When California adopted the Common Core State Standards for Math in 2012, it opened a door for educators to understand and teach math in a deeper, more interconnected and meaningful way. But despite the stickers quickly slapped on textbooks proclaiming they were “Common Core Aligned”, no curriculum had significantly changed the way it was approaching math teaching. This vacuum turned into an opportunity for SFUSD: to create their own district math curriculum that was genuinely aligned with the standards, approach, and vision of the Common Core.
This math curriculum would be grounded in the belief that all students were capable of engaging in rigorous, creative, and meaningful mathematics. It would be organized around rich, challenging math tasks that allowed students to make sense of math concepts through multiple interconnected perspectives and representations. And it would be designed to ensure that students’ opportunities for mathematical success were not based on identity, background, or circumstance.
The SFUSD math department adopted a Scope and Sequence (from the Pearson Foundation, no longer in operation) and a structure for problem-based units built around a big idea, 4 math tasks, and 3 lesson series. Together with Oakland Unified School District, SFUSD developed a The Math Teaching Toolkit that focused on pedagogies that supported the standards for math practice.
With all this in place, the first units were developed by teams of teachers who participated in professional development and then worked together to create the units. This allowed the district to not only create a curriculum by teachers and for teachers, but also to strengthen teachers' content knowledge and develop collegiality. Eventually the math department received grants and was able to grow and have enough content specialists to finish developing the first full iteration of the units. The curriculum was translated into Spanish and Chinese, the two main languages of instruction in SFUSD after English.
Over the next few years, the math department continued to refine the curriculum based on feedback from teachers who were using the units with their students every day. Some overall revisions included improving the integration of support and accessibility for multilingual learners as well as special education needs, creating rubrics for key pieces of student work, and developing multigrade curricula that could be used by special education classes as well as general education classes to support varying learner needs. Additionally, within each grade level, revisions were continuously being made to enhance opportunities for students to develop a deeper understanding of the math concepts that were central to their grade level, connecting their new learning to what had come before.
In 2021, the math department took a few final steps to publish the SFUSD Math Elementary curriculum through a creative commons license so that it would be available to anyone, anywhere. Once it was open source, educators across the United States and the world were enthusiastically accessing and using the curriculum in a variety of learning spaces.
Transition to SF Math
In 2025, the San Francisco Unified School District adopted a new curriculum and discontinued its support for maintaining the former framework. Recognizing the immense value of these open-source materials, the Silicon Valley Math Initiative (SVMI) decided to preserve and host them, ensuring educators everywhere maintain free, continuous access to high-quality, inquiry-based math resources. What you see here, SF Math, represents the final published version of the SFUSD Math Core Curriculum.
Note: Please note that SVMI will only be providing “Viewer” access and will not grant “Editor” access to preserve the resources. You may occasionally find dead ends to some links that used to lead to an old website or an incorrectly linked file. We are sorry about that and we hope you will report those links to SVMI so that we can continue to improve this living version of the curriculum by emailing sfmath@svmimac.org
Tips for Using the SF Math PK-5 Curriculum (Access the Portals Here)
Here are some suggestions and resources to help you begin learning about, and planning with, this curriculum.
⇨ Find the Overview and familiarize yourself with:
- Critical Areas of Study for the Grade
- Scope and Sequence
- Unit Design
- Norms & Strategies
⇨ Familiarize yourself with the problem-based structure of each unit in each grade:
⇨ Watch this video: How do I plan using the SFUSD Math Core Curriculum, which presents an overview of planning with the curriculum.
⇨ Helpful Resources:
We hope you find this posting helpful! Whether you are using the SF Math curriculum in its entirety, or using selected resources, we trust you will find it an enjoyable and useful addition to your math repertoire.
Noam Szoke and Jennifer Hein deMause, former SFUSD Math Content Specialists and members of the SFUSD Core Curriculum writing team
