Leo’s wariness of Latin is understandable. When the “Habemus Papam” declaring him Pope was delivered in Latin, it encountered , reigniting debate about whether Latin is still useful in the modern era.

Rumors of Latin’s demise are greatly exaggerated, but school districts are planning its funeral. That needs to stop; the first step in planning for Latin’s continued life is to resist the elitist label that studying the language imparts. Latin is an equity tool, and we don’t acknowledge that enough. 

Latin programs across the country are being euthanized. In Needham, Massachusetts, a more than $2 million budget shortfall combined with declining enrollment led the public school district to eliminate its entire high school Latin program. Only 62 students were enrolled across four classes, compared to 945 in Spanish. Latin 1 had already been removed the prior year.

Over in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the district decided to Latin out of the middle school entirely — removing it grade by grade over three years — while technically keeping it at the high school for now. The high school Latin teacher warned it would be unsustainable: Without a middle school feeder, most students simply wouldn’t switch languages.

A t across Denver Public Schools put Latin at risk at Riverside High School, where the teacher noted that the lack of Latin in middle schools was already contributing to low high school enrollment. 

Cutting Latin off in middle school is the death knell for the language. Middle school Latin gets cut first due to low enrollment, which then makes high school Latin unsustainable, creating a self-reinforcing decline; about 80% of students who took Latin in middle school had been continuing it in high school.

That’s why the language is on life support. Only about 1,513 public high schools teach Latin, out of roughly 24,000 high schools total —  about of schools. That’s just public schools; private and Catholic schools push the number higher, but a comprehensive combined figure isn’t tracked precisely. Estimates put total K–12 Latin enrollment at around 210,000 students, which is about of all students studying a foreign language.

This decline is not new: High school Latin students dropped from around 700,000 in , largely due to the post-Sputnik push toward math and science. More recently, Advanced Placement Latin exam takers fell from 6,083 in 2019 to 4,336 in 2025,suggesting continued erosion at the advanced level.

That’s bad for English speakers, as Latin forms the root of nearly two thirds of English vocabulary, especially the advanced words used in science, law and literature. For school-related vocabulary, the figure is 90%. Studying Latin can strengthen reading comprehension, which is why some schools still offer the course. 

It’s time to address the real reason why Latin studies have been declining without many scholars becoming too concerned: the elitism debate. 

Classics always had an elite image — classical knowledge was historically the hallmark of gentility — and parochial and private schools maintained classical standards longer than most public ones.This difference in offerings is most stark in the U.K.: only of private schools.

In the U.S., Latin is especially concentrated in certain types of schools: elite independent prep schools — such as Exeter, Andover and Groton — and Catholic secondary schools where it’s often required. 

But a third type of school is breaking that loop: charter schools. They demonstrate how to keep Latin alive. Classical Charter Schools in the South Bronx offer a tuition-free education in one of the most underserved congressional districts in the U.S., with Latin as a core part of the curriculum. Latin instruction starts in , framed not as prestige-building but as a practical tool: improving English grammar, spelling, vocabulary and readiness to learn other languages.The idea is to flip the script: give low-income kids the same linguistic tools that elite schools have always hoarded.

Latin critics have pointed out that no one speaks the language but that’s not exactly true.  Linguists like Tim Pulju argue that Latin never truly stopped being spoken — it continued in Italy, Gaul, Spain and elsewhere, g into the Romance languages over centuries.There’s an important distinction:  Classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil became fixed and may have died conversationally but Vulgar Latin — what ordinary Romans actually spoke — kept evolving into what we now call Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. 

For Latino students especially, Latin can be framed as the root of their own language, not a foreign elite artifact but something ancestral and relevant. 

Latin is very much alive but it’s limping. Presenting it as an equity tool rather than a classical tradition can change who sees themselves as a potential Latin student and can change curricula — and lives.

In Kristin Lidstrom’s business classes at Hamilton Southeastern High School in Fishers, the finance lessons quickly become personal.

“They begin thinking about their own spending habits, future goals, or even what they’re seeing at home,” Lidstrom said. “Concepts like interest rates or debt suddenly carry weight when they realize how long it can take to pay something off or how quickly costs can grow.”

Not every student will pursue business after Lidstrom’s class. But all of them can apply the lessons they’ve learned from business class in their future career paths, she said.

And Indiana wants all high school students to start thinking about what those paths will look like beginning in high school. The state will have in 2029 that emphasize career learning and financial literacy.

Lidstrom’s own career journey started with studying marketing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. But she found the path she wanted to pursue through volunteering in schools, and combined it with her passion for business to become a teacher.

Now the business department chair at Hamilton Southeastern with 22 years of experience in the district, Lidstrom has been piloting an AP Business with Personal Finance class this year, which is open to grades 9-12. The course, which is set to roll out nationwide in the 2026-27 school year, has the backing of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and local employers.

Read more below about Lidstrom’s class at Hamilton Southeastern High, and the projects that students complete pitching business ideas and putting together a realistic budget.

These answers have been edited for length and clarity.

What does a typical day look like in AP Business with Personal Finance? How is this class different from other AP courses?

A typical day in this class is very active and hands-on. The course is intentionally designed with a project-based learning approach, so while there are occasional moments of direct instruction, most of the time students are learning by doing, working through real-world scenarios, collaborating with peers, and applying concepts in meaningful ways.

What really sets this course apart from other AP classes is that it’s less about memorizing content and more about developing skills. Students are consistently engaging in problem-solving, critical thinking, and communication, which mirrors how business actually works outside the classroom.

One of the anchor projects in this course is an entrepreneurship business plan that students build from the ground up, centered around solving a real problem.

Students start by identifying a need — something they’ve observed in their own lives, school, or community. From there, they develop a product or service to address that need and work through the full business planning process. This includes defining their target market, analyzing competitors, creating a marketing strategy, and building out basic financials.

What makes this project especially meaningful is that it’s not hypothetical in the traditional sense. Students are expected to make realistic decisions, justify their choices with data, and adapt as they encounter challenges along the way.

The project leads to a presentation where students pitch their business as if they were seeking investment. It’s a great example of a real-world scenario because it requires them to bring together everything they’ve learned.

The culminating project in the course is a financial-adviser simulation, in which students take on the role of advising a client through real-life financial decisions.

What makes this project impactful is that students have to think holistically and justify their recommendations based on the client’s situation. It pushes them to apply what they’ve learned in a realistic context and communicate their reasoning clearly.

Have you seen any moments where the material “clicked” in a real-world way for students?

One of the biggest “click” moments is around things like compound interest or saving for the future. When students see how small, consistent decisions can significantly impact their financial situation over time, it changes how they think. They start asking better questions, making more intentional choices in simulations, and connecting it to real-life decisions they’ll be making soon.

It’s in those moments you can tell it’s no longer just a class, it’s something they see as directly relevant to their lives.

What do your students hope to do after high school and has taking this course changed the way they think about money, entrepreneurship, or next steps?

My students have a wide range of plans after high school. Some are heading to four-year colleges, others to community college or trade programs, and some are eager to jump straight into the workforce or start something of their own. What this course does is give all of them a stronger sense of direction and confidence in those next steps. While not all students will pursue business after high school, they all come away with an appreciation for how business acumen can support them in any career path.

How does the course support students in meeting Indiana’s new diploma requirements?

This course directly supports Indiana’s new diploma requirements by fulfilling the Personal Finance requirement, ensuring all students graduate with a strong foundation in money management, credit, and financial decision-making.

As an AP Career Kickstart course, it also helps students begin building a purposeful pathway early in high school. It encourages them to pursue additional AP coursework, putting them on track toward earning Honors and Honors Plus Seals. By starting that progression earlier, students are more prepared and confident as they move into more rigorous AP classes, while also developing practical, real-world skills that connect to both college and career opportunities.

If you could adjust one thing about how business or personal finance education is taught nationwide, what would it be?

If I could adjust one thing, it would be to make business and personal finance education more consistently rooted in real-world application rather than theory. Students don’t just need to know what a budget, credit score, or interest rate is, they need to actively use those concepts in realistic scenarios. When students are making decisions, experiencing the consequences, and reflecting on those choices, the learning sticks in a much deeper and more meaningful way.

I’d also push for this type of learning to happen earlier and more consistently across grade levels. By the time students are making real financial decisions, they should already feel confident navigating them, not encountering the concepts for the first time. Ultimately, the goal should be to move beyond exposure and toward true readiness, so students leave school not just informed, but capable.

What’s the best teaching advice you’ve ever received, and how have you put it into practice?

The best teaching advice I’ve ever received is to never do for students what they can do for themselves. In practice, that’s shaped how I structure my classroom in a big way. Rather than stepping in with answers, I focus on asking questions, creating space for productive struggle, and designing experiences where students have to think, decide, and reflect.

It can be uncomfortable at times (for both the students and me) but that’s where the real learning happens.

In a course like this, it means students aren’t just learning concepts, they’re applying them, making mistakes, adjusting, and building confidence along the way. Over time, you can see them become more independent, more thoughtful, and more willing to take ownership of their learning, which is ultimately the goal.

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Experts have raised a variety of factors contributing to this reality: learning loss due to the pandemic, increased screen time, the dissolution of long-form reading and teacher burnout. While each of these points are critical, there’s an even deeper, more fundamental issue facing students that a flurry of educational reforms haven’t fixed and may have worsened:

They are simply not spending enough time actually reading in school.

Practice makes perfect, but without the reps, there’s no room for growth. Research kids should have at least 15 to 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading time a day. The reality? Much worse. On average, middle school and high school kids are getting about, if that.

This poses an even greater challenge for students in poverty. Kids who have little to no reading opportunities at home depend on school to fill the gaps. When reading minutes are reduced, they’re hit the hardest.

So how do educators fix it?

It turns out, they already have the answers. Here’s what the research tells us.

First, schools must protect uninterrupted reading time — and make it non-negotiable.

Right now in school, kids are bombarded with interruptions: digital devices, announcements, visual distractions, visitors. In fact, a recent of the Providence Public School District revealed that classrooms are interrupted more than 2,000 times a year, resulting in the loss of between 10 and 20 days of instructional time. What’s more, administrators often underestimate or misperceive how these interruptions might be disrupting the learning process.

Students need to be given the space to focus. If educators want to make changes, they need to get intentional about providing stronger opportunities for kids to focus in school: rethink the physical environment to reduce visual noise, streamline communications for students and build in time for cognitive processing.

That means giving students the time and space to get their reading reps in.

Second, teachers must make the time kids are spending in school worthwhile.

Giving kids the time and space they need to read, requires that they know how to do it. And there needs to be accountability and checks that tell us the practice is worthwhile. That’s where a strong curriculum comes in.

Educators need to be asking ourselves whether the work we’re asking students to do is worthy of their time and intelligence. If our kids are spending 15,000 hours in school across K-12, it’s on us to ensure they’re getting out what they’re putting in. It starts with providing high-quality instructional materials that are comprehensive, coherent, evidence-based, knowledge-rich, and grade-appropriate.

shows students learning under a coherent curriculum gain an average of 1.3 months of additional learning — 1.8 months for struggling students. With the right instruction, kids who are hit the hardest finally have the opportunity to catch up.

Unfortunately, TNTP’s 2018 multi-system study,, and its subsequent study revealed that students are rarely taught grade-level work, and they’ve often seen the materials that are being covered in a previous class. As a result, while kids are getting As and Bs, they’re demonstrating mastery of grade-level standards just 17% of the time.

Bottom line? Kids are doing the work, but they aren’t being appropriately challenged. They’re caught in an incoherent moshpit of disconnected academic programming. Schools are underestimating students’ potential, and it’s backfiring on their ability to learn to read.

Schools need to prioritize a curriculum that is cohesive, knowledge-rich, and grade-appropriate to support true learning. If we’re going to ask kids for their time, let’s make it count.

Finally, schools need to be clear-eyed about how they are measuring success.

Today, the domain of English Language Arts is made up of three key areas that are interconnected: reading, writing and oral language. these areas work hand in hand to help students build their skills; writing improves reading comprehension, while oral language supports both reading and writing.

The problem? Most testing tools that are used for instructional decision-making focus on a small slice of what it means to be proficient in the higher order skills of ELA. They rely on limited data sets like from to draw conclusions around proficiency across the whole domain, sometimes with big consequences for kids and teachers and instructional programming. Often, these tests don’t measure grade-level proficiency, they measure recall. That’s why our children can get As and still not be proficient readers.

If schools want our kids to succeed in literacy — an imperative in the age of AI — there has to be a more advanced discussion about assessment. Schools need to adopt an assessment system that aligns with the domain of English Language Arts. That means moving away from single-point-in-time multiple choice testing strategies and adopting assessment practices that hold the bar for higher order reading, critical analysis, writing, speaking, communicating and collaborating.

Solving the literacy gap doesn’t require an overhaul of our education system or an innovation that is smarter than all humans combined. As educators, we can teach children to read who attend school for 15,000 hours. We need a collaborative, aligned effort to challenge the status quo. We need leaders who are willing to pull on the right levers for change: protect reading time, provide high-quality, grade-level materials and measure what actually matters

This social capital — the knowledge of how to forge connections that make opportunities visible and attainable — is the missing curriculum in American K-12 and postsecondary education. And it’s a shortcoming with consequences.

Young people from well-connected families absorb social capital almost by osmosis when it comes to learning things like how to ask for help, follow up and signal ambition without arrogance. Others, equally capable but from less-connected families, must figure this out alone. The result is unequal starting lines and unequal outcomes — a yawning between social wealth and social poverty. 

Social wealth means having not only knowledge and credentials, but relationships that open doors, including mentors who give advice, supervisors who challenge us when we need to grow and networks that surface opportunities. Social poverty is the absence of those assets. It is being a talented individual without advocates.

Research finds that students from higher-income families are far more likely to report having mentors who help them consider careers, internships and next steps than students from lower-income backgrounds, first-generation college-goers and young women, especially those without college-educated parents. They report thinner networks and fewer trusted adults to guide them through critical transitions.

One of the most schools and colleges can counter social poverty is through mentorship. It’s not just a “nice to have” experience; young people with mentors are more likely to persist in education and transition successfully into work than those who lack such guidance.

But schools treat mentorship as an optional add-on, something that happens only if a motivated teacher, counselor or employer goes above and beyond.

Psychologist David Yeager what young people need is not generic encouragement, but relationships combining high expectations and genuine support. Effective mentors don’t simply reassure students that they belong. They communicate that growth is expected and that effort will be taken seriously.

This builds trust and reinforces agency. Young people are more likely to persist when they believe that adults see their potential and are invested in helping them meet it.

Yeager suggests these dynamics can be designed and structured rather than left to chance. This doesn’t mean turning schools and colleges into networking factories or diluting academic rigor. It means recognizing that social development is educational development. 

Just as literacy requires instruction and practice, so does learning how to form professional relationships and networks, seek mentorship and navigate institutions.

What would it look like for schools and colleges to design a system that takes this responsibility seriously? Here are six principles to guide this effort.

1. Make mentorship universal, not exceptional. Mentorship shouldn’t depend on self-selection or teacher heroics. Schools and colleges should assign mentors, integrate advisory systems and partner with local organizations to ensure every student has sustained contact with at least one non-family adult mentor. 

2. Start early. Students should encounter mentors beginning in middle school, when identities and aspirations are still forming. These relationships should become more formal and structured as students progress through school and college. Mentorship should be framed as normal, not remedial.

3. Teach the skills of relationship-building. Social capital isn’t only about access — it’s about competence. Students need instruction and practice in how to ask for help, follow up after meetings, give and receive feedback, and navigate professional norms. These skills can be taught, rehearsed and assessed, just like writing or public speaking.

4. Connect learning to people and places. Career exploration should include visits to workplaces, not just abstract classroom discussions about careers. Opportunities to shadow professionals on the job, internships, project-based learning and alumni networks help students see how knowledge travels into the world, and who helps move it along.

5. Signal high expectations with high support. Mentorship programs should avoid coddling or coldness. Adults should communicate clearly that they expect students to grow, stretch and persist, and that they’ll provide the guidance that makes growth possible.

6. Measure what matters. Schools and colleges track test scores and graduation rates but rarely monitor whether students graduate with mentors, references or professional networks. Simple measures, like verifying whether students can name adults who would help them find a job or write a recommendation, should serve as leading indicators of social wealth.

The remedy for this missing curriculum isn’t a mystery. It’s the will to treat social development as a core educational outcome rather than a byproduct. Reframing education around social wealth doesn’t diminish the importance of academic knowledge. It completes it. 

In a world where opportunity increasingly flows through relationships, schools and colleges that ignore social capital risk graduating students who are credentialed but stranded. Those that build it provide young people with the relationships and networks they need so they know that they are seen, supported and connected to a realistic future they can pursue.

That is the curriculum students need. And it’s one that schools and colleges can no longer afford to leave unwritten.

In February, the organization I lead, , brought these two camps together when it became the new home for the program. The program is a system for whole-student learning that integrates high-quality instructional materials from leading curriculum providers, key life skills, real-time data and monitoring tools, with dedicated coaching. It has reached more than 250,000 students across 46 states. 

Some may wonder: “Why would an organization known for school design and innovation become the home for one of the most comprehensive high-quality instructional materials platforms in the country?” But the fact that we found our way to each other shouldn’t be surprising. It should feel overdue. 

I spent the first chapter of my career in education certain I had figured out the equation: Great teachers. Rigorous materials. High expectations. If you gave students access to challenging content and put skilled educators in front of them, outcomes would follow. I trained teachers on that logic. I watched it work often enough to trust it.

It wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t the whole story.

Over the years, visiting thousands of classrooms and talking with young people and their families, I kept seeing the same thing. Teachers were getting stronger. Curriculum was getting more aligned and rigorous. The field’s investment at the instructional core was raising the floor for millions of students. Yet, the experience around all of it was still mired in century-old assumptions about how learning actually happens. The daily interactions and activities through which young people build knowledge, skills, and identity had barely changed.

Young people can feel it. About 75% of elementary students say they love school. By high school, that number flips. Only one in four teenagers reports being truly engaged in learning, a crisis Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop lay bare in The Disengaged Teen. Students are simultaneously bored and overwhelmed. 

Families are voting with their feet, too. Public school enrollment has fallen by nearly two million students since 2020, with in some states and private school enrollment surging. In New York City alone, sits 11% below pre-pandemic levels, and 41% of departing families cited a desire for more rigorous, engaging instruction.

This is what led me to co-found Transcend. For the past decade, we’ve been helping communities design learning environments where strong instruction meets intentional experience design, where the learning itself is engaging, relevant, relationship-rich and connected to who students are and who they’re becoming.

Consider what this looks like in practice. At Intrinsic Schools in Chicago, strong academic content lives inside a learning environment where even the physical design of the building is responsive to the learning experience. Multiple teachers work with students across different learning modalities in a single large classroom, adjusting instruction in real time based on individual goals and needs. 

On Choice Days, students build their own schedules, selecting academic supports like writing labs alongside enrichment they care about. Three times a year, students lead their own conferences with advisors and families, reflecting on their growth and mapping their path forward. The instructional core is rigorous. The experience is intentional.

At the same time, Gradient Learning’s movement to strengthen the instructional core has accomplished something that needed doing. I would never want us to stop investing there. When I visit schools with strong teaching and learning systems, I see students doing more meaningful work. The kind of work necessary for thriving in the world they are about to inherit.

That hard infrastructure, though, operates inside a learning environment. If that environment hasn’t been intentionally shaped, even the strongest instructional elements hit a ceiling. The science of learning and development tells us why. The brain does not process content in isolation from context. 

Learning is shaped by relationships, by whether students feel safe and known, by whether the work connects to something that matters to them, by whether they have agency in the process. Belonging activates the neural architecture that makes deep learning possible. Students actively construct knowledge , and no amount of well-sequenced information changes that fact.

We take for granted everywhere, except school, that experience matters. When we choose a restaurant, book a hotel or pick a doctor, we want to know how it felt to be there. In education, we’ve largely measured only outcomes while leaving the daily experience of learning itself unexamined. That is a gap we must close.

Community-based design, which I discussed in a recent , is how we close it. Students, families, educators, and learning experts must come together to rethink how we do school. 

This work builds the environment that strong instruction requires. The Gradient Learning program finding its home at Transcend is the bridge. Rigorous, aligned instructional materials now sit inside an organization designing the learning environments where those materials can do their best work.

AI, economic disruption and civic fracture are reshaping the world our students are entering. School is one of the few institutions positioned to help young people navigate all of it. But we won’t meet this moment through one-size-fits-all mandates handed down from above, nor by asking exhausted educators to innovate on nights and weekends. 

The path forward is a third way: communities redesigning schools together — drawing on research, proven models, and local wisdom to build learning environments where rigor and meaning reinforce each other, where young people are held to high expectations and supported as whole human beings, and where the daily experience of learning is as intentional as the curriculum itself.

The false choice between rigorous instruction and bold design has held the field back long enough. The schools that figure this out will be the ones young people actually want to attend. Our field has all the pieces. It’s time to put them together.

The Texas Education Agency received final approval Wednesday evening for roughly 4,200 corrections and changes to its elementary and secondary school curriculum.

Voting 9-6, the State Board of Education approved the changes to Bluebonnet Learning after in January. Members had said they needed more time to review copyright concerns, formatting errors and typos.

On Wednesday, some board members questioned whether the errors indicated a need to change Texas’ for learning materials, while others asked the education agency to provide an estimate of the corrections’ cost to taxpayers. Texans will bear the financial burden of the corrections because the education agency developed the materials using state funding.

“I think that when we have mistakes, that kind of undercuts the trust that we’re building with our local trustees and our local administrators,” said Republican board member Brandon Hall, who supported the corrections.

Colin Dempsey, a Texas Education Agency official who helps organize the instructional material review process, said the agency planned to calculate the costs after the State Board of Education voted on the changes.

Dempsey also said the agency has increased the number of people who review publishing materials since Bluebonnet in November 2024, expressing optimism that the increase would help the state catch errors earlier in the process. State Board of Education rules, Dempsey added, do not specify accountability measures when the board finds errors in state publishing materials.

“Clearly it’s something that we need to address,” he said.

Several board members who voted against the changes Wednesday have long opposed Bluebonnet. The reading and language arts curriculum attracted national attention in 2024 for its references to the Bible and Christianity.

The education agency has said the make up only a fraction of the overall product, which includes reading and math. have found that the reading curriculum skews heavily in favor of Christianity compared to other religions. Parents and historians have also about the materials downplaying America’s history of racism and slavery.

Roughly have indicated that they’re using at least some portions of the reading curriculum, covering about 400,000 students. The materials come with a $60 per-student incentive for districts.

Some board members requested Wednesday to hear from education agency officials who worked on Bluebonnet. Other board members said the Bluebonnet developers reached out to them directly and offered to address concerns or questions about the 4,200 errors prior to the meeting. Republican Aaron Kinsey, the board chair, said he could not force the publishers to testify if they were unwilling.

Dempsey advised against having the individuals testify, saying the agency preferred to keep dialogue between its staff overseeing the review process and board members.

Texas Education Agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky said in a statement that 4,200 represents the number of changes to Bluebonnet, not all of them errors.

“Some updates are simply improvements based on teacher feedback,” Kobersky said. “Every change and/or edit made to the product must be submitted individually for SBOE approval, regardless of the nature of the change, hence the large number. “

Dempsey said earlier this year that the 4,200 edits span more than 2,100 components of Bluebonnet. The curriculum, he noted, also has more components than other publishers.

For comparison, four other publishers that submitted correction requests reported a combined 16 edits.

Before the initial vote, board members acknowledged the trivial nature of some errors identified in Bluebonnet, while standing firm on concerns about what Republican Pam Little described as “sloppy publishing.”

“We are basically putting content out there that has not met the legislative request of us to remove, to review materials for quality and suitability,” Little said.

Democratic board member Tiffany Clark said the board and the education agency harmed students by allowing schools to teach flawed materials.

“If this is a product they’ve been using because they believe it was a high-quality instructional material, again, we have failed our students this school year,” Clark said.

The education agency will update the online version of the materials within 30 days and begin replacing physical books and teacher guides.

This first appeared on .

In one classroom, students identified literal and nonliteral language: an exercise in labeling text features. Students defined the types of language and carefully annotated the text with examples of both kinds, concluding with a perfunctory discussion.

In the other classroom, students identified literal and nonliteral language, but went further, grappling with what Neil Armstrong meant by “one giant leap for mankind” and connecting the famous phrase to the broader significance of the moon landing. The teacher engaged students by asking them if they, third graders firmly located on planet Earth, were part of the “mankind” of whom Armstrong spoke as he stepped onto the moon. The power of the text and the instruction echoed through that classroom.

Both teachers used the same high quality instructional materials. Only one truly supported students in building meaning. Across classrooms and districts, this pattern repeats, according to a.

In nearly two-thirds of 111 observed comprehension lessons, the work that students did supported only surface-level comprehension — a literal or task-oriented, partial understanding of the text that stops short of the deeper and fuller comprehension work readers need to engage in to succeed in later grades and beyond. Only 24% of lessons fostered robust comprehension, the kind that integrates literal and inferential understanding into a cohesive mental model of the text.

In other words: the curriculum is there. The materials are being used. But, in many classrooms, the meaning-making is missing.

SRI’s research focused on four large school districts that have implemented high quality curricula — including Core Knowledge Language Arts, Wit & Wisdom, and EL Education — for several years. Researchers surveyed 539 teachers who reported near-daily use of their district-adopted curriculum.

Students in these districts are reading and discussing knowledge-rich texts. On paper, this is what policymakers hoped for when states began recommending adoption of such curriculum.

But SRI also sent observers into classrooms in those four districts. The observations showed that teachers spent high proportions of class time on comprehension instruction, and that lessons featured many opportunities for student participation and highly engaged students. These findings represent the notable successes of the districts’ comprehension-focused curriculum implementation. But the comprehension instruction often stopped with the task — finding details, answering literal questions, naming text structures — without guiding students toward the bigger ideas and themes that define deep comprehension.

High quality instructional materials can lay the foundation for robust comprehension instruction. But they cannot deliver it on their own.

This is not just an instruction problem; it’s a systems problem. Curriculum designers, district leaders and instructional coaches may be unaware of the extent to which systemic practices determine the depth of comprehension instruction. SRI’s findings point to multiple well-meaning school and district forces that unintentionally nudge instruction toward the shallow end.

SRI researchers found narrow “standards-aligned,” “data-driven” approaches guiding teachers to focus on discrete skills and individual standards, despite the reality that comprehension standards are not individually measurable. There’s also insufficient teacher time spent discussing, analyzing and mastering the texts — and their content — as they prepare to teach knowledge-rich curriculum

Administrator classroom walkthrough observation rubrics and checklists often reward the most visible aspects of a comprehension lesson — posted objectives, student participation andx curricular materials in use — rather than what actually matters: Are students making meaning?

In short, well-intentioned systems may be signaling to teachers that addressing standards, completing tasks and tests, and simply using curriculum materials are the most important goals. But SRI’s findings suggest that these efforts might distract teachers from the true goal of teaching students to understand texts.  

SRI’s analysis of the 24% of observed lessons that did foster robust comprehension points to six teaching practices that matter. These practices include engaging students in text-specific analysis, modeling meaning-making, leveraging prior knowledge, providing instructive feedback, creating opportunities for text-based reasoning and structuring peer learning. These practices were more tightly correlated with robust comprehension — suggesting they could be steps toward how teachers might shift their practice toward that goal.

None of these are new ideas. Educators have talked for years about modeling, text-based evidence, and rich peer-to-peer discussion. What is new is the clarity with which we observed how these practices must be oriented toward the big ideas of a text — not merely toward a task — to move instruction from surface to substance.

For example, in one lesson, a teacher used strong instructional modeling to show students how to collect key details and paraphrase a main idea. Then, she showed students how to do it in a history text about how new navigational technologies facilitated European exploration of the New World, truly unlocking robust comprehension.

For policymakers and system leaders who championed high quality materials as a lever for literacy improvement, these findings offer both a warning and a roadmap. Fortunately, the districts involved have the literacy leadership and professional learning infrastructure to make key shifts toward robust comprehension instruction. Three next steps for literacy leaders stand out:

1. Define and communicate a clear vision for robust comprehension instruction. Districts must go beyond “fidelity” to curriculum and articulate what deep understanding looks like for students and what it demands from instruction. Discussion, writing, knowledge-building, and standards are all part of the story, but ultimately, robust comprehension must be the target.

2. Reorient professional learning around the knowledge-building texts and their meaning. Teachers need structured opportunities to build the historical, literary, and scientific content knowledge necessary to facilitate robust understandings of the knowledge-building texts. Their professional learning should require deep, collective unpacking of all the nuances in the texts. .

3. Align observation and assessment systems to priorities for instruction. If tools and interim assessments measure only surface features, surface-level instruction will persist. Systems must adopt tools that can discern whether instruction leads students toward robust comprehension and use that data transparently to support improvement.

These changes are not small lifts, but they are essential.

Perhaps the most hopeful finding in the study is this: Lessons that supported robust comprehension didn’t just deepen learning, they increased student motivation and engagement. Students liked these lessons more. The students in the robust One Giant Leap lesson could see themselves in the Apollo mission — and on the moon.

In short, the path to better literacy outcomes is also a path to more joyful teaching and learning.

SRI Education and The 74 both receive financial support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies

Wielding chainsaws, they helped the 97-year-old former Colorado governor clear out fallen timber this year to make a path for some four wheelers. 

“They just enjoyed the working relationship back then, and they enjoy the friendship now,” Romer said in a recent interview. 

But when they finish the day’s projects, it’s not unusual for the group to relax over wine and cheese and trade war stories about Romer’s tenure. Under his leadership, the district saw several years of steady gains in reading on both and . Fighting bureaucracy and a powerful teachers union, he required elementary schools to use Open Court, a phonics-based program that embraced what is known today as the science of reading. The district trained teachers to use it and hired reading specialists to make sure they stuck to the curriculum. 

“For six years, we concentrated on that. It was the most important thing we did,” Romer said. But the teacher’s union chafed against the program’s rigid design and eventually demanded over the curriculum. “They didn’t want us to be screwing around in classrooms. They wanted the door shut. We forced those doors open.”

Nearly 20 years later, those stories have a new relevance as reading scores are once again on the rise. The current superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, has taken a similar, top-down approach to literacy with a program from curriculum provider Amplify. District leaders say they’ve learned from the past about the dangers of a lockstep approach to teaching reading, but some wonder whether teachers are getting the support they need. 

Tackling a new curriculum is “not an easy shift, and the ongoing support is needed,” said Francisco Villegas, chief academic officer at the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit that manages 20 high-need schools in the district. “There are fewer dollars, and that likely will have implications for what the district is able to provide.”&�Բ�����;

The Partnership schools adopted the Amplify program in 2018-19 and began to see in English language arts on the state test. Since 2022, seven of the Partnership’s 11 elementary schools have seen double-digit increases in the percentage of students meeting or exceeding state standards. At a in September, Carvalho called the Partnership a “terrific incubator” that influenced the district’s curriculum choices. 

But systemwide, leaders are to balance the budget and layoffs are expected. Compared to the Open Court years, training on the reading curriculum districtwide is more “hit or miss,” said Maria Nichols, president of the district’s principals union. LAUSD offers opportunities, both online and in-person, for professional development. School leaders, however, often don’t know which courses teachers have taken or whether they’re using what they’ve learned, she said. “We are PD rich and implementation poor.”

‘On the same page’

Romer’s team implemented Open Court at a time when was pouring millions into training to teach reading. A $133 million from the U.S. Department of Education provided even more. Nearly all of the district’s 12,000 elementary school teachers participated in and many completed follow-up sessions throughout the year.

“It was phenomenal,” Nichols said. “We were treated as professionals. There was a lot of money back then.”

Former board members, among Romer’s annual visitors, said Open Court was a way to ensure all students, in an urban district where kids often change schools, would receive strong instruction. Marlene Canter, who served on the board from 2002 through 2008, said that regardless of teachers’ level of experience or the college they attended, “everybody would be on the same page.”

For some teachers, that played out literally. Many found Open Court . There was a specific set of cards with letter sounds to post on the wall and a recommended U-shaped classroom layout that, according to a teacher guide, left “a large open space on the floor for whole-group and individual activities” and provided “an easy ‘walk-around’ for the teacher.” Critics viewed the , deployed to ensure teachers followed the curriculum, as “Open Court police” ready to catch them veering off script. 

“They took my fun and creativity away,” former teacher Stuart Goldurs complained in a . “I became an instructional robot.”&�Բ�����;

Ronni Ephraim, who served as Romer’s chief instructional officer, said the change upset some teachers. The district asked them to replace storybooks that had been favorites in their classrooms for years with Open Court phonics-based “readers,” workbooks and classroom libraries. Despite the objections, the district saw struggling schools improve and outpace the state. 

“I don’t think top-down is bad,” Ephraim, now a consultant, said about curriculum choices. “I think the board and the superintendent have to believe in it, and then they have to make sure that everybody is prepared to teach it as designed.”

‘Big disconnect’

Critics said the program was ineffective with English learners. Over time, performance flatlined, and the district replaced Open Court with a program. 

Rob Rucker is among the LAUSD teachers who worked for the district during the Open Court years and is now adjusting to Core Knowledge Language Arts. A third grade teacher at 135th Elementary School in Gardena, one of several small cities within the district’s boundaries, he said some novice teachers valued Open Court’s structure. They didn’t yet have enough experience to write lesson plans of their own.

“I actually liked Open Court,” he said. “It was very straightforward and easy for teachers to understand.”

The Amplify program still covers the basic skills students need to decode words and recognize parts of speech. It’s also what reading experts describe as a knowledge-building curriculum. The units introduce students to early civilizations, like the Vikings in Scandinavia, and science content, such as the solar system and animal habitats.

That’s where Open Court fell short, said Nichols, with the principals’ union.

“When we tested kids, they could read beautifully,” she said, “but they couldn’t understand what they were reading.”

For a student population like LAUSD’s, with 86% living in poverty and one in five still learning English, strengthening kids’ knowledge of the world is “going to be the real game changer,” said Barbara Davidson, president of StandardsWork, a think tank, and executive director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Since 2015, the campaign has been a leading voice for integrating history, science and the arts into reading curriculum. 

Rucker said his students were already familiar with stories like “Alice in Wonderland” and “Aladdin,” so it wasn’t hard to keep them interested in a lesson on classic fairy tales. Getting them to relate to lessons on ancient Rome has been more challenging.

According to a district spokesperson, “the goal is to ensure that every school has access to the literacy expertise and coaching capacity it needs.” But other than a two-day training from Amplify, Rucker said he hasn’t had any additional support on how to implement the program, he said. He thinks his school would benefit from an English language arts coordinator teachers could lean on when they need someone with more experience, but because of enrollment loss, many schools have lost administrative positions. 

Some teachers feel Amplify is out of reach for struggling students, leading them to patch in other materials to make the material more relevant. 

During a recent lesson on early American irrigation systems, Kareli Rodriguez, who teaches at Stoner Ave. Elementary School on the west side of town, used pictures and videos to help her fifth graders grasp the idea. Excitement over the Dodgers’ successful World Series run helped her pique kids’ interest in a passage on Yankees’ relief pitcher Mariano Rivera.

But it’s “not realistic,” she said, for teachers to get through a lesson in the recommended 90-minute time slot with so many students working below grade level. A district coach modeled a lesson for the teachers last school year, Rodriguez said, but she couldn’t finish it in time either.

“I think that’s a big disconnect that the district needs to understand,” she said. “It’s definitely rigorous, but most of the students are always playing catch up.”

Still, like most other schools in the district, Stoner Avenue saw improvements in reading. Fifty-two percent of fifth graders met or exceeded expectations, compared to 41% last year. 

Literacy advocates hope those gains will convince leaders — as Romer did with Open Court — to stick with Amplify. “Our push is going to be to say, ‘You got to stay the course,’ ” said Yolie Flores, president and CEO of Families in Schools, a nonprofit that for research-backed teaching materials. Her group breaks down the science of reading for parents so they’ll know how to talk to teachers about the curriculum and help their kids at home.

District leaders gathered in October to celebrate the district’s recent improvement. Outside the auditorium at Maywood Elementary School, as students rushed back to class after lunch, Deputy Superintendent Karla Estrada took a moment to talk about lessons learned since the Open Court years, like taking feedback from teachers.

The district, she said, wants them to follow the Amplify curriculum “with integrity” while recognizing they often have to make decisions in the moment, depending on their students. 

“They let me know where something is not quite what they want,” she said. “But no curriculum is going to do everything for you.”

What’s the problem? The truth is, adopting and implementing a new curriculum isn’t simply an educational challenge — it’s a human behavior problem. For students to benefit from instructional materials, those materials must be used well in classrooms. But that can happen only when districts support early and meaningful to strengthen the quality and sustainability of adoption efforts.

The stakes are high. A demonstrates that high-quality instructional materials (HQIM), when used effectively, improve student achievement. School systems need every tool at their disposal to address worrisome learning gaps in core academic subjects. But these efforts come at a cost. Districts typically replace their core curriculum every five to seven years, and each adoption represents a multi-million-dollar decision that holds the potential to impact teaching and learning. Yet too often, new materials sit on shelves and go underused leaving the investment, and the impact on students, unrealized.

Behavioral scientists have long known that makes people favor what’s familiar, even when better options exist. This can help with making quick decisions in a complex world. However, in group settings, it can lead to and overlooking evidence. Organizations often struggle to turn good intentions into lasting new practices, and schools are no exception.

To better understand why strong curriculum adoptions sometimes falter, our organizations partnered — combining ’ producing evidence-based reviews of K-12 instructional materials and helping districts design effective adoption processes with ’s expertise in applying behavioral science to help organizations , change habits and follow through on new practices.

Together, we surveyed a nationally representative group of 254 district leaders and educators who had recently adopted new materials. The findings, presented in our new report, , make one thing clear: The toughest hurdles come not during selection, but during implementation.

Nearly half of respondents (49%) said “achieving consensus or stakeholder buy-in” was their biggest challenge, and 48% cited “implementing purchased curriculum.” By contrast, far fewer struggled with early steps such as identifying needs or narrowing options. This pattern reflects a confidence-implementation gap. While 72% of leaders said they feel confident choosing new curricula, only 59% have systems to evaluate implementation and just 60% pilot programs before adoption.

The data also reveal a blind spot. Although nearly half of districts cite buy-in as a major obstacle, only 18% seek outside support for consensus-building — suggesting that many underestimate the complexity of change management and try to do it all internally. Teachers, meanwhile, often have limited input: In a 2024 survey, only 1 in 5 reported having a role in selecting their school’s materials, and just 1 in 4 said their district was “very effective” in helping them implement new ones. When educators feel excluded or undersupported, the status quo bias strengthens — making even the best materials harder to sustain in classrooms.

Districts that beat these odds do a few things differently, taking a proactive approach to countering biases and building energy around change:

Involve teachers early and often: Bringing educators in at the start — on curriculum committees, in pilots and in decision-making — builds ownership and strengthens implementation. Teachers bring practical insights into what works for students and can flag potential pitfalls before rollout. Their engagement isn’t just good process — it’s what makes change possible.

Plan for implementation from day one: Adoption must be understood as an ongoing process, not a single decision. Districts that plan early for how materials will be rolled out in classrooms — including scheduling, teacher training and ongoing support—see stronger results than those that treat adoption and implementation as separate efforts. When teachers receive curriculum-based professional learning, student outcomes can , having about the same effect as a 15% reduction in class size.

Make field testing non-negotiable: Piloting new materials before full adoption helps districts gauge how well resources meet teacher and student needs, while giving educators a chance to see their value firsthand. This familiarity reduces resistance to change and surfaces adjustments that improve long-term success. 

State and district leaders can learn from the examples of and , where clear definitions of high-quality instructional materials, paired with complementary state guidance, help districts in making local decisions. Districts such as and highlight the power of early teacher engagement, transparent communication and sustained professional learning to translate curriculum adoption into quality use of new materials. When districts approach adoption through a people-centered process — anticipating bias, engaging teachers and designing for implementation — they set themselves up for lasting success.

When the time comes to replace core curriculum, district leaders have a choice: repeat the same ineffective procurement routines or build a process centered on people and learning. Handled poorly, even the best materials risk gathering dust. Managed thoughtfully, with an understanding of how people respond to change, they can transform teaching and learning. 

When adoption focuses on engagement, planning and teacher support, curriculum stops being a box to check and becomes a lever for success, sparking the kind of lasting improvement every district seeks: better teaching and better results for students.

These are the telltale signs of math anxiety creeping back into my classroom, and it’s heartbreakingly common. Between experience a decline in math skills over the summer across elementary grades. By the time they reach fifth grade, students can lag behind their peers by two to three years.

That means students are missing out on crucial math skills that form the foundation for everything that comes later. As many teachers can attest, math remains one of the hardest subjects to teach because the basics aren’t always as black and white as they seem.

I’ve had to look for new ways to break down those barriers and ease the pressure. That’s why I’ve leaned into game-based learning. It takes something stressful and makes it approachable. In teaching math, that makes all the difference.

I first brought games into my math block because I wanted to try something different. A student suggested we review a concept with a math game he had used, and I decided to give it a shot.

There are plenty of games: Math Reveal, Quizizz and Coolmath among them. In my class we use Prodigy, which allows students to play as wizards exploring different fantasy worlds. They progress through the game by engaging in math-based quests and battles, answering a series of math questions to power spells, cast attacks or heal their wizard. Behind the scenes, the platform analyzes each student’s strengths and gaps, then adjusts and tailors content to the appropriate learning level.

The benefits were clear almost immediately, and the atmosphere in my classroom shifted. Kids who normally avoided eye contact were leaning in, laughing and actually asking to do math. It was a small change at first, but it began breaking down the anxiety that had been holding students back.

Their anxiety turns into curiosity, and their avoidance shifts into active participation. Students knew they could make mistakes, try again and keep moving without the fear of failure they often carried into traditional lessons.

Over time, I’ve learned that these games weren’t just fun. They were powerful teaching tools. Game-based learning platforms helped students review after new lessons and revisit older concepts to keep their skills sharp. As a result, when we moved on to fractions or multi-step problems, they weren’t burdened by forgotten fundamentals.

Now, I incorporate game-based learning throughout my curriculum. I may introduce a new lesson with a quick round or have students partner up to practice and reinforce a concept. Before a test, I can assign relevant game modules that give students a low-stakes way to practice and prepare.

I noticed students catching up quicker than in previous years. At the start of one school year, I had eight students who were pulled out of my class for extra math help. By the end of the year, only two needed the extra support.

And let’s be honest: These tools have helped me, too. Teaching math can be overwhelming, especially with constant pressure to get every student up to speed and prepared for benchmark tests.

Game-based learning became a comforting resource for me because it offers new ways to personalize lessons and celebrate small wins. As students play, I can track their learning in real time to see which skills they’ve mastered, where they’re struggling and how their performance is shifting over time. Students can move at their own pace now, and I can step into the role of guide rather than taskmaster.

Like any classroom tool, game-based learning works best when you use it with intention. Over the years, I’ve learned some strategies that make it more than just “play time.”

• Play along: When I first started using game-based learning platforms, I didn’t fully understand how each game worked or the way they built in rewards, challenges, and storylines that keep kids engaged.
  
  That changed when I created my own character and began playing alongside my students. Suddenly, when a student shouted, “I just beat the Puppet Master!” I knew exactly what that meant, and I could celebrate and learn with them.
  
  By experiencing the games myself, I learned how to implement them in the classroom. I could see firsthand how to weave them into lessons, when to use them for review versus pre-teaching, and how to keep the fun from becoming a distraction.

• Assign with purpose: I don’t just let students log in and click around. I strategically tie games to the key concepts we’re learning that week or use them to revisit skills. For example, I might assign a short warm-up where they tackle problems from earlier in the year so they’re never losing touch with old material. Cyclical practice helps build long-term retention while lowering the stress of new concepts.

• Differentiate lessons: One of the biggest wins with game-based learning is how easy it is to differentiate and personalize learning. In any classroom, I have students at wildly different levels: Some need extra review, others are ready to race ahead. With games, I can assign work that meets each child where they are.
  
  That flexibility saves me time, but more importantly, it saves students from unnecessary stress. They can master concepts step by step, and I can gently move them up without overwhelming them.

When I first introduced game-based learning, I didn’t know what to expect. It felt like one more thing to manage. But I let students guide me, and the results spoke for themselves. They were more engaged, less anxious and more willing to try.

For teachers who are unsure, my advice is simple: Give it a chance. Watch your students light up when math feels less like a hurdle and more like a game. For me, the greatest reward has been seeing kids who once dreaded math start to relax, build confidence and move from “I can’t do this” to “Can we play again?”

Game-based learning isn’t about replacing rigor. It’s about sparking curiosity, reducing fear and creating the kind of engagement that fosters a genuine love of learning. Most of all, it reminds us — and our students — that math can, and should, be fun.

More and more, are developing strategies for summer instruction, recognizing it as a cost-effective way to combat learning loss, drive academic and social-emotional benefits for students and advance curricular priorities. Designing and delivering high-quality summer programs requires many of the same district-level efforts needed to plan a full academic year, including recruiting and enrolling students, identifying qualified staff, defining the curriculum, providing professional development and arranging for transportation. All this takes time.

Because influence local activities, will position leaders, from state capitals to schools, for success in 2026. As they get to work on summer learning, state leaders should keep four guiding principles in mind.

First, they can make summer learning a priority by signaling its importance as a vehicle for education and enrichment. and , for example, have done this by codifying summer learning into legislation. Through its Additional Days School Year initiative, has allowed districts to add up to 30 instructional days to the school calendar, including through summer learning programs. has provided communication toolkits that include flyers and social media graphics that build awareness of and enthusiasm for summer reading programs throughout the state. Designed to attract students, teachers and site coordinators, the tools also detail the benefits of participation: Students receive free, small-group tutoring, have a chance to catch up and build confidence in all subjects; and teachers get to work intensively with smaller student groups while receiving training and coaching.

Second, state leaders can establish a vision for what summer learning should accomplish for students. Some states, like , have made literacy a priority. emphasizes reading camps that include daily doses of math as well. For high school students, New Mexico offers paid summer internships, providing work experience and opportunities for community engagement. 

Third, summer learning must be factored into state education budgets. Funding decisions are particularly time-sensitive and may require legislative action. It is crucial for state leaders to help local education agencies understand avenues for funding their programs. Several states have secured ongoing financial support for summer learning, whether through legislative action (Oregon), tax revenue () or recurring budget line items ().  

States can consider an array of funding options to support local programming, which may include formula grants, competitive grants, grants for districts and grants for community-based organizations that may partner with districts. However, applying for grants can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. Some of the school systems serving the students with the greatest needs may have limited bandwidth for grant writing. 

Lastly, it is critically important for state education leaders to offer guidance for providers of summer learning to help translate their vision into program design. For example, the collaborates with state education leaders to give financial and technical support to community organizations offering evidence-based summer programs. requires summer programs to be at least 30 days in length and to blend core instruction, enrichment activities and social-emotional support, which is consistent with . Texas mandates that districts receiving state funds share data related to enrollment, attendance and academic growth, to help its state education agency understand engagement and impact statewide. 

As part of this quality-assurance effort, state education leaders should consider the “both/and” qualities of summer learning: It is most effective when designed with both evidence-based characteristics and flexibility in mind. Certain , such as a combination of academic and enrichment activities, the use of highly qualified staff and sufficient time for academic instruction, contribute to . At the same time, effective programs are flexible enough to address a range of needs and goals. For example, a state or district might identify a need to focus on building reading skills or providing students with opportunities for STEM immersion or career exploration. Widespread summer programming that will make a difference for students across villages, tribes, towns and cities in each state will depend on a “both/and” mindset. 

Summer is not just a time. It is a tool for providing evidence-based, adaptable learning programs. As they enjoy autumn, state leaders must look ahead to summer 2026, ensuring their state and local partners are well positioned to advance learning priorities and opportunities for the students they serve. 

A painter prepped the side of a classroom building at the school for a new mural — smiling dragons in caps and gowns, and the district slogan: “Ready for the World.” On a patch of pavement sat a mini outdoor library featuring a small seating area, an umbrella for shade and a cart full of books.

She hopes the features prompt visitors to ask, “Who’s the principal here?” But the progress at 135th, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, goes much deeper. Chronic absenteeism is down to 13%, from 17% in 2024. Over the past two years, the percentage of students meeting state standards in English language arts has climbed from 25% to 37%. In math, it grew from 26% to 34%.

The changes, along with the formation of a STEM lab and the addition of afterschool Boys and Girls Clubs, were enough to convince Daveyeon Shallowhorn, the school’s plant manager, to pull his two kids out of a nearby Catholic school and enroll them in 135th.

“I just see different things being offered that I don’t usually see,” he said.  

Districtwide, leaders are celebrating the highest-ever performance on California’s state test. But the strong gains in math, reading and science, at every grade level, weren’t limited to wealthier, or high-performing magnets. They were evenly distributed across some of the district’s most challenging, high-poverty schools, like 135th.

Some say Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s centralized approach to steering the nation’s second-largest district is lifting performance at schools that languished near the bottom for years. The seven-member school board, which hired him in 2021, reaffirmed their confidence in his leadership last month, to renew his contract for another four years. But others say there are likely multiple explanations for the boost. The question is whether the positive trends will continue in a city where the powerful has a history of resisting top-down programs.

“If Carvalho is seeing gains, that means our students are gaining,” said Jose Luis Navarro, a former principal in the district who now coaches school leaders. For now, United Teachers Los Angeles is unhappy that a recently adopted budget didn’t include raises. Nevertheless, Navarro urged the union to embrace Carvalho’s agenda. “You’ve already tried fighting every superintendent for the last 40 years. Just try working with one and see what happens.”

The improvements came in spite of wildfires that wiped out part of the city, a crackdown on undocumented students and a federal government trying to on blue California. 

“Our kids, our students persevered,” Carvalho, who declined to be interviewed, said at his back-to-school address in late July. “They, in fact, soared.”

But while students from all racial groups improved, significant gaps remain. At least two-thirds of white and 74% of Asian third-graders met or exceeded expectations in reading, compared to 37% of Latino students and 31% of Black students. 

“We will redouble our efforts. We will redouble our commitment,” he pledged at an Oct. 10 press conference at Maywood Elementary. 

‘Smaller numbers’

Experts say the recent achievement growth among the district’s neediest students is likely a cumulative effect of several initiatives, including a more uniform approach to instruction, extra help for kids who are the furthest behind and a concentrated focus on the most troubled schools. 

But Carvalho has “generally good instincts about what works,” said Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California. The district adopted a research-based literacy curriculum, has over 10,000 teachers in the science of reading and has spread some of those to math instruction. “It seems the district is investing in quality curriculum and supporting teachers to use it.”

As scores go up, however, enrollment continues to dwindle. Over the past five years. LAUSD has lost .

But that factor could be working in the district’s favor. That’s because for now, LAUSD, unlike , has , leaving some schools with more staff per student.

“You already have built-in small group instruction with smaller numbers,” said Nery Paiz, principal of Glen Alta Elementary School, east of downtown. With an enrollment of about 100, his average class size is about 19 students, he said. 

shows that such “pronounced” declines can sometimes lead to increases in test scores. found that enrollment loss doesn’t immediately translate into funding cuts, freeing up more resources for schools in the short term. LAUSD’s $18.8 billion budget, adopted in June, increases spending for majority-Black schools, arts programs and support for LGBTQ students.

‘No secret sauce’

Some in the district say the uptick in scores would have happened without Carvalho, whom they dismiss as a slick media personality.

“We’re far enough away from the lockdowns that teachers have been able to recover, and students have been able to recover,” said Nicolle Fefferman, a veteran high school social studies teacher in the district. “There is no secret sauce to teaching.”

She helps lead an advocacy group, Parents Supporting Teachers, whose members are far less enamored with Carvalho than when he arrived in early 2022. The district’s failed experiment with a $6 million AI chatbot has drawn accusations of misspending. Officials discontinued use of the tool when the company went under. Others argue he to close schools during the fires, relying on guidelines that failed to account for multiple fires burning across the region and filling the air with . 

Some parents say students have in school and are unhappy with Carvalho’s move to roll out an online program called . To Fefferman, the digital lessons and assessments represent “overtesting,” which the teachers union has traditionally opposed. UTLA didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Maria Nichols, president of Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, the principals union, said i-Ready has created “friction” between school leaders and teachers who object to the program.

The increase in scores is worth celebrating, she said, but said it came “on the backs of the [principals] who are working 60 hour weeks.” Her union joined with UTLA and SEIU Local 99, which represents non-teaching employees, outside schools Sept. 16. All three are currently in negotiations with the district over salaries and working conditions. 

Board President Scott Schmerelson, who has the union’s support, said such concerns are to be expected. It’s a “general rule” to complain about the superintendent “no matter what he says, no matter what he does,” he said. But he called the “grumbling” minimal. 

He’s particularly enthusiastic about the district’s Black Student Achievement Plan, a $175 million initiative that provides schools serving Black students additional counselors, cultural activities and field trips. Former Superintendent Austin Beutner proposed the program in early 2021 to reduce achievement gaps. Under Carvalho, it continues to expand, in spite of challenges from who say it discriminates against students of other races. 

Since last year, students in Black Student Achievement Plan schools have seen slightly more growth in reading and math than the district as a whole. 

The additional resources have “helped [Black students] a lot, not only academically but emotionally,” Schmerelson said. “I think they feel important. I think they feel respected.”

‘Nothing short of remarkable’

With high expectations, the board voted unanimously to hire Carvalho in late 2021. At the time, Pedro Noguera, dean of education at the University of Southern California, likened the award-winning superintendent’s arrival to“LeBron coming to the Lakers.” The board trusted that Carvalho’s success leading the Miami-Dade schools for 14 years would follow him to the West Coast. 

But efforts to overcome COVID learning loss and rise above pre-pandemic performance began a year earlier, with schools still locked down. Most students wouldn’t set foot in classrooms for another year. 

Beutner used COVID relief funds to launch Primary Promise, a highly popular effort to target extra instruction to struggling readers, including English learners, students in foster care and others most likely to fall further behind because of school closures. 

In 2021, a Boston-based consulting group that designed the model “nothing short of remarkable.” On average, students began the year reading five words correctly per minute. Some couldn’t read at all. After 10 weeks, they were close to reaching the goal of 21 words per minute.

Julie Navarro, who is married to Jose, worked on the program as a reading specialist at Panorama City Elementary in the San Fernando Valley, where she said teachers were eager to share materials and ideas with each other. 

“It was seriously the most positive collaboration I’ve ever been a part of,” she said. Primary Promise teachers attended monthly training that she described as “well-planned, thorough and research-based.”&�Բ�����;

Then Carvalho , arguing that with relief funds drying up, it was unsustainable to keep paying instructional aides to staff the program. The renamed Literacy and Numeracy Intervention expanded services into higher grades, drawing criticism from who said the emphasis on the early grades was what made it effective. Beutner and Ray Cortines, also a former superintendent in the district, called the move .

“I had never seen teachers who were willing to die on the hill of an LAUSD program,” Fefferman said. “As a high school teacher, I was like ‘Yes, please make sure they can read by third grade.’ ” 

In Julie Navarro’s view, educators who lead the intervention work are sometimes “pulled in multiple directions” and the program has “less integrity” than the original. But Panorama, she said, is an example of staying true to the model of giving students small group instruction and consistently tracking their progress.

The school has seen double digit increases in reading and math since 2022 and was on this year’s list of . With many families facing financial hardship and newcomers navigating language and cultural barriers, Julie described the population as “the most-challenged families I’ve ever seen all at one school. In spite of their situation, they were growing.”

‘Kids know their data’

Close attention to student data was a hallmark of the Primary Promise program. Carvalho expects the same level of monitoring districtwide with i-Ready. The platform, Schmerelson said, helps teachers know whether to “slow down” the pace of learning for students who are struggling or move kids ahead.  

On a bulletin board in a second grade classroom at 135th Elementary, students’ initials are clustered into four color-coded groups — from blue for exceeding standards in i-Ready down to red for being two grade levels behind. Some argue that “data walls” if they’re not among the high-achievers. But Tanya Ortiz-Franklin, the school board member whose district includes the school, believes the practice motivates students to work hard. 

“Kids know their data and teachers know their data,” she said. “They are using it to move instruction. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do for years.”&�Բ�����;

Her region encompasses 175 schools that stretch from the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro — the busiest container terminal in the U.S. — to the historic Black neighborhoods south of downtown. They include Maya Angelou Community High School, one of Carvalho’s 121 “priority schools,” where he takes a more hands-on approach to tracking data and staffing schools with extra counselors and academic coaches. 

“I spend 90% of my time dealing with 10% of the schools,” Carvalho said at a conference at  Harvard University in September. “They are accountable directly to me.”&�Բ�����;

The schools have some of the poorest achievement and attendance rates in the district, and in Maya Angelou’s case, a high rate of community violence. In 2019, the listed the high school among those with at least 50 homicides within a one-mile radius over a five-year period. In 2023, a stray bullet during a football game at the school.

“Being an inner-city school, it’s very easy to focus on the negative aspects that happen here. That’s the low hanging fruit,” said Principal Jose Meza. That’s why he encourages staff and students to “flood” social media platforms with positive news, like a poetry night for newcomers, and the 13 students admitted to Berkeley and the University of California Los Angeles this year.

“Embracing our roots and honoring our heritage,” the school posted on Instagram for Hispanic Heritage Month, with a reel of students dancing, sampling food and displaying artwork.

But in trying to make students feel welcome and safe inside the fence that surrounds the school, Meza has also tightened up the academic program. He reassigned counselors to students by grade level, rather than grouping them alphabetically. The change allows ninth graders to get extra support as they adjust to the demands of high school.

He gives students a double dose of Algebra I each day if they need it, and moved credit recovery courses to the regular school day instead of afterschool or on Saturdays when they’re less likely to come. His students have posted gains in state scores the past two years, but two-thirds of 11th graders still don’t meet expectations in language arts and over 80% are failing math.

“Half of our students are coming in below grade level,” he said “That doesn’t mean we’re going to treat them as such. We’re going to have expectations that are aligned to the standards.”

Carvalho aims to create more consistency in teaching across the district, but he’s choosing math and reading programs based on the experience of schools that tested programs and found them to be effective with high-need students, said Rick Miller, CEO of CORE Districts, a network of nine large systems in the state, including LAUSD.

Illustrative Math, now being phased in districtwide, is one example. Teachers at Jordan High School, in a densely populated neighborhood of housing projects and small homes, were among the first to use the program. 

On a Monday morning earlier this month, 10th graders in Luis Lopez’s geometry class opened their workbooks to a new lesson on congruent shapes. They chatted with classmates about the set of rectangles on the page before Lopez stepped in to remind them of vocabulary words like “vertices” and “corresponding.” The curriculum is structured so that students grapple with new concepts and work together on problems before teachers deliver a full lesson. 

“When we were going to school, especially in math, it was ‘I will model. I’m the teacher and now … you’ll just do 100 problems,’ ” said Principal Alex Kim. This curriculum, he said, flips that process while also ensuring the tasks focus on grade-level material.

The program has gained popularity in other districts. The New York City Public Schools saw a decline in scores after implementing the curriculum in hundreds of schools. But two , one in Missouri and one in Maryland, found that students using Illustrative Math outperformed those who didn’t. At Jordan, a quarter of 11th graders met expectations in math, compared to less than 4% two years ago.

‘Historic generational implications’

To some former LAUSD parents, the improvements are too little, too late.

They are cynical about any post-pandemic rebound, saying that the district contributed to learning loss by staying closed almost until the end of the 2020–21 school year. 

“I don’t think LAUSD should get credit for putting out a fire that it was responsible for lighting,” said Ben Austin, a longtime Democratic political adviser and former member of the state school board. “My daughters didn’t go to school for 18 months, along with all the other kids in LAUSD. That obviously had historic generational implications.”

California’s sluggish reopening affected students statewide, but what angered some LAUSD parents the most was the teachers union’s influence over remote instructional time during school closures. In March 2021, The 74 reported that the union negotiated a reduced, six-hour school day despite district officials saying they didn’t want to “shortchange the students.” The revelation came during a lawsuit, against the district and the union.

The agreement promises 45 hours per year of high-dosage tutoring to 100,000 students who are the furthest behind as well as summer school for up to 250,000 students in the district who were affected by the extended closures.

During the 2020-21 school year, Judith Larson said her daughter’s remote classes often “ended well before they were supposed to” or that teachers used the sessions to collect homework assignments rather than provide live instruction. Her daughter lost so much ground in math that last year, as a junior in high school, she scored at a sixth grade level. In English, she was two years behind and losing hope that she would be able to attend the University of California Los Angeles, her dream school. Now a senior, she’s made progress, but still struggles in math. 

“She is working hard to bridge the gap,” her mother said. “I am hoping that the high-dose tutoring … will help her get there.”

As with schools nationwide, the pandemic worsened longstanding achievement gaps in LAUSD. There’s still a 30 percentage point difference between poor students and those from wealthier families in reading and math. 

“There’s a long way to go,” and “with each year, progress gets harder,” Miller said. But as a former state education official, he never expected LAUSD to outperform the state. “They were too big.”

This year, LAUSD’s growth exceeded the state’s and California’s other large school districts. During the press event at Maywood Elementary, state Superintendent Tony Thurmond was on hand to mark the achievement. He organized a webinar so other districts in the state could “hear some of the stories about what has created that success.”

Speaker after speaker stepped to the podium to share in what one board member called a “watershed moment” for LAUSD. Drawing a few chuckles, Carvalho paused to note that Thurmond had to slip out early and “give some love to other lower-performing districts.”&�Բ�����;

Bill McCallum, a lead writer for the Common Core math standards, and Kristin Umland, then a faculty member at the University of New Mexico, led the effort, which was supposed to last a year or two. 

At first, Umland said, the organization was focused on helping other groups, including the and testing companies, improve their products to meet the more rigorous standards. 

Eventually, she said, the group shifted to creating the curriculum — including lesson plans — that it felt best served students as they strove to achieve both a conceptual understanding of math, the why of how math works, alongside procedural fluency, the ability to solve problems. 

Illustrative Mathematics now encompasses 90 employees — all are remote workers — with no central location. For those states that still use it, the curriculum is aligned to Common Core standards — and there are also state-specific versions for those states that don’t.

“Our goal is to change outcomes for students, regardless of the standards they are using,” Umland said. “Math is math, and all states agree that kids should learn math.”

Select schools within the New York City system have been using Illustrative Mathematics for half a decade. A recent, massive rollout across hundreds of campuses has been met with sharp criticism from many teachers and  

Some said the curriculum and for students to practice what they’ve learned. One educator acknowledged these initial growing pains but said , one that helped students more easily understand abstract concepts.  

Umland has heard all of the complaints. While she acknowledges these early days struggles,  it doesn’t mean the move is a failure. Only that it needs more time, she said. 

“There’s no magic bullet,” she said. “If there was, somebody would have figured it out by now.”

Los Angeles, which adopted the curriculum in its middle and high schools in 2023, meanwhile, .

The 74 talked with Umland recently about the math wars, how her organization’s approach stands out from the rest and about Illustrative Mathematics’s bumpy New York City rollout.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where does Illustrative Mathematics fit into the math wars? And by math wars, I mean that push and pull between teacher- and child-centered learning? 

We always see ourselves as a third way. There’s no-one-size-fits-all for all students in all contexts. There are times when students need to understand and hear a direct explanation. And there are other times they should be given a chance to think about it for themselves, make sense of it, grapple with it and discuss it. So, it’s not either or. It’s what’s appropriate for what you’re trying to help students learn in the particular moment.

What type of lesson would require a direct explanation? 

So, a perfect example is when kids are learning to count. There’s no way they can figure that out on their own. Numbers are different in different languages. That’s a completely cultural thing. That’s something you have to learn by hearing other people say the number to you. 

But when you’re starting to do addition, once they understand what three is and what two is, you can say, “If I have three marbles and two marbles, how many marbles do I have altogether?” 

The things that are cultural have to be taught directly. But once you understand what the meaning is, you can figure it out. 

How does Illustrative Mathematics’s approach to teaching and learning compare to most other curriculum methods?

A lot of folks learn mathematics from an “I do, we do, you do model,” where the teacher does an example question, then they work together with the students, and then the students go practice.

Our method sort of flips that model on its head, allowing students to think about a problem so they can get oriented to it. And then there’s discussion where they make sense of it. 

And, finally, the teacher brings it all together. It gives students a chance to think for themselves before being shown something. 

I can show you how to do two plus three by counting it all myself, or I can say, “Here’s a picture that shows two marbles and three marbles. How many marbles do you see altogether?”

Some kids will know how to count it and will do it. And some kids won’t. They’ll talk about it, share their strategies, and then the teacher can make sure that the student who does it correctly shows their solution. Or if none of the students do it, they can show them how.

Illustrative Mathematics had a rough rollout in New York City. What went wrong for some teachers/schools? 

A lot of the complaints weren’t necessarily about the curriculum itself, but about the rollout or the implementation. 

Teachers need to have professional development where they get oriented to the design structure and they get a chance to experience what a lesson feels like. They need a chance to practice.

Ideally, they have opportunities to collaborate with their colleagues on planning and they have coaching support as they go. It’s just sometimes hard to coordinate all of those pieces.

A lot of teachers, in the first couple of months, are still trying to understand how it works. But once they get to the second or third month, then they start to see how it works. When something is new, it’s harder. It doesn’t necessarily make sense. And it takes time for people to get oriented to it. 

We’re seeing the best success in the places where they’ve been doing it longer. They’ve put in a lot of time to support it and when they get to that phase, then they’re really seeing the outcomes for students.

What do you want to fix about mathematics education in this country?  

A lot of school districts have come to realize that they need high-quality instructional materials. They’ve made that commitment. Then they start to ask themselves, “OK, so what do we do for (struggling students)?”

In a multi-tiered system of support, tier one instruction is the core instruction that all students receive. Students identified as needing additional support will receive tier two instruction. Often, this means they will be pulled for small group instruction or additional instruction.

One of the problems is that for many of these students, it’s like they’re on a highway and then they get pulled off onto the frontage road — only they never find a way back. They end up on a parallel track. What we want is to figure out how to support these students.

How might you help kids stay on track? 

Right now, we’re really focusing on early math. We are currently developing a pre-K math curriculum. It will be available next school year. If you can get to students early, it has an exponential impact on them before they head on to later grades. If we can do a better job with the youngest math learners, they won’t have the problems that we see at the secondary level in the future. 

Beginning his career in education as a state policy analyst, Hirsch has led the nonprofit — which takes an independent, Consumer Reports approach to reviewing instructional materials — since its founding in 2014. He previously spent years surveying teachers on to learn more about what made them want to stay in their careers, and in a similar way, aimed to elevate the role of teachers in what is often an “opaque” industry, he said.  

The organization’s initial reports were not well received and drew “nasty letters,” from publishers, Hirsch said. More than 1,100 reviews later, many states and districts consider EdReports the leading authority when deciding on new materials.

“One of the things about … leading something as big, impactful and important as EdReports is this is an idea that’s bigger than me. It’s about the impact we’ve had,” he said. “I hope the job is as exciting to someone else as it has been to me. It’s just time for me not to be the one doing that job.”

Hirsch, who said he’s not sure what he wants to do next, will leave at the end of the school year while the board conducts a search for a new chief. 

Hirsch’s departure comes at a time of change for the organization. Last year, it revised its scoring process in response to feedback from experts and educators. In June, the organization expanded to review pre-K materials, influenced by a 2024 showing that curricula for 3- and 4-year-olds often “fall short” and don’t provide enough support for multilingual learners. 

have also taken a larger role in determining which materials districts select, with several to use EdReports reviews as guides. But with the growing attention to the role of high-quality materials in student learning, the organization has faced increased criticism.

Some argued the review process was slow to emphasize the science of reading. Reviewers gave its to programs that still encouraged students to guess words based on pictures or the rest of a sentence while also giving lower, yellow ratings to programs found to boost student achievement.

“I think we’ve caught up in terms of the criteria,” said Courtney Allison, EdReports’ chief academic officer. “Now we’re working on … just making sure that we can provide as much information as possible about as many programs as possible.”

Other critics say EdReports’ review system overemphasizes whether materials address the . Hirsch acknowledged many of the concerns, and the released in November placed a greater focus on phonics, fluency and phonemic awareness while “still considering standards where they’re useful,” said spokeswoman Janna Chan.

Additional organizations, like and the , have also launched as alternatives. Hirsch said he’s never viewed them as competitors, and Allison said additional “partners” can provide helpful signals to district leaders. The risk, she said, is that there’s so much “noise” that leaders picking curriculum “throw up their hands and say, ‘Never mind, it’s too much.’ ”

Devon Gadow, a partner with TNTP, a nonprofit consulting organization, said she appreciated Hirsch’s confidence in EdReports’ mission. 

“They could have gone in 15 different directions, and certainly there are other organizations that have popped up over the years that are now reviewing materials,” she said. But Hirsch’s “singular focus” on the connection between curriculum and standards “allowed states and educators to demand better quality materials.”&�Բ�����;

In looking for a new leader, EdReports needs someone who understands the intersection of artificial intelligence and curriculum, both as a real-time , but also as a guide for teachers on how to present a lesson to students who might be working below grade level, Gadow said. With more schools incorporating tutoring and intervention groups into the school day, she said teachers also need more support in connecting their primary curriculum to additional materials.

With all the emphasis on high-quality materials, Hirsch noted growing research showing that simply adopting a strong curriculum isn’t enough. A from the Rand Corp. showed there’s often a mismatch between curriculum, teacher training and assessment. Teachers are using more curriculum materials than ever, but often “water it down” to their students’ level, wrote David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. 

An released last month showed that most districts don’t pilot materials before adopting them districtwide and don’t have their own process for measuring whether the materials they choose are effective.

“Why hasn’t the needle moved on student achievement more?” Hirsch asked. “We’re starting to think the next decade has some really important questions that build off all we’ve done.”

Meanwhile, it is ever more common for and to publish “portrait of the graduate” — a vision of the well-educated student. As reveals, there is little emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge. that scanned a large number of such portraits produced this condensed list: “Analyze to understand, care for and contribute to society, collaborate across difference, communicate in all media and modalities, create to solve and share, and practice self-awareness and regulation.” Such a hodgepodge of metacognitive, behavioral and ethical goals is often confused, wrongheaded or underthought from the start. To analyze something, you need to know what it’s about; communication in the absence of learning might well be mindless or destructive. In public (and ) schools that are by income and race, what “differences” are we talking about? 

But the drumbeat continues — often found in the admonition to “teach 21^st century skills,” with the ethical implication that an education that doesn’t provide them is cruelly undermining children’s very well-being. A careful review of these “new” skills reveals a lengthy laundry list, multiple elements of which lack sharp definition or repackage long-held, if perennially vacuous, pedagogical aims. To cite some examples, I have my doubts that our century alone values “managing time and resources effectively to complete tasks and achieve outcomes,” or that “forming well-reasoned arguments” would strike us (or even the ancient Greeks) as anything but obvious as an educational goal.

Even elements that seem both contemporary and sane, such as teaching digital literacy and the thoughtful use of artificial intelligence, leave us pressing for meaning. What standards should teachers and students use to evaluate social media if they know little to nothing about the topic?

What has been devalued in these exhortations to impart “skills” is the teaching of knowledge about the world, including geography, history, high-level science and math, foreign languages and the human condition through literature and the arts. Why do we devalue and neglect real knowledge? One key reason is that knowing is equated with “memorization” — a term that has apparently become a pejorative label for an antiquated model of learning. This is astonishing. We expect experts to know vast amounts of information by heart, regardless of whether they are surgeons or concert pianists. We know that without storage of information in long-term memory, learning would become next to impossible — indeed, survival itself would be at risk. 

But a second reason — the most common riposte to arguments for teaching content — is that doing so is just regarded as old-fashioned in the era of the internet. After all, we are told, we can always “look it up.”&�Բ�����;

To question this ubiquitous assertion, take one of the most famous theories in physics: string theory. When we look it up, we find out that to understand string theory, we need to grasp what a Calabi-Yau manifold is. Searching for that term, we are told that “Calabi-Yau manifolds are compact, Ricci-flat Kähler manifolds that are important in string theory” and that “a Ricci flow is a differential equation that smooths a manifold’s metric.” Search for an account of that equation, and we are informed that it’s a “geometric partial differential equation.”&�Բ�����;

It turns out that, beyond the pleasure of looking at some pretty, knotty shapes without the first conception of what they might be, what I really need to grasp string theory is “a strong foundation in complex geometry, differential geometry and algebraic geometry, including concepts like complex manifolds, Kähler manifolds and Chern classes. Key mathematical tools include differential and integral calculus, topology, abstract algebra and tensor calculus.” This includes, for example, an understanding of the quintic hyperface where a fifth-degree polynomial in multiple variables is equal to zero (what we are after is a smooth quintic hypersurface in P⁴ (a quintic threefold) which is a Calabi-Yau variety). 

Are you still with me? Only one reader in 20,000 (I am an optimist on both counts) can, I suspect, understand the terms in the last paragraph, and such understanding isn’t just one more AI prompt away. It’s not that I lack critical thinking; it’s that any level of critical thinking is simply irrelevant to the fact that I haven’t studied the math. 

You don’t need string theory to make this point. For years, , followed more recently by , state leaders such as in Louisiana, commentators like and organizations like the , have argued — supported by considerable evidence — that without broad background knowledge, becoming a strong reader is impossible. According to this body of research (and to common sense), it’s pointless to ask an American child to “find the main idea” in a sentence like “he switched to the googly and so rearranged the placing of the silly mid-off” — yet many English students would have no trouble understanding the cricket reference. from cognitive and educational psychology, sociology and curriculum studies converge on the foundational idea that knowledge acquisition is the essential foundation for complex thought, including thinking critically about a topic. Those who advocate for schools to teach metacognition should also demand that students first learn about the world and the human condition. 

The response that some things can’t be understood without studying them, or that students will struggle to comprehend texts if they are unfamiliar with the background knowledge those texts presuppose, hasn’t stopped the steady retreat from requiring schools to teach knowledge. Exhibit 1 is grade inflation: High school graduates earned an average , while NAEP scores (and ACT/SAT performance) declined. In short, we call knowledge today what we used to call ignorance. Exhibit 2 is the steady reduction in state requirements of any testing for high school graduation (incorporating recent decisions in and , we are down to six states). And Exhibit 3 is what counts as news: Does the nation care that Louisiana — the only state in which the vast majority of teachers have been using the same high-quality, content-rich curriculum for years — was also the only state to show NAEP gains in fourth and eighth grade right through the COVID years and continuing? Consider, too, the mainstream indifference (a couple of notwithstanding) to the fact that charter schools, especially those in , alone bucked the national trend of falling outcomes.

There is really only one important counter-push, known as HQIM (high-quality instructional materials). Fifteen states have now joined a , led by the Council of Chief State School Officers, to shift their public schools to the use of these curricula. In English Language Arts, such curricula are rated by EdReports as meeting state standards — and must pass a “building knowledge” standard as part of the evaluation.  Still, as is clear from detailed work that the has conducted over the last decade, many EdReports“approved” ELA curricula still focus on disconnected bodies of thematically related topics that fail to build sequential knowledge (E.D. Hirsch’s – has been a rare exception). As , the use of knowledge-rich curriculum is now threatened by how AI is often used — namely, to dumb down strong curriculum. There are powerful ways in which AI could support effective knowledge acquisition ( is one example). But, as ever with technology, the question will be whether the misuses undermine the potential benefits. 

We reap what we sow. Today, poorer students are reading more poorly, compared with their wealthy peers, than they have since NAEP started measuring the gap. Preaching anti-intellectualism and a disdain for acquiring knowledge may be politically efficacious. It also creates a smokescreen over the nation’s widening income distribution, which is, in turn, . 

The arguments in this piece have been couched in the language of utility — why it’s important to know stuff, and why it’s worth reflecting on the causes of knowledge’s dethronement. But in closing, remember Plato’s Apology, and in particular Socrates’ now-untimely statement that the unexamined life is not worth living. Except that what Plato has Socrates say is, in fact, much more radical: For a human being, “the unexamined life is not livable.” Knowledge furnishes the mind — what we know is the most intimate, the most enduring, of our companions. Without it, we are but bundles of instincts, emotions and habitual behaviors. Fortunately, children love to absorb knowledge — if we would but provide it. 

With a state mandate looming, the Los Angeles Unified School District this week joined other districts in preparing to introduce a semester of personal finance by the Legislature’s 2027-28 deadline. 

The LAUSD school board gave the go-ahead on Tuesday while stipulating that elements of financial literacy and economic justice be incorporated into the course. 

As of 2023, only 27% of the state’s high school students attended a school that offered a course in personal finance, the California Department of Education reported. But to increase access and make it a high school graduation requirement, the state passed Assembly Bill 2927 in 2024, which proponents argue could  students’ lifetime earnings by roughly $100,000. 

Twenty-nine states already require such a course. 

“If you speak to any adult, they will tell you one of two things,” said Tim Ranzetta, a co-founder of Next Gen Personal Finance. “One is, ‘It’s a class I wish I had.’ The second is, ‘Can you educate my kids?’” 

Per the , the LAUSD will be required to provide an update that includes a start date of February 2026. The course will address: 

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LAUSD’s program will also incorporate financial justice — an element that can help students understand American history, literature and government from an economic perspective. 

“During a time when the future of a family may seem uncertain, when many students and youth find themselves suddenly the heads of household, it’s all the more important,” said LAUSD student board member Jerry Yang at Tuesday’s meeting. 

Yanely Espinal, the director of educational outreach at Next Gen Personal Finance, added that including financial justice can help students understand ongoing wage gaps based on profession, gender and other factors. 

It’s “getting students to understand the reality that we live in within the financial world,” Espinal said. “It hasn’t always been so picture perfect, and while it is increasingly improving and becoming, there’s a lot of effort to try to make it more fair.”

‘Most sought-after elective courses’

Last year, Fresno Unified School District became one of the earlier California districts to offer a financial literacy elective course in the majority of its high schools. 

“We just kind of floated it out there, like, ‘Hey, if we were able to offer this elective course, who’s showing interest in it?’” said Jeff Allen, a teacher on special assignment who has been focused on implementing the course districtwide. “Overnight, it became one of the most sought-after elective courses.”

And in that year alone, the district identified 15 teachers who wanted to teach the subject and taught 998 students. 

Further south, at Olympian High School in San Diego’s Sweetwater Union High School District, Allison Saiki has been teaching financial algebra for years — and has recently worked to add financial literacy this semester. 

“We have social media where students can go and learn from … financial influencers,” Saiki said. “But I have students that say, ‘Hey, you know what? We see a lot of that outside, but we don’t know what’s real. But we can come to you and we say, ‘Hey, is this true?’… and we decipher it together.”

Saiki, who has been awarded as the school’s teacher of the year and has been recognized districtwide, also transforms the classroom into an active economy, with its own currency, employment, pay, property and tax. Students fill out I-9 forms and learn about 401(k)s. 

Teaching the subject has also helped Saiki personally. 

“I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m an impulsive spender!’” Saiki said. 

“Professional development has given me an opportunity to look at my finances and be like, ‘Wait a minute, let’s fix some things, so that��I can do everything that I am telling my students to do.’”��

Beyond the requirements 

Even though the mandate only calls for a one-semester high school course, Espinal said educators can start introducing students to basic principles of financial literacy even earlier. 

For example, at the elementary school level, she said teachers can mimic scenarios of how they might split their birthday money into different piggy banks. 

“You should decide how many of those dollars will go to saving, how many will go to spending, how many will go to charity or donations or gifting to others — and how much will you invest for the future, for bigger goals that are much beyond the next few weeks or months of your life,” Espinal said. 

Middle school can be more specific, and high school should be oriented toward students’ lifetime goals, according to Espinal. 

She stressed that many of the topics covered are already relevant for high schoolers, who may be navigating car insurance as young drivers, or looking into ways to pay for college. LAUSD school board member Kelly Gonez also stressed the importance of extending financial literacy into adult education during Tuesday’s board meeting. 

“That early exposure amounts to very specific decisions that they have to make,” Espinal said. “But you can’t really make those decisions unless you’re informed about everything that weighs into that decision-making process.”

Schools are still required under federal and state law to help students who don’t speak English to both learn the language and understand the content of their classes.

That’s the message California education leaders and advocates are sending to schools after the Trump administration rescinded guidelines about how schools should teach English learners.

A third of students in California public schools begin school as English learners, meaning they do not yet speak, read or write English fluently.

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Some educators and advocates are worried that the rescission of the federal guidance could open the door for some school leaders and teachers to scale back instruction for English learners and stop providing translations to families.

“The danger is not in the law going away, but in districts thinking they can step back from their obligation,” said Martha Hernandez, executive director of the nonprofit Californians Together. “That would be devastating for English learners.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled more than 50 years ago, in the 1974 case Lau v. Nichols, that students who do not speak and understand English fluently have the right to understand classroom lessons, and that schools must help them learn English and understand academic content alongside their English-speaking peers. These requirements were also codified in federal law in the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice, under former President Barack Obama, sent out a 40-page “Dear Colleague” letter to schools across the country, laying out legal precedents and federal requirements for serving English learners. The document included examples of how to identify English learners, how to give them adequate instruction in the English language and make sure they understand academic content, including the role of bilingual education or support in a student’s home language. It also provided examples of how school districts could be found to be out of compliance, such as not offering English language acquisition programs to students with disabilities, or not giving English learners access to the same grade-level curriculum or extracurricular activities as other students.

This summer, a message in red appeared at the top of the guidance: “This document has been formally rescinded by the department and remains available on the web for historical purposes only.” The only explanation the federal Department of Education provided for rescinding this guidance is to say that it is “not in line with Administration policy.”

It is the latest in a long line of steps the Trump administration has taken to dismantle support for students who speak languages other than English. Previously, the Department of Education laid off almost all employees in its Office of English Language Acquisition and asked Congress to terminate federal funding for teaching English learners, immigrant students and the children of migrant farmworkers. President Donald Trump also issued an executive order declaring English the official language of the United States.

In the president’s budget request released May 2, he said, “the misnamed English Language Acquisition program … actually deemphasizes English primacy by funding NGOs and States to encourage bilingualism.”
California state law requires schools to provide instruction for students to learn English, known as designated English Language Development (ELD), and language support within every class, known as integrated ELD. The state also has its own guidance, such as the English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework and the English Learner Roadmap. In addition, the state provides funding for English learners, and every district is required by state law to specify in their annual spending plans how they intend to use the money.

“The U.S. Department of Education’s action does not change any state laws regarding English learner programs or services,” said Liz Sanders, director of communications at the California Department of Education. She said the department will continue to provide guidance for teaching English learners with resources on its website, like the English Language Development Standards, and a page about specialized programs for “multilingual learners.”

“California has been a leader,” said Hernandez. “In the absence of clarity at the federal level, California can and should model best practices for the rest of the country.”

Still, Hernandez said not all California districts have consistently provided the English Language Development instruction required by law. She is worried that without federal guidance, more districts will stop providing instruction or support for English learners and their families.

“That will lead to an increase in long-term English learners, it will lead to a stalling of reclassification, it will lead to higher dropout rates, and it will leave English learners behind,” said Hernandez.

Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Debra Duardo published a statement criticizing the rescission of the federal guidance, saying it “creates uncertainty, weakens accountability and risks widening opportunity gaps, especially when resources are already stretched thin” and declaring that the county will continue to ensure “that English learners have equitable access to education.”

School district leaders in California said they frequently used the federal guidance in the “Dear Colleague” letter to clarify the legal obligations schools have to English learners.

“We quote it all over our own documents to just make very clear what our obligations are. When there is any wavering or questioning around, ‘Do we have to provide ELD courses?’ or ‘Do we have to provide professional learning?’, we have leaned on that guidance quite a bit,” said Nicole Knight, executive director of the English Language Learner and Multilingual Achievement department in the Oakland Unified School District.

Norma Carvajal Camacho, assistant superintendent of educational services for the Azusa Unified School District in Los Angeles County, said that when the federal guidance came out, there was still a lot of misunderstanding about how to best teach English learners. So the district used the federal document to help train teachers and administrators.

“Many of our teachers still lived in the space of, ‘If I’m teaching in English, that’s sufficient,’” Carvajal Camacho said. “So it was used initially to lay the groundwork for providing support for teachers in English language development, understanding language acquisition and being able to support students intentionally who are learning English as an additional language.”

After the Department of Education rescinded the guidance, Azusa Unified sent a memo to all school administrators asserting that schools must still provide daily instruction on language development and language support in all classes and make sure English learners have access to all courses, including college preparation, honors and AP classes, among other requirements.

“Our obligations under Title VI and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act remain in effect,” the memo reads. “As a District, we remain steadfast in ensuring every English Learner has meaningful access to high-quality instruction that supports both language development and academic achievement.”

Some parents of English learners across the state are concerned that without federal guidance, some schools will stop giving children the help they need to learn the language.

“If our children who are English learners don’t get reading, writing, listening and speaking help, it will be fatal,” said Martha Rivera, parent and president of the District English Learner Advisory Committee in the Riverside Unified School District. “Because a child who does not have reading comprehension is a child who will not advance in school.”

Teodora Mendoza, a mother from San Jose, said her daughter did not speak English when the family came to the U.S. from Mexico more than 10 years ago, but the language support she received in school helped her become fluent, and she is now in college. She said the translation the school provided for parents also helped.

“It helped me communicate with the teacher and ask how my daughter was doing,” she said. “It reassured me about sending my daughter to school.”

She thinks that without federal guidance, some schools may stop offering translation for parents.

“It truly worries me,” she said.

This was originally published on .

Despite decades of research and advocacy around differentiated instruction for English learners, many curriculum publishers continue to design products around a “grade-level box” that assumes a uniform level of language proficiency and background knowledge. These one-size-fits-all materials often meet state standards but rarely meet the needs of English learners who exist at various points along the language acquisition continuum.

The core problem is this: Curriculum is often written with the assumption that all students in a classroom are functioning at the same academic and linguistic level. But a fifth-grade classroom may include learners with the reading comprehension of a kindergartner in English — despite having strong critical thinking skills in their home language. Conversely, another EL student might speak English confidently but struggle with writing structured essays or understanding figurative language.

Curriculum that doesn’t account for these variations forces teachers to do heavy lifting to retrofit materials, spending hours supplementing, modifying, and differentiating lessons that were built on narrow assumptions.

highlights this disconnect between mainstream curricula and EL needs, calling for instructional models that integrate language and content instruction explicitly. Unfortunately, many commercial curricula still , treating EL modifications as afterthoughts or add-ons, rather than essential design principles.

Another oversight is the belief that language proficiency progresses evenly across all domains: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In reality a student might excel at oral communication while struggling to read grade-level texts or write a coherent paragraph. Yet, curriculum materials rarely provide scaffolded support for this reality. Instead, they often label students generically with little nuance.

This oversimplification of curriculum design can lead to gaps in instruction, often because of a failure to understand the difference between acquiring a language and learning one, as well as limited clarity on where these processes overlap. Teachers may unintentionally misjudge a student’s language proficiency, assuming a higher level based on conversational fluency or underestimating a student’s capabilities simply because they are quiet or reserved.

This challenge is when instructional decisions rely more on perception than on a clear understanding of state-identified proficiency levels — especially when curriculum materials are not aligned with those levels and fail to include explicit recommendations and strategies for integrated language development and strategies.

Beyond language proficiency, curriculum content can also miss the opportunity to tap into students’ cultural and linguistic assets. Students come with a wealth of lived experiences, knowledge, and perspectives that could enrich the classroom environment, what researchers describe as “.”&�Բ�����;

Yet, many curriculum materials approach ELs as blank slates to be filled, rather than as contributors with valuable voices. Sadly, these supports often appear as surface-level add-ons — like generic sentence frames or generalized translated glossaries — rather than as integrated approaches to equitable, meaningful content access.

Incorporating culturally sustaining pedagogy and leveraging students’ lived experiences and languages as legitimate background knowledge is not just essential for curriculum design but crucial for for all students.

Prioritizing the following actions in curriculum design can lead to more effective materials —ones that yield positive results, reflect classroom realities and genuinely align with teacher student needs.

• ��Build in multiple entry points for varying language proficiencies

Curriculum should reflect students’ diverse linguistic and academic starting points, not just simplified versions of the same material. allows English learners to engage meaningfully with rigorous content, rather than being sidelined or underestimated. 

• ��Provide professional development for teachers working with English learners
  Training for EL instruction should be treated as essential, not optional, in curriculum rollout. Equipping teachers with a of how students develop across all four language domains — speaking, listening, reading, and writing�� — helps them recognize that proficiency varies by domain and provides the perspective and tools needed to scaffold effectively.��

• Treat home languages and cultures as priorities and integral instructional resources, not afterthoughts
  Thoughtfully embedding these elements into curriculum design and materials strengthens student identity, builds relevance, and deepens engagement—making learning for all students. For instance, teachers can encourage the use of home languages when possible for brainstorming or initial drafting before transitioning to English

• Embed actionable teacher guidance
  Recommendations and multi-step approaches�� should be woven directly into lesson content — not tacked on as end-of-book appendices or vague disclaimers. Providing empowers teachers to adapt instruction in real time based on students’ language proficiency—not just grade-level benchmarks. Curriculum companies should offer strategies tailored to the specific content demands teachers are navigating. That can include callout boxes and in-line prompts within each lesson.

Curriculum companies must recognize that English learners do not come in a standard size, and their learning cannot be boxed into tidy grade-level expectations or neatly matched from one proficiency level to another. As classrooms become more multilingual and multicultural, this reality must be reflected not only in the lessons teachers deliver but also in the materials and products they are given.

English learners should not be a footnote, but a foundational consideration in how we build and deliver educational content.

The San Francisco Unified School District announced that it is rolling out a new math curriculum for grades K-8 this school year.

According to a statement from the district, the newly adopted materials focus on three key areas: solving math problems accurately; understanding the “why” behind the math; and learning how to apply math in everyday life.

San Francisco Unified has set a goal of increasing the percentage of eighth grade students meeting grade-level expectations from 42% in 2022 to 65% by 2027. This new curriculum was piloted last year by 84 middle school teachers and 160 elementary teachers. Early results were promising, the district said.

“San Francisco’s public schools are focused on helping every student build confidence and competence in math to be set up for lifelong success,” Superintendent Maria Su said in the statement.

SFUSD’s math curriculum had received heavy criticism and was even the subject of a ballot measure last year. Voters supported an effort to teach algebra in eighth grade. Previously, the district pushed algebra to ninth grade in  into different math paths at the middle school level.

But the staff, hoping to avoid debates over families’ religious beliefs, has chopped roughly 30 sections out of the curriculum, including a kindergarten lesson on the Golden Rule featuring Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and several excerpts about a Christian prayer the governor of Plymouth Colony said at the first Thanksgiving.  

The district’s elementary teachers “went through the materials looking for things that may be controversial,” said Superintendent Joe Craig. They didn’t feel those parts of the curriculum “were in line with what we wanted the lesson to focus on.”&�Բ�����;

Fairfield’s process reflects the kind of that many districts have taken toward — the state-developed materials that prominently feature the Bible and Christianity. With feedback from 300 teachers, Fort Worth, the fifth largest district in the state, adopted the phonics portion of the curriculum, but turned down the units with religious material. Some districts ordered just a few books, likely for , while the Houston and Dallas districts opted to keep what they currently use.

Texas has spent roughly $100 million — and counting — to develop and promote its own reading curriculum. But some observers say they wouldn’t be surprised if districts aren’t rushing to pick it up, considering the State Board of Education approved it by a one-vote margin. 

“They may be reluctant to bring that same controversy into their districts, especially in communities with families of diverse religious backgrounds,” said Eve Myers, a consultant with Strive Public Policy Resources, a political consulting and lobbying firm that is tracking adoption of the program. “It’s potentially a distraction from their focus on the budget, student achievement, school safety and all the other pressing issues they must address.”

Texas has over 1,200 districts and about 600 charter schools with elementary grades. Of the state’s 20 largest districts, only Conroe, north of Houston, intends to use the program this fall. A shows that between May and late July, 144 districts and charters, mostly mid-sized or small, ordered the materials. 

State board members have asked for the total number of districts using Bluebonnet. “That’s the question we would all like to know,” said Pam Little, a board member who voted against the reading program last November.  

Other districts could be using the online version of the materials, but whether students would have actual books, and spend less time on screens, was a major debate last year during the board’s consideration of the program.

State leaders and conservative advocates say the religious content reflects a classical and appropriate way to teach literacy skills along with history and culture. Others like the emphasis on cursive writing and challenging vocabulary. In an interview with The 74 last year, State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath said a phonics-based curriculum that also builds students’ background knowledge can help the state recover from in reading skills due to the pandemic.

But the program sparked a statewide debate over whether political leaders are forcing Christianity into public schools. Bluebonnet makes its debut in the classroom at the same time schools will be required, under a new state law, to display the 10 Commandments. Gov. Greg Abbott also signed in June that allows districts to offer a daily, voluntary period of time to pray and read the Bible or other religious texts. Under a similar 2023 law, districts can hire chaplains to volunteer as counselors, but aren’t participating.  

“There is definitely a disconnect between the radical far right agenda … and what school boards who are accountable to local families and students are actually going to do,” said Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Interfaith Alliance, a national group that advocates for church-state separation. Texas, he said, is “taking away the rights of clergy and parents to lead religious instruction.”

‘Hard on the teacher’

In the 73,000-student Conroe school district, Dayren Carlisle, a curriculum director, said leaders picked Bluebonnet because teachers were previously working with a patchwork of materials. They often spent “arduous hours preparing for reading and writing instruction,” she told The 74 in an email. Bluebonnet provides a coherent set of lessons that meet state standards, she said.

But parent Christine Yates advocated against it. 

“I don’t think religious-based instruction belongs in any type of public school setting,” said Yates, whose children will be in second and fourth grade this fall. Her family doesn’t attend church and she’s concerned that the lessons dealing with faith are just “borrowing trouble.”&�Բ�����;

Becky Sherrill, a former Conroe teacher, sympathizes with educators who will have to navigate parent’s requests to opt their children out of the lessons. It’s a right that many parents might be more likely to exercise this fall because of a June U.S. Supreme Court opinion in favor of religious families who want their children exempted from hearing stories with LGBTQ themes.

“It’s hard on the teacher. It’s already so hard at Christmas or even with birthdays,” Sherrill said, referring to Jehovah’s Witnesses she has had as students. “You can’t give some kids cupcakes because they don’t celebrate birthdays.”

She’s already homeschooling her middle school son and has pulled her daughter, a fifth grader, out of the district as well, largely because of Bluebonnet and the 10 Commandments law. 

At a May board meeting, Carlisle explained to the board how teachers will field requests from parents who want to opt their children out of the lessons. 

“If a parent were to complain about this… we would have to find a completely different text,” she said. 

But that didn’t sit well with Tiffany Baumann Nelson, one of three , who call themselves Mama Bears, elected in 2022.

“There is no religion in this curriculum,” she argued. “They’re all historical references, and so in my opinion, there should be no alternative or modifications.”

Whether districts are removing biblical material or parents are opting their children out of the lessons, Little, the state board member, worries students could miss literacy skills they are supposed to learn. 

“Say an East Asian religious parent has decided they don’t want their child to have [a Bible story]. Is that child going to miss skill development?” she asked. Accommodating parents’ requests will also be a burden on district staff. “What is the cost involved in the manpower time for these districts to go through and eliminate the religious content? There was no need for the controversy that the religious content is going to start.”&�Բ�����;

‘Reviewed it and loved it’

The state board narrowly approved the new program last fall after the Texas Education Agency spent roughly $84 million to adapt an existing reading curriculum, from the company Amplify. Renamed Bluebonnet, after the state flower, the Texas version includes highlights of Jesus’ ministry and offers an evangelical view of early American history. Lessons for example, include the , an art history unit based on the creation story from Genesis and scriptural references to the motto on the . 

The agency, which would not provide a list of all districts that have ordered the program, paid multiple companies and content experts to craft and review the lessons, including the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation. Hillsdale College, a Christian school in Michigan, volunteered to work on units related to America’s founding, and a Christian media company, co-founded by Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel, contributed illustrations. But Texas officials refused to identify who wrote the biblical passages. 

In response to backlash, officials added more references to Islam and Hinduism and removed some texts that were offensive to Jews, but the final version still references Christianity more than other religions.

“We reviewed it and loved it,” said Cindi Castilla, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, a conservative organization. She pushed for state board approval of the curriculum last year, saying that there is “richness in biblical literature” and that Bible stories teach children character traits and the origins of the legal system. 

Since then, she examined the final version with retired educators who have experience teaching a classical curriculum and thinks it will strengthen students’ cursive and phonics skills. That’s why Gina Eubank wishes her grandchildren’s school districts — Katy, near Houston, and Belton, near Waco — had adopted the materials. 

“I watched … fourth- and sixth-grade honor students write a thank you note and was shocked by what I saw — the lack of legible handwriting and the horrific spelling,” she said.

‘Promote, market and advertise’

Districts on the fence about Bluebonnet can reconsider their decision next year. To make it more enticing, lawmakers added financial incentives — up to $60 per student for districts that use state-approved materials. That was likely one reason why the 27,000-student Lubbock schools adopted it, said Clinton Gill, a former math and science teacher in the district who now works for the Texas State Teachers Association.

At the same time, he thinks district leaders assume students will stand a better chance of performing well on the state test if officials match it up to a curriculum the state developed. Adopting Bluebonnet “also helps the district not have to hire staff to write curriculum when they get it from the state for free.”

The per-student bonus isn’t the only way the state aims to ensure Bluebonnet becomes the preferred choice. In December, the month after the board approved it, the Texas Education Agency quickly made Bluebonnet available to order. Materials from other publishers weren’t available until May.

“It seems that Bluebonnet Learning had an advantage,” Little told Morath, the commissioner, during . She said she heard complaints from publishers over the issue.

Morath called the delay a “one-time exacerbated problem” because the state had to add new language to contracts with publishers before making their materials available to districts. While the time lapse should be shorter next year, he said there would always be some gap.

In the current , lawmakers authorized Morath to contract with businesses to “promote, market and advertise” Bluebonnet. A provides $243 million to districts to help with implementation costs, like coaching for teachers. 

Last year’s budget included $10 million for regional education service centers to do similar work for districts adopting Bluebonnet. The centers are expected to for increasing the number of districts using the materials in their region to stay eligible for future funding. 

Some leaders in the state say that top-down pressure could alter the relationship the centers have traditionally had with school systems in their regions. They help districts, especially smaller ones with fewer central office staff, stay in compliance with state regulations or work on school improvement. 

The service centers have always been a “hub of knowledge,” said Martha Salazar-Zamora, superintendent of the Tomball Independent School District, north of Houston. Expecting districts to sell Bluebonnet, she said, “has been more of a strategic push.”

She doesn’t doubt that Bluebonnet will boost reading scores for some students, but Tomball is already rated a in the state’s accountability system.  Another reason why she didn’t consider the program is because a Spanish version is not yet available. Her district, where about 35% of students are , has a Spanish-English .

“I love anything that helps kids,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s the right tool for every district.”

, Rhode Island has deepened its commitment to ensuring all students, including multilingual learners, have access to rigorous, high-quality instructional materials and that teachers have the necessary training to implement them. While overall gaps still exist in the state, students who recently exited multilingual-learner status are now outperforming peers who are native English speakers on .

Multilingual learners — who now comprise more than — represent one of Rhode Island’s fastest-growing and most vibrant communities. In fact, Rhode Island saw the largest percentage growth of any state in the nation between 2010 and 2020. Over the last 10 years, enrollment of multilingual students in many school districts has risen between 100% and 400%. In , the state’s largest city, multilingual learners currently make up almost 40% of all students.

To ensure that these young people received high-quality, inclusive instruction — with materials that reflected their diverse cultural and linguistic experiences, supported English language development and connected with what all students in the state’s classrooms were learning — the Rhode Island Department of Education partnered with the nonprofit in 2021. The goal was to create a cohort to help district leadership teams follow through on the state’s by better addressing the needs of these students in core instruction, school design and programming.  

Districts now choose from several high-quality curricula, which cannot get that designation unless they are designed from the start with multilingual learners in mind. The department encourages district leaders to identify their instructional vision and consider the demographics and needs of their students before reviewing and selecting curricula. Districts must also plan initial and ongoing professional development to ensure teachers are prepared to properly implement the new materials.

High-quality curriculum by itself can drive student growth, but its impact can be greater with proper professional learning and skillful implementation. That’s why the department’s partnership with the forum didn’t stop at curricular materials; it also prioritized the people who will actually be using them.

When educators complete their professional development sessions, they come away with a clear understanding of what rigorous instruction looks like. Principals and other school leaders are challenged to ask: How do we know this curriculum works for our multilingual learners?”  Teachers learn to go beyond providing basic help and use methods that make challenging material understandable for every student. This includes providing regular opportunities for students to discuss topics and clear goals for language learning.

When teachers know how to provide the right support and understand how students develop language skills in different subjects, young people rise to the challenge and often exceed expectations.

Rhode Island’s commitment to strong instruction with high-quality materials, following the department’s and for multilingual student success, form the foundation of this work. Together, they create consistent instructional expectations and invest in ongoing professional development to support the academic success of all students. The state is also implementing new regulations for multilingual learners to better align with federal requirements, best practices,and the state’s commitment to providing a high-quality education.

The results are very encouraging. Nationwide, Rhode Island and between 2019 and 2024, according to Harvard’s Education Recovery Scorecard. also noted that Rhode Island leads all New England states in academic recovery.

This improvement is not just happening in urban hubs; there is a growing commitment to these students in rural and suburban communities that have historically had little exposure to non-English-speaking populations.

For other states to see similar progress, they must follow two simple but critical steps: adopt rigorous instructional materials that meet the needs of all students, and provide consistent, high-quality professional development for teachers, principals and other school leaders.

There is no perfect curriculum. But with the right approach, even great materials can be made better. The key is starting with a strong foundation, giving educators the tools to teach their new curriculum effectively and then continuing to offer professional development long after they’ve started using the new materials. that many teachers simply haven’t received the training they need to implement new materials effectively. That has to change. Professional learning must be continuous and available during the regular workday, encouraging teachers to keep improving their classroom skills. 

Rhode Island’s progress is a testament to what’s possible when state leadership, district teams and national partners work together with one shared goal: creating a system where multilingualism is seen as a strength, not a barrier, and where every classroom reflects the rich diversity of all students.

That includes examining the intellectual and cultural foundations of the holiday: the people, places and events that often get overlooked or erased in social studies curriculums.

Juneteenth, the federal holiday in American history, holds special significance for many educators as it was championed by one of their own. , a former teacher — well into her nineties — led the charge for national recognition. While many schools across the country are off on June 19 in observance, the reason why is not as often taught, says Knowles.

Knowles, CEO and founder of the educational consulting firm Teach Heal Build, focuses on creating culturally affirming classrooms and communities. In April, he published the latest installment in the BOLDLY BLACK workbook series “Mathematics and Science in Ancient Africa.” The set was designed for third graders to explore topical principles and practices tied to Black culture — offering lessons they may not encounter in a traditional school setting.

Ahead of this year’s Juneteenth holiday, The 74’s Trinity Alicia spoke with Knowles about what’s shifting in social studies instruction — particularly in Florida, the power of culturally responsive curriculums in today’s political climate and what motivates him in today’s sociopolitical climate.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The 74: This year marks the 160th anniversary of Juneteenth, but it’s only been recognized as a federal holiday since 2021. Why is it so important, from an educator’s perspective, that Juneteenth became a national holiday?  

Juneteenth allows both teachers and students to explore some of the deeper, more despondent areas of American history that are often avoided. It helps us step outside traditional narratives and unpack the multiple perspectives and experiences that different people, particularly within the African-American and African diaspora communities, have had throughout American history. In this way, it gives students a chance to better understand the ongoing process of freedom.   

For example, Juneteenth is often seen as the definitive end of slavery, but that’s an oversimplification. In reality, it represents a moment in a much longer and more complex journey toward emancipation. This perspective encourages both teachers and students to engage with history in a more nuanced and meaningful way. 

It was also, for almost as many years, largely left untaught in schools. What impact does that have on America’s students and our society as a whole?  

Having been in education for almost two decades, I’ve seen that when we don’t talk about important historical events — like those highlighted and signified by Juneteenth — we miss the opportunity to open up meaningful conversations in the classroom.   

I’ve witnessed how this silence can lead to the creation of a generation of students who are apathetic, especially when it comes to social justice and socio-economic issues that disproportionately impact marginalized communities. However, when we engage with authentic stories and histories, it gives students the chance to develop empathy, compassion and a broader understanding of others’ experiences. This helps create more open-minded individuals who are better equipped to contribute positively to the diverse society we live in today. 

An educator named Opal Lee, known to be “the grandmother of Juneteenth” was a key advocate for the national recognition of the holiday. What significance does this hold for you knowing a fellow teacher led that charge?

Within the framework of American capitalism, we often fail to give educators the honor, respect and homage they truly deserve. Educators are the ones who mold the minds of our children — they have the power and potential to shape not only students’ academic paths but also their overall life trajectories. When educators are empowered to lead conversations about topics like Juneteenth — and when we recognize that the push to make Juneteenth a national holiday was led by an educator — it highlights the strength and influence we possess as a profession.   

It shows that our impact extends far beyond the walls of the classroom and can resonate throughout society as a whole. We have the ability to unlock the minds of the next generation and to use our knowledge, especially historical knowledge, as a powerful tool for change. By doing so, we not only inspire other educators but also challenge our country to examine all aspects of its past — even the ones that don’t neatly fit the traditional narrative of American history.  

Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of human and civil rights activist Malcolm X, over 10 years ago on Juneteenth, “We’re in denial of the African holocaust.” Malcolm X would’ve been 100 years old last month, and we’re also 60 years from his assassination. On this Juneteenth, what do you want students to remember most about Malcolm X that they might not get from learning about other civil rights activists?  

As we celebrate Juneteenth this year, we must also reflect on civil rights activists beyond the immediate historical context of the holiday — especially when you think about figures like Malcolm X, who are usually misunderstood. His ideals and philosophy were labeled radical when taking a look at what he’s done overall for American history and the Black community in terms of uncovering darker truths as well as the denial of the American government and the experiences of African-Americans.

We live in a landscape right now and we’re told to move on and forget about those things we’re literally still dealing with as a community, but Malcolm X would want us to continue to advocate for our people and our students to be able to share our authentic experiences. And some of those experiences weren’t happy and joyous. But they have perpetrated so much psychological violence, which continues to happen in the classroom. And it was Malcolm X who stated that “only a fool would allow his oppressors to educate his children.”&�Բ�����; 

What Juneteenth does within Black communities forces us to step up based on the sentiments that Malcolm X expressed within that quote to be able to affirm and be able to become more self-reliant when it comes to our economic issues and social issues. But when it comes to educational issues and being more responsible and more accountable for teaching our history, we’re no longer contingent on systems to be able to teach the truth and history in the United States. 

From the bans on AP African American History courses to the pushback against DEI policies in schools nationwide, how have you navigated this climate as an educator in Florida?

Florida is one of the most prominent hotspots for controversy in education and arguably an epicenter of these debates. We’ve seen significant pushback against inclusive and truthful historical narratives, and it forces educators in schools to sanitize history and continue to perpetuate a fairytale traditional narrative of American history. This sort of censorship disproportionately impacts social studies instruction, which creates a sense of frustration and a disconnect, which leads to a disengagement with students.   

Throughout my work in public education, I have continued to push back and resist by looking at some of our state standards and benchmarks when it comes specifically to social studies and ensuring that I can tie in our stories and tie in those things that people label “controversial” or “political.” I have weaponized the language itself and weaponized some of the state standards so we can continue to tell our stories unredacted. 

Why is it important that Black parents, teachers and administrators are well represented in the decision-making process for schools?

One of the aspects of American history I don’t think that we unpack enough as a community is just some of the deleterious impacts that integration had within the Black community. A lot of the institutions, specifically the educational institution after integration, was absorbed by the dominant, more prevalent society. 

It is important, even within the current state of the system we’re in, that our voices are heard, our perspectives are heard especially when it comes to policies, processes, practices and procedures in education. Those who live in the community can have better, more viable solutions to some of the issues that we contend with within a community. I’ve seen processes within education when people outside of our community are making decisions, and those decisions are not necessarily meeting or accommodating the needs of the community. 

It is beyond critical that Black educators and educational leaders are given space to represent the issues and also the authentic, lived experiences and even some of the cultural norms that exist within those communities so they can be in a position to represent and also advocate for the things that are needed within the Black community.

In your years as an educator and advocate, what surprises you the most about trends and interests among Black students now versus when you were a kid in America? Do Black students and educators come into school — and specifically social studies classes — thinking, “What’s the point?”

Many children, especially those who are informed, are becoming activists around current events tied to identity. Students who are becoming outspoken, specifically a lot of our student-led organizations such as like Black Student Unions, for example, are able to take charge against the racism and bigotry here in Florida and amplify their voices around some of the injustice that is taking place in curriculum, which essentially violates our First Amendment.

You just a new workbook for students, “BOLDLY BLACK: Science and Mathematics in Ancient Africa.” What do you hope to achieve by releasing this series?

Information is widely more available than it was during my high school era in the 1990s simply due to the digital age we live in today. Sometimes we look at technology as being a destructive force, but it influences me to maintain a working knowledge of it in order to effectively show students how to access the information that we couldn’t when we were their ages.

Part of my activism and my solution-based approaches to things we’re dealing with within the Black community, specifically regarding American history that focuses on our experiences, is creating [this] Afro-centric workbook series that is geared towards students from grades three through 12. My third grade title is “Mathematics and Science in Ancient Africa,” and my goal is creating a curriculum that is concise and also digestible within the hands of parents and also community members.

In states where legislation is trying to restrict what we can say and do within the classroom, communities — and specifically Black communities — need to start building their own infrastructures and using some of the space within the Black communities. For example, community centers and also churches are safe, liberating spaces that can be found in Black communities that teach our history. 

Community members and those who may not be experts in pedagogy and pedagogical approaches can pick this up and share this information with their children. Some of those gaps and things that may be missing within the public educational system are now within the hands of the community to be able to educate and affirm all our children.

Thinking about classrooms and curriculums across the country — what keeps you up at night, and what are you most hopeful for?

In this current climate, I have such hope and optimism. I understand that Black communities have gone through far worse. Our whole experience within just the United States even before it became the United States and colonial America has been turmoil. 

But us as Black people have had agency and power to resist the oppression and repression of our voices and our experiences as well as our humanity in this country in the most profound ways. We’ve found ways to resist, push back and also provide for ourselves in order to achieve self-sufficiency in many points within our history. 

I feel hopeful moving forward that even if a public educational space is under attack, we will start to create those liberating spaces in solidarity like we’ve done throughout history in order to rebuild those institutions and infrastructures that were either destabilized or lost through integration. 

Considering all of those variables, there is very little pessimism within me around the things that have taken place and very little fear because, as Kendrick Lamar , “we gon’ be alright.”

Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.”

All New York City middle schools will be required to use city-approved curriculums for reading and math by fall 2027, Mayor Eric Adams and Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos announced Monday.

As the mandates are phased in, 102 middle schools across eight districts will be required this September to use a city-approved reading program selected by their superintendent, building on a in elementary schools.

And in math, officials are continuing a planned , adding 84 schools in six local districts this fall. Just over 100 middle schools are already part of the math curriculum requirement. (There are 529 middle schools across the city’s 32 local districts.)

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Adams’ education agenda has been defined by curriculum mandates to improve reading and math proficiency. Monday’s announcement indicates Adams is following through on plans to deepen those efforts. Proponents of the curriculum overhaul contend that it can take years for the changes to bear fruit, likely leaving it up to Adams’ successor to see the effort through as the mayor faces an .

Adams and his first chancellor, David Banks, argued that schools have had too much leeway to pick their own curriculums, leading to uneven academic results. Under half of students in grades 3-8 are proficient in reading while about 53% are proficient in math, .

“We can’t continue to do the same things that we have been always doing and expecting to get better results,” Adams said during a press conference at Brooklyn’s Dock Street School for STEAM Studies.

The reading and math curriculum mandates, known respectively as NYC Reads and NYC Solves, are meant to guarantee that schools are using high-quality programs. Principals have traditionally been allowed to cobble together their own approaches. Many about how children learn to read. Additionally, using one curriculum in each district makes it easier to scale up teacher training and may be less disruptive for students who switch schools.

The mandates have won mixed reactions from parents and educators. Some have raised concerns about the specific curriculums city officials chose and others said the city’s . All of the city’s elementary schools are now required to use one of three reading programs, and nearly all high schools have .

Teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew, a key supporter of the literacy mandate and , did not appear at Monday’s press conference. Alison Gendar, a union spokesperson, criticized the decision to expand the math mandate to middle schools.

“The DOE rollout of the new math curriculum in the high schools was dreadful,” she wrote. “It makes no sense for the DOE to expand the math curriculum to middle schools when its work in high schools is unfinished.”

The principals union has been more concerned about curriculum mandates, and a spokesperson did not say whether the union supports the addition of middle schools. Both unions have .

The city has not yet seen clear-cut gains from the new curriculums. State reading scores dropped last school year, with , though officials pointed to other assessment data that they said is more encouraging.

Aviles-Ramos said some test score drops are expected as teachers learn how to use the new programs. “We are truly listening to what’s happening on the ground so we can address any issues,” she said. She also predicted gains in student proficiency.

“I’m super confident as we embark on sthat we are going to see improvements,” Aviles-Ramos said. City officials have inor students at the cusp of passing the reading tests.

Educators at schools covered by the expanded reading and math curriculum mandates will begin to receive training this spring in addition to 12 days of “job-embedded coaching” this fall.

All but one of the districts in the first wave of the middle school reading curriculum mandate will use a program called , including Manhattan Districts 1 and 3; Districts 7, 9, 11, and 12 in the Bronx; and District 13 in Brooklyn. District 19 in Brooklyn will use a curriculum called .

In three of those districts — 3, 9, and 12 — the superintendents chose to mandate different reading programs in their middle and elementary schools. Education Department officials said superintendents made choices about which program to mandate based in part on how many schools were already using them. They did not immediately say how many middle schools are already using the curriculums mandated by their superintendent.

Notably, none of the superintendents in the initial wave chose the middle school version of Into Reading, the . That program has who contend that it is not culturally responsive, is too reliant on text excerpts rather than full books, and is not focused enough on building students’ content knowledge. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the company behind the program, has previously disputed those claims.

A different set of districts are mandating middle school math programs for the first time. Four districts — District 8 in the Bronx, District 17 in Brooklyn, District 25 in Queens, and Staten Island’s District 31 — will all use a curriculum called Amplify Desmos. District 5 in Manhattan will use i-Ready Mathematics, and District 6 selected Illustrative Mathematics.

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Nearly half of 1,471 education leaders who responded to the analytics company’s December query reported that the task was “very challenging” and far worse than finding strong English language or social studies applicants.

“The pool of certified math teachers is small, and the demand is high, particularly for candidates who are ready to support student learning from day one,” said Nicole Paxton, assistant principal and athletic director of Mountain Vista Community School in Colorado Springs. “In our district, we’ve experienced a growing number of math openings with only a handful of candidates to consider — many of whom are international applicants requiring sponsorship or visas.”

Another lends insight into a possible reason why: Only 1 in 8 elementary teacher preparation programs nationwide devote adequate time to teaching fundamental math content topics, including numbers and operations, algebraic thinking, geometry and measurement — plus data analysis and probability. 

The National Council on Teacher Quality, which released the teacher preparation study April 8, found ​​the average undergraduate program dedicates 85 hours of instructional time to foundational math content knowledge — 20 hours short of what the organization recommends. 

Graduate programs devote even less time to the topic — 14 hours total — with only 5% meeting or approaching the minimum recommendation of 150 hours. The council said 22% of undergraduate programs earned an “F” for their performance in this area: More than 80% of graduate level programs also earned this failing grade. 

“Teachers need to know how to do more than just follow the steps in math to get the right answer,” Heather Peske, the organization’s president, said in a statement. “They need to know why those steps work. It’s like the difference between a basketball player and a coach. The player can learn their role and follow directions, but the coach needs to understand the bigger picture, the why behind every move.”

Michael Rubin, principal of Uxbridge High School in Massachusetts, roughly 60 miles southwest of Boston, said finding high-quality teachers of any subject is difficult, particularly in math and science.  

“When we deal with even more advanced levels of mathematics, with highly specialized content, the number of educators is even more limited,” he said. “My father was a math teacher for 39 years, and not a year has gone by since he retired nine years ago where a principal has not reached out and asked him if he is willing or able to come in to teach, tutor or substitute.”

Indeed, Gallup poll responders said the problem was even more acute in later grades where the math curriculum gets harder: 64% of principals said this was “very challenging” at the high school level versus 56% at the middle school and 23% at the elementary level.

The struggle can also be seen in lower-income and rural communities, like Sheridan County School District #3 in Clearmont, Wyoming, which enrolls just 83 students K-12. Chase Christensen, who serves as both superintendent and district principal, said staff are frequently asked to take on other roles.

Next fall, he said, a physical education teacher will lead advanced mathematics classes — they will focus on pre-algebra, geometry, statistics and probability — at the middle school level while he works toward earning his certification in that subject. Christensen said he’s grateful for his staff’s’ flexibility. 

“When we all sit down and take a hard look at what the needs of the school are, people just step up and we figure out how it is going to work,” he said.  

Stephanie Marken, a senior partner at Gallup leading its U.S. custom research division, said schools’ trouble finding quality math instructors is particularly concerning because these teachers play a pivotal role in making this often tough subject palatable.  

“If you have a highly engaged teacher who’s really committed and qualified in that subject area, we know that it brings math education to life in a way that you just can’t do otherwise,” Marken said. 

Math anxiety, the fear that students — — share about this subject further harms their opportunity and ability to succeed in it. 

“We know that a lot of students have negative emotions surrounding math and that there’s a lot of pressure that math places upon students,” Marken said. “We know that the teacher makes a big difference in breaking down math and making it feel really relevant and achievable.”

Paxton, of Colorado Springs, said her district employs several strategies to manage the problem. It supports teachers on visas and those coming from alternative certification pathways through monthly meetings that focus on best practices, classroom management and cultural assimilation. 

It also works with which has, for three decades, recruited college graduates to teach in high-need schools for two years. Plus, it’s built a solid relationship with its local university’s teacher training program and has launched a “grow your own” pipeline to support teacher aides in earning their bachelor’s degrees, completing internships in the district and ultimately becoming licensed teachers there.

“These layered supports and creative recruitment efforts are our response to a national challenge,” Paxton said. 

Gallup’s Math Matters Study went beyond schools’ issues with hiring to families’ experience on campus: While roughly a third of the 808 parents who responded said their children receive some math tutoring, only 13% received such help more than weekly. Gallup notes that prior research shows  high-quality math tutoring can improve achievement by an additional three to 15 months of learning, “but the most impactful tutoring programs must include frequent sessions — three times a week or more.”

Roughly a third of parents said they would enroll their child in tutoring if it was available or more accessible.

Parents also reported a lack of communication about the subject on the part of educators: One in six said they “never” hear from their child’s school about the goals for their child’s math learning or what their student is learning in math class. 

The survey showed, too, a lack of understanding — and consensus — among educators about what constitutes high-quality instructional materials, curriculum aligned to college- and career-ready standards: 37% of all education leaders said they were “not at all familiar” with or “not very familiar with” the concept. 

Sixty-eight percent of school superintendents and 46% of school principals said their building or district had no official definition of the term. But when supplied with a definition by Gallup, which identified high-quality instructional materials as those “which are standards-aligned and use evidence-based practices for the content area,” 69% said most or all of their math curriculum qualified. 

Professional development proved an added challenge. Thirty-nine percent of educators surveyed rated their own school’s math-related professional development as “fair” or “poor.” This statistic was worse at the high school level where 6% said it was poor and 39% said it was fair. 

The Gates Foundation sponsored the Math Matters Study and provides financial support to The 74.