For five years, a San Francisco foundation funded, and a research organization closely monitored, a collaboration by 10 California districts to raise achievement under the Common Core math standards.

Every so often, K-12 schooling witnesses the rise of an intuitive, easy-to-like, bipartisan reform push that’s backed by deep-pocketed funders and a lot of recognizable names. While this alignment of ...

A correction to an earlier version of this article has been appended to the end of the article. When Veera Sinha was a little girl in India, her father asked his kids to solve math puzzles in their ...