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Last month I led a two-day training with eight California county offices of education. We kicked off the work with a deceptively simple question: Where are your districts in their curriculum implementation journey?

The answer: Most of their 221 districts they oversee were a lot earlier in the journey than expected. Years after adopting instructional materials, some districts still appeared to be in “program installation”— the foundational phase of the journey, based on the five phases of implementation my organization, Rivet Education, has defined.

Someone needs to help districts to carry this work from “We adopted it” to “Teachers can use it skillfully.”

The county offices are well positioned to play that role. As a vital part of the California educational ecosystem, sitting between the state and the district, the counties offer support ranging from professional development and leadership training to technology services and purchasing support. Many states have similar regional service centers, well respected and trusted by their districts. In a July 2026 survey by Rivet Education, 69% of education leaders who used a regional service center said they would recommend their support to another district.

What isn’t clear though, is how well California’s county offices of education or any regional service center are prepared to support district needs related to curriculum implementation.

Over the course of the year, Rivet will work with eight California counties to deepen their expertise in curriculum-based professional learning and implementation, apply that learning alongside districts and determine how they can build sustainable services to support this work. The end goal is to create a coalition that can support school districts with implementation of curriculum and instructional materials across the state, regardless of the county. 

As we kicked off our work together in August and county leaders reflected on the implementation activities their districts should be doing by now, alarm bells sounded. If districts are still struggling with foundational implementation steps years after adoption, what will prevent the same thing from happening with the next generation of instructional materials?

Adoption Is Only the Beginning

Three patterns from the initial summit with California county education office stood out:

1. Many districts appear to be further behind in implementation than the number of years since adoption would suggest. A district does not automatically progress through implementation just because time passes. A curriculum can have been in classrooms for three years while teachers still lack regular opportunities to internalize upcoming units and lessons, leaders lack a clear picture of what successful implementation looks like, or professional learning remains disconnected from the work teachers are doing in their classrooms.

2. Many districts lack strong processes for measuring and monitoring implementation. When implementation isn’t monitored, it becomes tempting to jump directly to student outcomes: Are test scores increasing? Those outcomes matter enormously. But they arrive late and tell us little about why results are or are not occurring. Districts also need to know whether teachers and students have access to materials, whether collaborative planning structures exist, whether teachers are using the curriculum consistently, and what additional support they need. Without that information, districts risk waiting for student data to tell them that something went wrong months earlier. 

3. County education offices are uniquely positioned to support implementation. The leaders my team worked with knew their districts and the complicated realities of leading implementation in each unique system. They asked practical questions about limited PLC time, leadership capacity, small districts, teacher onboarding and how to support districts that are already several years into an adoption without asking them to start over.

To see the biggest return on their investment in instructional materials, district and school leaders must take on sustained and complex change management work, while simultaneously managing staffing shortages, accountability pressures and other competing initiatives. If leaders are expected to carry the full weight of curriculum implementation alone, they will struggle. That is an unrealistic load. 

County offices can provide critical infrastructure — helping districts assess implementation, develop leaders, monitor systems and provide professional learning grounded in the curriculum teachers actually use.

California Can Make the Next Cycle Different

California is entering another major period of instructional-materials adoption, including new mathematics materials now and in the coming year and ELA adoptions in 2027 and 2028. That creates both a risk and an opportunity.

The risk is familiar: invest substantial time and money selecting stronger instructional materials, celebrate the adoption, provide initial training and assume implementation will follow.

The opportunity is to treat implementation as seriously as adoption from the beginning. That means establishing a shared understanding of what strong implementation looks like across its different phases, helping districts determine where they are in that journey and identifying the few critical moves necessary to accelerate progress.

It means building implementation monitoring into the strategy from day one rather than waiting for lagging student outcomes to reveal problems. And it means ensuring districts have the staff, expertise, professional learning, time, and resources necessary to support teachers through a change that takes years, not weeks.

California should also consider a clearer and more intentional role for how county offices of education can support curriculum implementation. Not every office will play the same role, nor should it. Some may develop deep expertise in particular curricula and provide curriculum-based professional learning. Others may become implementation partners that help districts assess curriculum implementation, coach leaders, monitor progress and respond when implementation stalls. 

California is hardly alone in confronting this challenge, but the encouraging thing is that this is a problem that county offices can fix.

Implementation is a journey. County leaders can describe the conditions required at different stages. They can monitor whether those conditions exist. They can provide teachers with professional learning grounded in the materials they use every day. And they can build regional capacity so districts aren’t expected to figure all of this out independently.

The next adoption cycle doesn’t have to be a wash, rinse and repeat of the last one. But getting different results will require treating implementation not as what happens after adoption, but as the work that makes adoption matter. 

Annie Morrison is a co-founder and principal consultant at Rivet Education. Her role allows her to support educators implementing high-quality instructional materials and help education leaders embrace their roles as change agents.