There’s a familiar divide between practice and policy. When it comes to grading, devices, equity, choice, student behavior, and much else, the views from inside and outside the schoolhouse are very different. That’s a big part of why educators and policy types tend to talk past one another. To delve into this disconnect, I reached out to Alex Baron, the director of academic strategy at a District of Columbia charter school, an Oxford Ph.D., and a former early-childhood and high school math teacher. Together, we’ll try to bridge a bit of the practice-policy chasm.
—Rick
Alex: Let’s discuss the policy-practitioner divide on curriculum: How much authority should teachers have to decide what gets taught? In recent years, policymakers have championed the high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) movement; HQIM refers to curricular materials from several vetted companies that provide teachers with scripted lessons, student assignments, tests, and pretty much anything else. At our school, we use HQIM in nearly every K-12 core-content course and expect faithful implementation from teachers.
In many ways, the HQIM transition represents a tectonic shift in what it means to be a teacher—from being a creator of content to a deliverer of it. Like many schools, we’ve shifted from the term “lesson planning” toward “lesson internalization"; this is because teachers aren’t creating lessons anymore so much as they are digesting the HQIM-prepared content. HQIM is a dream for many teachers because they receive word-for-word scripted materials. It’s also a salve for school leaders and policymakers since it ensures high-quality coverage of most state standards, assessment types, themes, and more.
However, HQIM also constrains many teachers. HQIM can raise the instructional floor but may lower the ceiling, especially for strong educators who want to teach their way but instead have to stick to the script. For example, if you’re an 8th grade English teacher using an HQIM like Wit & Wisdom, then you’ll read All Quiet on the Western Front—all the tasks, tests, and daily lesson plans relate to that text. If you want to read a different book, you’d also have to re-create all the course material for your replacement book—and that’s assuming school administrators or policymakers trust you to make lesson materials at a caliber comparable to the HQIM designers. Moreover, to realize the curriculum’s full impact over time, teachers across grades must stick to the program so that kids gain facility with the HQIM’s structures in each successive grade.
This structure reduces teacher autonomy. And many teachers—from veterans to novices and in between—surreptitiously deviate from curricular guidance, which creates implementation headaches for school leaders trying to find the balance. What do you make of all this, pal? Where is the balance between practitioner autonomy and policy mandates when it comes to what gets taught?
Rick: What a terrific topic. This is an issue on which I’m torn. I welcome the chance to think it through.
First off, let’s dispense with a red herring. Some self-styled public school advocates insist that state and local policymakers have no “right” to limit what and how they teach. That’s bizarre. Elected officials are democratically deputized by the residents who fund the schools and send their children to them. One of their jobs is to govern public education. So, it’s not a matter of whether policymakers have a “right” to do this. It’s a question of whether they should.
And I’m sympathetic to the arguments for consistency. There’s a reason why physicians don’t devise one-off approaches to administering medication. Clear, research-based protocols help provide consistent, quality care. In education, especially given the struggle of new teachers and the reliance of many practitioners on suspect online resources, it’s easy to make the case for this kind of professional uniformity.
More generally, the division of labor is a good thing. Courtroom litigators lean on staff and consultants for research, witness preparation, and jury selection. In music or film, performers rely on others to write their lines, record their work, edit the performance, and package the result. Professional athletes don’t dream up a game plan; they execute it. Asking millions of teachers to do everything is a huge ask and one that overwhelms a lot of hard-working professionals.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but think how frustrated I’d have been as a classroom teacher if a bunch of bureaucrats had micromanaged my lessons. I poured a lot of time and energy into planning units, designing lessons, and crafting assessments, and that process felt like a core part of the instructional role. I’d have felt oddly alienated from the work if my role had been just to deliver pre-packaged lessons.
And I don’t have a whole lot of confidence that “high-quality instructional materials” are always high quality. A lot of these determinations seem to depend heavily on whether materials check certain boxes or are assembled by curriculum designers who know the tricks of the trade. That’s not necessarily a recipe for rich, rigorous instruction.
So, I’m conflicted. Help me sort this out.
Alex: I’m not clear on the solution, Rick; honestly, I’m not clear on the exact problem HQIM aims to solve. Is HQIM about lightening teachers’ overburdened plates? Or is it about overriding teacher autonomy to ensure student access to rigorous materials? Perhaps policymakers wish to feed both birds with one HQIM bird feeder. But I suspect it’s mostly about that latter issue—here’s why:
The New Teacher Project’s 2018 report “The Opportunity Myth” indicated that students spend about 500 hours—or six months per year—on below-grade-level assignments. TNTP’s report came out within a year of the Council of Chief State School Officers’ task force to promote HQIM nationally. So while the rhetoric is often charitably framed as—"you teachers won’t have to worry about this workload anymore"—it’s more likely grounded in mistrust about teacher-created materials.
This mistrust can be well-founded: Teacher-made materials often reduce rigor. Why? Well, teaching is more fun when kids understand the material; when kids are successful, teachers feel successful. Conversely, confused kids become disengaged, misbehaved kids. Thus, many teachers assign below-grade-level work, which leads to a vicious cycle as kids’ learning gaps grow across years. Moreover, “The Opportunity Myth” showed that this pattern is worse for kids of color, where rigor can be systematically diminished due to racially tinged low expectations; this is an instance where DEI training—when done well—can have a big impact.
Enter HQIM, which assumes kids are on grade level in a country where 1 in 3 is not. Imagine 10th graders reading Crime and Punishment using a curriculum vetted by EdReports—the unofficial judge of what counts as HQIM. Imagine that many 10th graders are struggling to decode and comprehend Dostoyevsky’s writing. A teacher may be tempted to ditch the book and read Harry Potter—“We’re meeting students where they are,” the teacher might say. But as administrators, we’d reply: “If we meet students where they are, they’ll never arrive where they need to be for college and career success.” We’d push that even if a student struggles with text comprehension or essay writing, they can still read along with an audiobook version, grasp the literary themes, and show proficiency through a Socratic seminar. It’s doable but complex—especially in upper grades where kids’ annual learning gaps have grown to a chasm, while HQIM’s expectations remain resolutely grade-level.
Ultimately, at our school, if a teacher is moving kids toward grade-level proficiency, even with some self-made materials, we usually support that teacher’s independence. Just as charter schools trade autonomy for accountability, administrators afford agency for teachers who get results. But it’s a murky, fraught process and leaves me with mixed feelings.
Rick: As with most discussions about curriculum and instruction, the mixed feelings reflect the way a given strategy can either help or hurt. What matters is how it works in practice. Let’s stay with your Lexile example. I, too, want 10th graders reading challenging material that’s on grade level. Yet, when kids can’t read at that level, it makes sense to help them get where they need to be by giving them things they can actually read. The same goes for math—I want students at grade level, but I’d rather they gradually build mastery than just flounder in frustration.
This is a Goldilocks exercise. We want students working at, or above, grade level but may need to get them there in measured steps. This requires judgment. That’s where things get tangled. There are over 3 million teachers in public schools. A lack of training, experience, or expertise means there are reasons to doubt whether many of them should be entrusted with these decisions. Given the desire to keep students engaged, it’s easy to see why teachers might tend to aim too low. That breeds distrust among policymakers and is what fuels efforts to end social promotion or mandate “high quality” instructional materials.
I have trouble picking a side here. Why? Well, in the abstract, it’s tough to distinguish busybody micromanagement from sensible efforts to promote consistency. The answer depends on a lot of things. How much do I trust the vetting of the “high quality” materials? What do we know about the decisions teachers are making? Are struggling students duly wrestling with “grade-level” materials or are they just tuning out? What do the outcome data show about the real-world benefits of various “high quality” materials? When I get vendors’ promotional pitches for approved materials, I see a lot of attention to “alignment” but far less to these questions.
In the end, policymakers have an obligation to set expectations and guardrails. And, practically speaking, educators will always have a say in whether and how to use recommended materials. But those who would tilt this balance more toward policymakers do well to make clear how their definitions of “high quality” translate into the real world of students and classrooms. And those who envision a larger teacher role need to make the case that teachers have the requisite expertise and judgment.
