Decisions about curriculum are often hyperlocal in U.S. schools.
Individual districts usually have a lot of leeway to choose what materials they adopt. Teachers in those districts often mix and match officially sanctioned resources with those they find online or create themselves.
As a result, it’s hard to make sweeping statements about which curricula are most popular in certain subjects, or in certain places. But some states are trying to change that.
Last month, Massachusetts published an updated dashboard showing which materials districts are using and how they rank on state and national evaluations of quality. Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Nebraska have created similar statewide maps over the past five years.
In total, 23 states publicly share some form of data on district curriculum adoption, according to an analysis conducted by CurriculumHQ, a project of the Collaborative for Student Success, an educational advocacy organization that works to advance policies promoting standards-aligned materials and assessments.
Still, state-created searchable databases are uncommon.
Having these data easily accessible serves a dual purpose, said Jocelyn Pickford, an education policy and communications specialist who works with the Collaborative for Student Success on CurriculumHQ.
Dashboards like these provide information about the uptake of high-quality curriculum, showing how many districts are using materials that meet grade-level standards and use evidence-based instructional approaches, as defined by national organizations like EdReports or states’ own criteria.
But they also can serve as a directory for district leaders looking to connect and compare notes with other school systems using the same resources—and potentially encountering the same challenges with implementation, Pickford said. “There’s just an economy of scale there,” she added.
Still, there are challenges to collecting these data. Additional reporting requirements can feel burdensome to districts, and collecting and presenting the information at the state level requires time and expertise.
“These are some of the really technical, boring reasons, but they are actually very real,” Pickford said.
District-level data still obscures important nuance
In Massachusetts, the new data presentation is designed to be more customizable, said Lora Kaiser, the executive director of the Center for Education Market Dynamics, a research and data analytics organization that partnered with Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to do this work.
The tool allows users to filter by district characteristics, such as the size of the English-learner population, so school leaders, for instance, can find demographically similar systems using the same materials. Users can also see if there are differences in adoption choices between different kinds of districts—small versus large, or majority white versus majority students of color.
“With this dashboard, we’re trying to make it easier for districts who are in the curriculum-selection process to see what similar districts are using,” said Jacqueline Reis, a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, in an email. “For districts who have already chosen their curriculum, we hope the dashboard will make it easier to collaborate with other districts that are using the same curriculum.”
With these functionalities, Massachusetts is a leader in presenting these data, said Pickford. “This is so much more information than I’ve seen any state do,” she said.
The Massachusetts education department’s website states that 95 percent of districts participated in the data collection.
All of these state dashboards, including Massachusetts’, have some limitations, however. They don’t explore what’s actually being used in classrooms—just what materials districts have formally adopted.
This may obscure a lot of nuance. Many districts don’t keep track of—or even know about—all of the books, lessons, activities, and worksheets that teachers bring into the classroom.
In some corners, cataloging these school-by-school data has become a partisan project tied to the parents’ rights movement, which calls for more transparency in what schools are teaching children and more parental control.
During the 2023 legislative session, 62 bills filed in 24 states sought to expand parents’ rights in schools, mostly sponsored by Republican lawmakers, according to an analysis by FutureEd. Many of these proposals argued that parents should have the authority to review curriculum and opt their children out of materials they find objectionable. Some would also require schools to notify parents if children begin identifying as a different gender than the one assigned at birth, or ban instruction related to gender identity or sexual orientation.
But states’ attempts to assess whether schools are using standards-aligned materials shouldn’t be lumped together with these legislative proposals, Pickford said.
“To me, these are very separate types of legal and regulatory action,” she said. “I wish we could shift that narrative from curriculum being about culture wars to, are there markers of quality?”
