North Middlesex Regional School District (NMRSD) is a rural school district near the border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, serving the towns of Ashby, Pepperell and Townsend.  In response to poor student performance on state mathematics assessments, this district introduced a number of their teachers to the Singapore mathematics (SM) syllabus during a 2000 summer institute for pilot implementation that fall.

For effective implementation, new K-8 school curricula are most easily begun with K-1 or K-2, with another grade added each successive year.  However, worried about their entering high school students’ inadequate math knowledge, NMRSD chose to address these concerns with an SM pilot in their “feeder” middle schools (grades 5 to 8). The pilot program was quickly extended across classrooms and grades.  Kindergarten was added in the 2002-03 year and, as can be seen in Table 1 on page 10, every classroom in grades 1-6 was using the SM curriculum by 2005-06.  From this point on, Singapore math was established as the District’s official curriculum.

A summary of the report may be found here and the full report is here.