Here’s a confession for most math leaders: the thing you’re most afraid of isn’t that your improvement work will fail. It’s that it’ll succeed — and then quietly fall apart the moment the right person leaves.

You know the pattern. A passionate coordinator energizes the PD, shapes the vision, becomes the heartbeat of math improvement. Then they move, retire, or burn out, and within a year the momentum is gone. Not because people stopped caring. Because the work lived in their head, not in the system.

That’s the quiet heartbreak of school improvement: not failure, but fragility.

I want to walk you through two teams who refused to accept that fragility — and the evidence-based moves they made to build something durable. One started the year low, feeling unheard and disrespected. The other was quietly doing work so good that the rest of their district started copying it. Neither got there by luck. They got there by designing a system on purpose.

Let me show you how.

Flywheel vs. Ferris Wheel: Why Math Improvement Stalls When Staff Turn Over

We talk a lot about the flywheel — Jim Collins’ image from Good to Great of a massive wheel that takes enormous effort to start but, once moving, builds unstoppable momentum because every push lands in the same direction. That’s the goal of sustainable math improvement: progress that compounds instead of resetting.

But one of the teams I’ll describe said something that reframed the whole thing for me. As they planned their next phase, they didn’t say “we have a flywheel.” They said, in effect: we know we have a Ferris wheel.

A Ferris wheel is a flywheel where people keep getting on and off. Staff turn over. Leaders go on leave. A team member doesn’t come back in September. The wheel keeps the same shape, but the riders change constantly. And here’s the insight that separates durable systems from fragile ones: the smartest teams don’t pretend they have a flywheel when they actually have a Ferris wheel. They design for the Ferris wheel.

That single honest acknowledgment — people will get on and off, so the system has to hold the knowledge, not the individuals — is what everything below is built on.

Building a Coherent Math Improvement System: A District Turnaround Story

Let me start with the team that began the year in the worst shape.

When I met with this Ontario-based district team in the early spring, they were feeling low. They felt their voice wasn’t being heard at the table. There were dominant voices above them contradicting messaging they’d been delivering system-wide for years. Decisions were being made without consulting them. The word that kept surfacing was disrespected — like the work they’d done was no longer valued.

A few months later, everything they’d been trying to do was picking up steam. What changed?

They didn’t launch something new. They got more consistent around what they already had — three objectives they’d held onto for years: tasks that promote reasoning and problem-solving, connecting mathematical representations, and mathematical discourse. They front-loaded those goals in everything. They connected school-level improvement plans to those same goals. And the result was an interconnected system coherent enough that other departments started trying to mirror it.

That’s not a small thing. Their voice got elevated. They started getting invited to present at principal meetings and to sit in conversations happening at the superintendent’s table. As they put it: other people could now name the goals. Principals were asking sharper, more intentional questions about what the work looks like — and doesn’t look like — in classrooms.

This is exactly what the research predicts. Michael Fullan and Joanne Quinn, in Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action, argue that struggling systems are riddled with incoherence — mismatched strategies, competing cultures, and illogical initiatives. The fix isn’t more initiatives; it’s shared meaning. As Fullan puts it, leadership is the job of forging coherence.

When this team held their line on three clear objectives long enough for the rest of the system to learn the language, coherence did what coherence does — it turned isolated effort into gravitational pull.

Math Discourse Across Content Areas: When One Team’s Objective Goes District-Wide

The second team — working in a district in Missouri — shows the same principle from a different angle.

Their math team had been working on discourse. Patiently, consistently, for a long time. They built a discourse matrix. They got good at it. And here’s what happened: people across the district started hearing about what they were doing. They saw the matrix. And leadership decided to make discourse a district-wide objective — not just in math, but across every content area.

One of the team’s leaders captured why this mattered so much. It gave the math team more weight, because now discourse wasn’t a math-classroom thing — it was a district-wide thing, and they were the ones being looked to as leaders in that work.

Sit with that. A math team’s instructional focus became the entire district’s instructional focus, and the math people became the recognized experts other departments turned to. That’s math improvement transitioning into other departments — the strongest possible signal that a system has achieved what Fullan calls systemness, the state where everyone rallies around a common outcome.

And it’s worth naming why this beats the top-down mandate so many leaders default to. Fullan is blunt about the track record of top-down change: across forty years and many countries, he finds no system success whatsoever from it, partly because the top doesn’t know what it’s doing — they’re not close enough to the problems. But pure grassroots doesn’t work either: Neither top-down nor bottom-up strategies for educational reform work. What is required is a more sophisticated blend of the two. The Missouri team’s discourse focus didn’t get mandated down from a policy office. It earned its way up and out because the work was visibly good. That’s the blend in action.

4 Strategies to Make Math Improvement Sustainable Through Staff Turnover

Now to the part you can actually steal. When the Ontario-based team planned their next phase, they made a series of design choices that any small system can replicate. These are the moves that turn a fragile, person-dependent effort into a durable system.

1. Layer New Math Content Onto Existing Objectives (Avoid the Adopt-Abandon Cycle)

After three years on fractions and algebra, this team realized they had an underdeveloped construct beneath it all: multiplicative reasoning. So they moved into it. But — and this is the discipline most teams lack — they did not abandon fractions and algebra to chase the new thing. “It’s a Ferris wheel,” they said; those ideas have to stay front and center as riders cycle through. So they’re examining multiplicative reasoning through the lens of their same three objectives — models, discourse, and reasoning-rich tasks.

This is the antidote to what we call the adopt-abandon cycle: the annual ritual where leaders feel dissatisfied in June, grab something new, and push the flywheel from zero again. Teachers learn that commitment is optional because something new always replaces it. The fix is to adapt first, adopt rarely, abandon wisely — new content should strengthen the existing flywheel, not restart it.

2. Capture Artifacts So Math PD Knowledge Outlives Staff Turnover

This is the heart of designing for a Ferris wheel. This team didn’t just do good PD — they captured artifacts of it. They built asynchronous courses documenting everything they’d learned, and they’re working with their new-teacher induction lead to bake those courses into onboarding.

Think about what that does. A new teacher — or a new leader — can walk in mid-year and access the accumulated learning of the whole effort. The work no longer lives in one coordinator’s head. It lives in the system, documented and repeatable. When someone gets off the Ferris wheel, the seat doesn’t go cold.

And this team is proving it works in real time. Over a single year they absorbed a staggering amount of turnover — one leader went on leave, another stepped up to take her place, a third didn’t return — and they kept moving. That’s not resilience by accident. That’s what captured artifacts and distributed leadership buy you.

3. Use a “Learn Fast, Implement Slow” Curriculum Rollout

This team is adopting a new resource (they have no existing curriculum — a genuinely “Wild West” starting point). A panicked leader would roll it out everywhere at once. Instead they chose a staggered five-year rollout using a “learn fast, implement slow” model: start in the fall with a grade 3–6 pilot, partner each coach with a teacher to work through an entire unit — not pop in and out for bits and pieces — and deeply understand the barriers before scaling to more teachers, then to K–2, then up through the grades.

The reasoning is exactly right: they know they don’t have the support structures to do more than that and do it well. Learning fast in a small pilot lets you implement slowly and successfully at scale. This is the upstream move — fixing the system that produces the problem rather than rushing the rollout and spending years on downstream cleanup.

4. Time Your Math PD “Breadcrumbs” to Your Pacing Guide

Here’s a refinement worth its weight in gold. Both teams use breadcrumbing — dropping small, usable portions of PD into monthly principal newsletters and staff meetings, so the learning keeps surfacing all year instead of fading after a one-off session.

But the Ontario-based team had a breadcrumbing problem: it wasn’t timely. They were, in their own words, throwing darts at a board. They’d share a great task or model, and whether it landed depended entirely on luck — one teacher happened to be about to teach that exact unit and grabbed it; everyone else filed it away and forgot. The fix is pacing-aware breadcrumbs: if you know a grade has a unit coming up where a big idea will surface, you drop that breadcrumb right before it, matched to what teachers are actually teaching in the coming weeks. Same content, radically more uptake.

This connects directly to the measurement principle underneath all good math improvement. End-of-year test scores are lagging indicators — summative in nature, providing information to diagnose a trend after it has started, and arriving far too late to steer by. What you want are leading indicators you can see and act on weekly: task selection, lesson structure, the quality of discourse, the use of representations. As the research puts it, leading indicators are in our control and lead to our hoped-for success and are actionable for the target population we’re dealing with at the time. Timely breadcrumbs are a leading-indicator move — they let you influence instruction while it’s still forming.

“Clear Is Kind”: How to Set Math Objectives Without Feeling Top-Down

I’ll name one thing both teams had to wrestle with, because you will too.

There’s a fear — a legitimate one — that being clear about the objective will feel top-down, like a directive handed down rather than something co-constructed. The Ontario-based team has a strong union and rightly protects teachers’ professional judgment. “We can’t tell anybody how to plan,” they said.

True. But you can recommend. And you can make the recommended path the easy one. The frame they landed on: write your school’s goal around these three priorities, and you’ll get an abundance of district support. Choose another direction because it fits your site better — that’s fine, but you won’t get those supports. Not a mandate. A clear, generous, transparent offer.

That’s the resolution to the top-down fear: not vagueness, but clarity. Clear is kind. The clearer the target, the less the message drifts as it travels from district office to principal to classroom — and the more teachers can actually monitor their own growth toward something they can name.

How to Start Building a Sustainable Math Improvement System

You don’t need a five-year plan by Friday. You need to honestly name your wheel and make one durable move.

This week, try this:

• Name your wheel. Be honest: do you have a flywheel, or a Ferris wheel with people getting on and off? Design for the one you actually have.
• Capture one artifact. Find one piece of learning that currently lives only in your head and document it — a short async module, a one-pager, an onboarding note. Ask: if I left tomorrow, would this survive?
• Make one breadcrumb timely. Take a task or model you’d normally send out at random and time it to a unit a specific grade is about to teach. Watch what happens to uptake.
• Protect your objective. Before chasing a new content focus, decide how you’ll keep last year’s work front and center. Layer, don’t abandon.

The teams that broke through this year didn’t do it with charisma or a heroic individual. They did it by building systems strong enough to outlast any one person — capturing artifacts, pacing their rollouts, timing their support, and holding their objectives long enough for the rest of the system to catch the language.

They stopped hoping the wheel would keep spinning.

They built a wheel that spins for them.

Take the Free Math Improvement Assessment to Find Your System’s Weak Points Most leaders can’t say with confidence which part of their system is fragile until something breaks. The Ontario-based team didn’t get durable by accident — they got there by honestly diagnosing where their work lived only in people’s heads, where their breadcrumbs were landing by luck, and where their objectives were holding. You can run that same diagnosis on your own system. We built a free assessment that scores your district across the six areas that determine whether math improvement sticks or resets — the same lenses these teams used to find their fragile points before they became failures.  It takes about 15 minutes, you’ll get a letter-grade snapshot of each area, and you’ll walk away knowing exactly which domain to push on first. Take the assessment and see where your system stands. Because you don’t fix fragility by working harder. You fix it by seeing it.