Listen to the article
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Dive Brief:
- The nation’s school districts — which currently develop curricula at district, school or classroom levels — would benefit from state-level curation of high-quality materials, according to an analysis published by the National Association of State Boards of Education.
- National, state or province-level curricula in reading, math, history and science are a common feature among top-ranked countries on the Program for International Student Assessment, according to the white paper written by David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins institute for Education Policy.
- Because U.S. students are studying so many different curricula, it’s difficult to assess in standardized fashion what they’re studying, Steiner said. He added that standards, curriculum and assessment are in a “triangular relationship with one another. We achieve no manner of mischief in this country by not aligning them.”
Dive Insight:
Though standards in math look similar across states and English language arts standards are beginning to coalesce around the science of reading in the early grades, Steiner said, “In the end, what matters is what’s tested and what’s studied.”
“If you look at the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] results and try to correlate them with whether states did or did not adopt the Common Core State Standards, or changed them in big or little ways, you find no relationships,” he said. “You can’t conclude anything. What matters is state leadership, district leadership, and the adoption and implementation of good curriculum.”
Though Massachusetts probably comes closest to achieving the triangular alignment Steiner lays out, he said Louisiana has shown promise in testing two of the most commonly used curricula in that state. And Texas might be on the road to adopting assessments to test an optional statewide English language arts curriculum called Bluebonnet Learning “that will reproduce, at scale,” what occurred in Louisiana, Steiner said.
The Texas ELA curriculum has been adopted by more than 25% of districts in the state as of August, and the Texas Education Agency has approved a required list of 200 texts, expected to be implemented in the 2030-31 school year, that every public school student should read in K-12, which Steiner expects will be integrated into the Bluebonnet curriculum.
A state doesn’t necessarily need to coalesce around a single curriculum and could choose from among three or four very good ones, Steiner said, but “if you leave it up to teachers to make up their own playlist of materials, that means that the quality of kids’ education is totally a matter of luck.”
Among questions the white paper advises state boards of education to ask about high-quality instructional materials are:
- What are high-quality instructional materials and why state boards should focus on them?
- What does the research say about them?
- Should states be weighing in on curriculum choices?
- How does that square with legal and regulatory requirements around local control?
- What can state leaders do to ensure effective implementation?
- How can state boards track districts’ adoption and use of instructional materials, and what data should be collected?
- How can states leverage regional education service entities and educator preparation programs?
