Classroom

In the majority of the country, districts operate under local control, meaning that school systems, or sometimes individual schools or teachers, have the ...

If a teacher said that her district hadn’t adopted standards-aligned materials, it didn’t matter whether she was in a state that was trying to encourage their use—she wasn’t any more likely to be using these materials than a teacher who was in a state not in the IMPD network. Some of these curricula that states are promoting devote significant time to reading and discussing specific books, which students might not be asked about on state tests, White said. “It is really important that finances never be a reason not to change and do the right thing,” he said. Kentucky provides professional development for district and school staff on how to select materials and the research base behind them. RAND used EdReports’ ratings to code materials as standards-aligned or not, a metric that many states also use in their definition of high-quality materials. Delaware has streamlined the process for districts to contract with vendors in a statewide professional learning guide. Advocates of this state- and district-directed approach say that it frees teachers from the burden of having to sort through resources on their own time: They say the materials they’re promoting are already designed to help students master grade-level material and engage in deep thinking. States in the network set their own criteria for what “high-quality” means, so they include a variety of measures—like whether they are culturally responsive or whether they get good marks from EdReports, a nonprofit that publishes curriculum reviews. Doing this work is time consuming, though some teachers say that they prefer to have the flexibility to choose their own materials. White, who is currently a managing principal for the consulting group Watershed Advisors, was not involved in the report. States have a limited amount of power over what materials teachers use in the classroom. A new report from the RAND Corporation suggests that some states have managed to do just that.