangles that represent parts of a whole. The teachers got excited and turned to Eureka Math² to see how they are used in there. "These are strategies the framework calls on us to use. They are right here," Gonzalez said.  

She said that she loves seeing that kind of growing enthusiasm from teachers, acknowledging change can be hard. "We’re asking for a systematic change in our district,” she said. But she added that it’s exactly the kind of change students in Beaumont schools need and deserve.