CAP’s findings demonstrate that there is more to be done to remove barriers to adoption and implementation of high-quality instructional materials. Only 18 of the 30 districts provided such information on their websites. Eighteen districts provided information on their websites on the process they undertake when adopting instructional materials. This analysis also uncovered the difficulty of determining which instructional materials districts are adopting or recommending. The next section of this report highlights the adoption and implementation processes of some exemplar districts. But a few districts stand out as having adopted highly rated instructional materials: Shelby County Schools in Tennessee, Duval County Public Schools in Florida, Wake County Public School System in North Carolina, and Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky, have adopted or are recommending instructional materials that are highly rated by EdReports’ and Louisiana’s rating tools nearly across the board. This analysis employs two publicly available rating systems-EdReports and the Louisiana Department of Education’s annotated reviews-to arrive at a snapshot of the current status of the adoption of curriculum reform and instructional materials in the districts.Īnalysis from the Center for American Progress finds that 10 of the 25 school districts that responded to the authors’ inquiries and are using rated curricula are not using any instructional materials rated highly by either rating system. It then examines the curricula and instructional materials used by the 30 largest districts in the United States. This report first presents existing research on curriculum and instructional materials. 6 In fact, when the effect sizes-a measure of magnitude that is comparable across interventions-of various educational interventions are stacked against one another, the effect size of a strong curriculum is larger than that of many other common education reform efforts. This makes it more likely that the curriculum itself, rather than other district characteristics, was responsible for the increased student achievement. While these findings were only correlational, curriculum effects have also been found in studies in which school curriculum was randomly assigned.

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