Imagine for a moment you have a friend who has opened a restaurant, pouring their life's savings into the venture, only to find it failing miserably. So, they come to you for advice: What should they do?
Likely, before you worried about ambiance, advertising, or gimmicks like a roller-skating wait staff, you'd ask a simple question: What's on the menu? Is it any good? After all, people will drive for miles to an out-of-the way, hole-in-the-wall restaurant for a tasty dinner.
In many ways, the questions are the same for schools. What's on the menu—namely, what is actually being taught in classrooms—is perhaps the most important within-school variable driving school performance (second only to teaching quality). Studies have shown, for example, that a well-designed and implemented curriculum can have a significant impact on student achievement—equivalent to raising schoolwide student achievement by 11 percentile points in reading (Slavin et al., 2009) and 7 percentile points in math (Chingos & Whitehurst, 2012). Studies of schools that help students in poverty achieve significant learning gains reveal that their key distinguishing feature is typically a focus on consistent implementation of high-quality curriculum (Chenoweth, 2009).
With this in mind, here are three questions to ask about your curriculum.
What Are We Actually Teaching?
Standards or curriculum guides are helpful, but they often don't translate into effective classroom practice. As a recent RAND report noted, what teachers teach—the texts, lessons, and classroom materials they use to guide learning—often doesn't align with standards. Likely that's because only about a quarter (27 percent) of educators actually teach "by the book"; the rest either greatly modify their school's curricula (18 percent), create their own materials (19 percent) or cobble together existing materials to guide classroom instruction (37 percent) (Kaufman et al., 2020).
Certainly, in the hands of expert educators, teacher-created (or cobbled together) materials can offer rich, relevant learning experiences that help students achieve high standards. Yet given that the bulk of these materials have not been examined with rigorous research (Steiner, 2017) and the fact that teachers often rely on superficial criteria (such as visual appeal) to select instructional materials (Bugler et al., 2017), it remains an open question whether these materials support student success.
Is It Working for Our Students?
It's also important to recognize that curricula can align with standards yet still not be effective. For example, experts polled by Education Week found that the top five most popular reading programs in the U.S. are not backed by reading science (Schwartz, 2019); they all skew toward the unproven strategy of teaching students to decipher words they can't read by sight by looking for surrounding clues instead of the proven practice of teaching students to decode them.
Notably, in many districts, curriculum selection appears to be a rather loosely structured, ill-defined process—with evidence of effectiveness falling far down (or even off) the list of criteria for selecting curricular and instructional materials. For example, in a series of focus groups, teachers who served on school and district curriculum selection committees reported that they often had no rubrics or criteria to guide their review (Bugler et al., 2017). In the absence of criteria, they tended to select materials based upon visual appeal and ease of use.
Nonetheless, while selecting curricula based on evidence may be necessary, it's not always sufficient to ensure the program works with a district's own students. For example, when Oakland Unified School District adopted a reportedly effective reading curriculum, it had limited and even negative effects on the district's own students (equivalent to five months of lost learning) (Gonzalez, 2018). This was likely due to, among other factors, the program's evidence of effectiveness being limited to early grades, whereas Oakland was attempting to use it with older students. This suggests that schools and districts would be wise to conduct small-scale experiments before implementing a new curriculum broadly.
They need to answer the only question that truly matters: Does it work for our students?
Are We Giving Teachers Implementation Support?
Oakland's disappointing results were also likely due to inconsistent implementation (Gonzalez, 2018), an all-too-common shortcoming with curriculum. A survey of 6,000 teachers in 12 states (Kaufman et al., 2020) found that most teachers do not use their provided instructional materials as intended. For example, even though 31 percent of principals reported that their schools or districts required standards-aligned ELA curricula, just 14 percent of teachers reported actually using standards-aligned curricula regularly in their classrooms, and only 9 percent said they used them for at least half of their instructional time.
This poor implementation is perhaps not surprising, though, given that more than 80 percent of teachers said they never received any sort of professional learning to help them use their curriculum in their classrooms. In focus groups, teachers reported, for example, that new instructional materials often "just showed up" with no explanation or support (Bugler, 2017, p. 3). Here's the good news: Among the 6,000 teachers surveyed, those who said they received frequent professional learning and coaching to help them use their curriculum were more likely to use it and see it as valuable in helping students meet standards.
A survey of 6,000 teachers in 12 states found that most teachers do not use their provided instructional materials as intended.
Lastly, it's worth noting that curriculum implementation should not be construed as de-professionalizing teaching; to the contrary, teachers must still make countless professional decisions every day to help their students meet the high expectations of a well-designed curriculum. Moreover, high-performing schools tend to follow an adopt-then-adapt approach to curriculum; they focus first on ensuring consistent use of curriculum, then over time, work together as professionals to adapt the curriculum to their own students' learning needs and interests ( Chenoweth, 2009).
Likely, that's akin to the advice you'd give your restauranteur friend: Focus first on serving great food. But over time, refine the menu—and the ambiance—to meet your customers' ongoing needs and tastes.
