Texas School Boosts Achievement and Engagement with Four Years of Eureka Math® TEKS Edition

When Principal Genie Baca first came to Eastridge Elementary (Amarillo, TX) 15 years ago, the school’s state assessment data showed that major instructional changes were needed. In the 10 years that followed, Eastridge educators worked hard to turn that data around by unpacking the state standards, writing their own lesson plans, and using assessments they had created. 

“Our lesson plans were beautiful, and our data was growing, but it took a lot of work. My teachers and their mental health were being compromised. About four years ago when we did our campus needs assessment, our teachers said, ‘We love that our students are growing, but we can't keep up this pace. We need something different,’” said Baca.

It was at that point that the district’s assistant superintendent asked Baca whether she would like to pilot Eureka Math TEKS Edition at Eastridge, and she and her staff jumped right in. “For the first time ever, my teachers have balance. Eureka Math has been just the thing we needed. It’s been life-changing for my students, for my staff, and for my parents.”

Anchoring Implementation in Ongoing Support

Baca explained that she has always prioritized building a growth-oriented culture and investing in professional learning for her staff, and her approach to Eureka Math TEKS Edition implementation was no different.

“We have had every Eureka Math training that Great Minds® offers–Launch, Fluency in Action, Preparation and Customization, Major Work of the Grade Band. You name it. Great Minds taught us how to do our walkthroughs, how to pull data from our walkthroughs, and how to do deliberate practice­, which has been the biggest game changer out of anything.”

At Eastridge, deliberate practice and internalization of the curriculum happen daily, during planning and after school, and are a collaboration between instructional leaders and teachers. “As an instructional team, we decided we were going to implement Eureka Math full force with fidelity, and we were going to be with our teachers every day, planning with them and supporting them,” said Baca.

Teachers come to their planning period each day with the next day’s lesson read and thoroughly annotated and with exemplar problems and the lesson’s problem set completed. During that planning period, coaches model the most difficult parts of the upcoming lesson, and teachers practice delivering the lesson and receive feedback.

“Before Eureka Math, my teachers had to do three things: create the lesson plans, prep for the lesson plans, and then deliver the lesson plans. Now, they have been given this rigorous curriculum, and a big load has been taken off their plate. Our teachers feel like this is less work and higher quality work and that they are better teachers because of the system we have in place,” explained Baca.

In addition to ongoing professional development and daily deliberate practice, Eastridge educators have had 12 coaching days with Great Minds coaches, and administrators conduct regular non-evaluative walkthroughs to observe teaching and learning in action. “Sometimes what happens during internalization is not what happens in the classroom when teachers are using the curriculum with real students. That first year we spent most of our time on internalization and planning, which was needed, but we quickly had to spend our time on observations too so that we could make sure what we saw in planning on any given day happened during instruction the following day,” said Baca. 

Impressive Growth on State Assessment

As Eastridge educators have embraced Eureka Math TEKS Edition and worked hard to master it, they have seen math proficiency improve dramatically for grade 4 and grade 5 students. The percentage of grade 4 students who are proficient in math (scoring “meets grade level” or above on STAAR) tripled from 19% in 2021 to 59% in 2024, and the percentage of grade 5 students who are proficient in math increased from 39% in 2021 to 57% in 2024.

Eastridge has also gone from underperforming Amarillo ISD and the state of Texas to outperforming both, as seen in the chart below. 

Since 2021, each cohort of Eastridge students has also performed better than the last. The 2020–2021 grade 3 cohort went from 24% proficient in grade 3 to 48% proficient in grade 5. The 2021–2022 grade 3 cohort went from 36% proficient in grade 3 to 57% proficient in grade 5. And the 2022–2023 grade 3 cohort seems likely to continue this trend: They went from 43% proficient in grade 3 to 59% proficient in grade 4. 

Baca expressed how much growth she has witnessed in her students who have now had Eureka Math TEKS Edition for several years in a row, saying, “If you walked into a room of my oldest group of students, you would be blown away by the way they think about math, the way they problem solve, and how many different ways you would see a problem solved from one table to the next. It’s amazing to watch them take ownership of their learning, how they build off each other's learning, and how they love challenge; they want to do the hard problems. We’re sending them off to middle school, and they are well prepared.”

Bringing Connection, Confidence, and Joy into the Classroom

Eastridge teachers across grade levels describe their math classrooms using terms such as student-led, full of discourse, fun, engaging, hands-on, and predicable—with routines, structures, and consistent models that help students thrive.

“Students come in at the beginning of the year knowing the structure of the lessons, being familiar with the vocabulary and the terminology, and understanding how the curriculum works, so I feel like there’s a sense of comfort because they know what’s expected of them … When we have students come in who aren’t familiar with the curriculum, they may be a great student and may even be able to solve something, but they often don’t have the same conceptual understanding as the other students. It’s just so evident that Eureka Math provides that, and it’s really neat to see how fast new students can develop that conceptual understanding using the curriculum,” explained Mariah Vallejo, a grade 2 teacher at Eastridge.

Principal Baca also highlighted the positive impact that the curriculum has had on student behavior in the classroom. “The pacing is part of the rigor. There's no time to get off task because we teach bell to bell, and students love the math. We have visitors every week, and the first thing they say when we go to debrief is, ‘You had no kids off task. If we had students like yours, we could do the curriculum.’ They think that it’s my students who cause the curriculum to work well when it was the curriculum that fixed our behavior challenges,” said Baca.

Eastridge teachers agreed and shared their perspectives on how teaching with Eureka Math TEKS Edition has affected their classroom dynamics and relationships with students. Grade 2 teacher Esmeralda Ruiz emphasized the power of the high expectations for students that the curriculum requires, saying, “Building relationships with students goes hand in hand with the curriculum because they start to respect you and start to love you for teaching them the way that you do. When you believe they can do so well, they also believe it and they don’t give up.”

Kindergarten teacher Naomi Alvarez captured the joy that teachers feel seeing students rise to meet the challenges set for them by the curriculum year after year:

“You see students become so confident in the classroom. They’re more engaged, they want to participate, they want to be hands-on, and they want to be challenged. It just feels so good as a teacher to see them grow and realize their own accomplishments.”