La Cañada Math Parents (LCMP) is a private group of parents (and teachers) in the La Cañada Unified School District (LCUSD), located in La Cañada-Flintridge, California, dedicated to improving the quality of mathematics instruction in our district, to providing support and enrichment opportunities for our kids, and to helping to support math competition opportunities.
LCMP was created in May of 2016 when the LCUSD School Board, over the principled objection of hundreds of parents, voted to adopt Everyday Mathematics as the mathematics textbook for K-5 instruction in its three elementary schools – La Cañada Elementary School, Palm Crest Elementary School, and Paradise Canyon Elementary School.
Since the Everyday Mathematics adoption decision, LCMP has continued to focus parent discussion on matters related to improving mathematics instruction in the district and providing resources for parents seeking help in remediating, supplementing, or just plain understanding the math taught in the schools. LCMP parents also volunteer in our schools tutoring, coaching and/or teaching math enrichment and competition classes.
About Our Name…
La Canada Math Advisory Group is not a new name. During the Math Wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s, LCUSD adopted a 1989 NCTM aligned “reform math” curriculum that caused widespread parent and student frustration and dissatisfaction. Parents banned together and formed a parent group, which they called the La Canada Math Advisory Group.
A mathematics professor (David Klein of CSUN) who was invited to come talk to La Canada parents in 1998 wrote of the affair several years later:
“I am regularly bombarded by email messages with pleas for help from parents who are desperate to fill in the gaps left by NCTM math programs. Both EM and CMP are major sources of complaints. Parents often resort to private tutoring. Two years ago, I was asked to give a talk about math programs to a parents’ group in a high income region in the L.A. area called La Canada. The school district had extremely high test scores, and I was surprised not only by the request for me to speak, but also by the urgency of the request. I asked the parents what they were so worried about, given their top scoring schools. The answer from the approximately 50 parents I spoke to was that they were paying through the nose for tutoring. That was why their scores were so high.”
A parent in the original La Canada Math Advisory Group wrote in 1998:
“We have formed La Canada Math Advisory Group. Our short term goal is to study math curriculum and make suggestions to school board. We will be taking a survey of parents about the new math program and new textbooks – Houghton Mifflin. We are a new group and have much to accomplish. …Here are preliminary results of survey sent to parents of fifth grades students at Palm Crest Elementary.
– Over 60% received outside tutoring,
– Over 50% of parents reported not liking the new textbooks whereas only about 16% said they liked the books.
– Only 16% of parents liked the use of cooperative learning.
– Over 80% of parents either did not like or had no opinion regarding heterogenous groups.”
Thus, a new generation of La Canada parents picks up where previous parents left off.
La Cañada Math 