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.” 

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.”

But overall, results have been modest. In math, researchers have found when districts adopted HQIM materials. Evidence of major outcomes in ELA are also lacking: and , which lead the nation in , show mixed NAEP results. Why aren’t there stronger positive outcomes? Because most teachers simply don’t use the new materials for most instructional purposes. They might pull a quiz or a homework assignment from the curriculum, but when it comes to daily instruction, they water it down, mix it with stuff from the internet or skim over material by giving students few opportunities to grapple with the rigorous content.

Telling teachers to just do it — teach the darn curriculum — isn’t working. To address the situation, school districts are spending some $18,000 per teacher per year on professional learning, an increasing portion of which goes to curriculum-related instruction. The plausible idea is that if teachers are given adequate support to understand the new materials and present them effectively, resistance to using them will diminish. 

There isn’t much strong research on the impact of this type of professional learning. One shows a very modest effect, while a review that analyzed previous research found “small to moderate positive impacts.” This is because at the core of resistance is a mindset: Teachers don’t believe their students can manage the rigor of grade-level HQIM instruction — thus, the avoidance and watering down. The general response (especially from the publishers of these materials) has been frustration. Perhaps teachers don’t trust themselves to handle the material, or perhaps they don’t like the curriculum because they haven’t tried it (to paraphrase a British from my youth) — or they just need more curriculum-integrated professional learning. 

While there is surely some truth to these responses, I think they miss a key point — teachers are often behaving rationally. In 2022, 26% of eighth-graders performed at or above proficient on the NAEP in math, and 31% in ELA. While NAEP standards are more demanding than those in most states, what this means (conservatively) is that more than half of the students in an average American public school classroom lack grade-level skills and content knowledge. In the inner cities and many rural communities, that proportion is much higher: In the economically troubled city of Baltimore, where I live, the proficiency rate for eighth graders on the math NAEP in 2022 was . 

If you were a teacher faced with 25 13-year-olds whose knowledge of math and ELA ranged from one to three years below grade level, would you readily teach materials that assumed grade-level competence? 

School districts in Baltimore and across the country aren’t blind to this reality. For many years, they have tried to help underperforming students through remedial education that attempts to teach what wasn’t mastered in previous years. This effort has had various labels — for example, MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports) or RTI (Response to Intervention). It usually involves grouping students into what is called Tier 2 or Tier 3 and then giving them various doses of remediation. There is no rigorous research that suggests this effort has succeeded at scale. 

More recently, this approach has been adopted for the use of HQIM in the classroom (also called Tier 1 instruction). The idea, reasonable on its face, is that weaker students should be given extra time, usually through pulling them out of arts or even social studies courses, to master the materials. 

Here is a quick sketch of how the approach works — in theory. Students take diagnostic assessments a week or two before the start of a new HQIM unit. In math, these test students’ mastery of the prerequisite skills that will make effective learning in the forthcoming unit possible. In ELA, the assessment will test for key vocabulary and background knowledge without which the forthcoming text(s) will be inaccessible. Then, the results are given to the Tier 2 teacher, who focuses on preparing the students with “just in time knowledge” — what students must know to successfully understand their upcoming Tier 1 HQIM unit.

But in practice, these efforts underdeliver. And that’s not simply due to the challenges of organizing the student groupings and the instructional differentiation; it’s because there simply aren’t effective assessments to do the job. A state test administered the previous year is largely useless (and most teachers are ignorant of how their students performed). Nationally normed tests such as i-Ready and MAP aren’t designed for educators to be able to translate results into curriculum content. A previous end-of-unit assessment (if the teacher even gave it) might work if the new skills and knowledge in each new curriculum build directly on what students had successfully learned in the previous unit. However, ELA units often introduce completely new subjects, and math curricula are full of skills that . The Tier 2 teacher is left trying to guess what to teach — and too often uses materials that aren’t even from the same curriculum as the Tier 1 instructor is using. 

In short, there is too little connection between what students are being taught in Tier 2 instruction and what they need to know to be ready for Tier 1 HQIM material. Teachers and schools are rightly trying their best in adverse circumstances: In Houston, students are tested during their Tier 1 classes and then given appropriate Tier 2 teaching for the second part of the 90 minutes, an approach requiring extremely tight planning and many hours pre-analyzing every unit to design the tests and instruction. Superbly led districts and schools (regular and charter) create time for such analyses. But in most districts, Tier 1 instructors are given some exposure to a curriculum’s content and then told to differentiate their teaching on the fly, remediating while simultaneously teaching the grade-level material. 

What teachers and students need is urgent action from the curriculum publishers (and AI-based providers such as and ). They should be providing short, focused pre-unit diagnostics that are integrated with the most-used curriculum. These short quizzes will pinpoint the material Tier 2 instructors need to highlight. The bottom line: If Tier 2 classes across the United States were focused on teaching what students most need to know to access their forthcoming Tier 1 curriculum unit, Tier 1 teachers would rightly have more confidence that their students could manage Tier 1 HQIM. Instead of watering down that material, they could teach it, thus fulfilling the considerable promise of the new high-quality curriculum.

This won’t be a panacea. There’s no way to ensure that a child who is two years behind will be ready for next week’s grade-level instruction — a problem that goes back to the nation’s pre-K universe, with its and . But it is possible to give that child a chance. Currently, Tier 2 teachers are flying blind — wasting hundreds of instructional hours, unable to provide students with any chance of benefiting from HQIM. And Tier 1 instructors? Many will go on watering down those materials, knowing how few students are ready to learn rigorous, grade-level content.

Kids like her daughter Clara, a second grader, glommed on to its rich characters; she’s especially fond of Lily, who wears her black hair in a short bob and has a collection of plush toy lions. Fellow teachers, meanwhile, like that it “hits everything” students need to be strong readers.

“It slowly builds, introducing more and more sounds, and then it jumps right into blending those sounds into little words,” Morrison said. At least two independent link the program to “significant positive” results.

But that winning combo initially wasn’t enough for ���󾱴�’s education department to put Superkids on its list of approved . Morrison homed in on a likely culprit: , a nonprofit that for nine years has operated as a kind of “Consumer Reports” for the K-12 publishing industry. At the time, Ohio leaders approved only programs that won the organization’s coveted green rating. Superkids earned a more modest yellow.

“How EdReports can be the sole basis of this process is astounding,” Morrison, also a local school board member, wrote to the state. Ohio trains teachers in the , she said, but “this list takes us three steps backward.”

Ohio ultimately relented after Zaner-Bloser, which publishes Superkids, appealed. Temporary as it was, the episode demonstrated the outsize power of EdReports in the world of high-stakes curriculum decisions — a power that has come under increasing scrutiny as more parents embrace the phonics-laden science of reading. Critics of the nonprofit say it has continued to award green ratings to reading programs that might still accommodate balanced literacy — a discredited philosophy in which teachers encourage kids to learn to read by surrounding them with books— and has slapped effective programs with yellow ratings.

In interviews with The 74, EdReports officials say they’ve gotten the message.

Starting in June, its reviews of early reading materials will reflect a fuller embrace of the science of reading. “Phonics and fluency are now non-negotiables” for a green rating, said Janna Chan, EdReports’ chief external affairs officer.  

Reviewers will also no longer use “three-cueing” — a practice associated with balanced literacy that encourages students to identify unfamiliar words by picking up clues from text or pictures. Since 2021, at least 10 states have .

An internal memo sent to EdReports staff in February and obtained by The 74 acknowledged growing doubts about the organization’s credibility as states pass new reading laws. CEO Eric Hirsch wrote that the organization is “most vulnerable to criticism around our reviews” of comprehensive English language arts programs called basals or “big box” curricula — programs that some have attacked for being “” and giving lip service to the science of reading. Hirsch wrote the memo in response to a that critiqued the organization and highlighted newer groups providing alternatives to its reviews.

EdReports contracts with a network of over 600 reviewers, many of them current or former teachers who earn up to nearly $3,000 per review. Working in teams of five for an average of four to six months, they if curriculum products meet standards and are easy for teachers and students to use.

Evidence of the organization’s considerable influence isn’t hard to find.  A 74 analysis of , a data service that stores recordings of public meetings, reveals that since January 2021, EdReports has been mentioned over 100 times during school board meetings. District leaders and staff frequently invoke its ratings when making budget recommendations.

The “end-all, be-all for curriculum review” is how Bill Hesford, an assistant superintendent in the Bayfield, Colorado, district described the organization during a January discussion of a new math program.

That same month, T.C. Wall, assistant superintendent of the Bolivar, Missouri, schools, assured her board that all reading programs up for consideration had earned the organization’s highest rating.

“We’re starting with quality stuff,” she said.

Financially, there’s much at stake for both districts and curriculum companies. Fueled by a one-time infusion of federal relief funds, school systems spent roughly on curriculum in the 2021-22 school year alone. Due to the time and expense such reviews require, districts typically wait as long as six years before revamping their offerings.

Pressure to ‘conform’ 

For many publishers, EdReports’s green stamp of approval is a valuable marketing tool they trumpet in .

Others lost trust in its reviews years ago. 

Collaborative Classroom, a curriculum provider, publishes four literacy programs based on the science of reading used by hundreds of districts. One of them underwent four reviews in three years because, in Hirsch’s view, new features warranted a fresh examination. But the process left Kelly Stuart, the publisher’s president and CEO, exhausted and disillusioned.

“We play in this world as a nonprofit,” she said. “But if we were a for-profit company, there would be a tremendous amount of pressure on us to conform and meet all green.”  

In a world so contentious its seminal debates are called “,” critics have been — including those who initially welcomed EdReports. 

Karen Vaites, a literacy expert and advocate, once led marketing efforts for Open Up Resources, a nonprofit that offers free curriculum materials to districts. Declaring that “excellence is now easy to find,” she was among the first to in 2018.

In recent years, her views have taken a 180.

“EdReports is no longer an effective guidepost,” said Vaites, who founded the in January to essentially compete with the organization. One of its first projects is to review , an Open Up Resources program that earned a yellow from EdReports, but has showing effectiveness and won from districts that use it.

Vaites said she no longer has a financial relationship with Open Up Resources. But having once been an EdReports “fangirl,” she said she feels “doubly obliged to let people know that they need to look beyond” the site.

If loving memes about curriculum is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

But seriously, enough with districts adopting pricey curricula that bomb reviews.

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites)

Hirsch declined to address her specific criticisms, but said he and his team plan to gather feedback from researchers, as well as district and state leaders, to respond to critics’ concerns. By the end of the summer, the organization expects to update guidelines for all three of the content areas it reviews — English language arts, math and science — and apply them to next year’s reports. 

Hirsch told The 74 the pivot is in keeping with its mission as an organization geared toward — and staffed by — teachers.

“You’re not a great teacher if you can’t reflect on practice,” he said.

‘No counterbalance’

With backing from major foundations, Hirsch founded EdReports in 2015 to help guide districts toward materials that satisfied the then-relatively new , a set of guidelines in math and language arts that most states still follow. In an attempt to tap into the booming market, many publishers touted their products as “Common Core-aligned” even when their commitments were tenuous at best. Experts say a third-party reviewer was sorely needed. 

“Some publishers had a vice grip on the whole curriculum thing,” said Kareem Weaver, an Oakland literacy advocate featured in , a documentary about the push to provide low-income and minority students with high-quality reading instruction. “Before EdReports, there was no counterbalance to publishers’ claims of being ‘high-quality.’ ”

Now with an $11.5 million annual budget, Hirsch called the organization “amazingly transparent,” without “taking a dime from publishers.” But Weaver thinks EdReports would have a greater impact if its reviews factored in evidence of effectiveness. 

“Don’t just treat kids like guinea pigs,” he said. “Parents have to know if their kid is actually going to get the things they need in regular classroom instruction.”

Hirsch responded that solid, independent evidence of a specific curriculum’s effectiveness . When it does exist, publishers typically offer it in response to reviews. But he conceded that EdReports could make the information easier to find. 

‘Bloated’ materials

Evidence is also important to state leaders, who increasingly to adopt reading programs based on research. But some experts say publishers are responding to new mandates by “overstuffing” their products — adding structured, phonics-based lessons without removing the older ones.

Vaites points to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s , one of the three programs approved as part of — a two-year effort to overhaul literacy instruction in the nation’s largest school district. EdReports gave it a green rating, despite complaints about its overabundance of units, lessons and worksheets. 

“As a novice teacher, you’re going to get overwhelmed when you see four pages that go along with one lesson,” said April Rose, an instructional coach at P.S. 132Q in Queens, who works with the United Federation of Teachers to support staff transitioning to the program.  With such wide offerings, some teachers struggle to find assignments for students that match the standards they’re trying to teach, she said, or hop from one skill to the next without giving students deep practice.

Jim O’Neill, a general manager at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said Into Reading is designed to let teachers “grow while teaching with the program.” The broad range of lessons and activities, he added, is also intended to support students at multiple levels in one classroom.   

“Coming out of the pandemic, there are two things we have — students with different needs, but also new teachers who are just beginning to teach reading,” he said. “Having carefully crafted lesson plans can help them get up and going with the right resources for the right students at the right time.” 

Hirsch acknowledged bloat is a problem, but said publishers are reluctant to remove features some teachers prefer. 

He suggested that districts adopting a new curriculum view EdReports as just a starting point — and follow up with adequate training and support for teachers. 

Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, agreed. “School districts rely too much on these external reviews without a clear understanding of what they tell you and what they do not,” he said. “They need to give a close look at the programs themselves.”

Disclosure: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Overdeck Family Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to and to The 74.

Interim assessments are big business. The term covers a of designs and purposes, but broadly, these are exams administered at different points in the school year to gauge student progress. Usage is widespread, with the heaviest reliance in — those that serve the most marginalized and vulnerable students. Many educators make instructional changes based on the results, decisions that can have profound and lasting effects on the trajectories of countless learners.

According to the RAND Corporation, reported that their students had taken an interim assessment in the 2021-22 school year, and demand in this is growing. But while states’ end-of-year exams are thoroughly peer-reviewed, no such process exists for interim assessments. Further, publishers share very little evidence to show that their products are standards-aligned or can improve student learning. For educators, this means interim assessments are a black box, with no third-party reviews of publishers’ marketing claims.

This was the very problem our organizations — , a nonprofit providing free reviews of instructional materials, and the (Center for Assessment), an organization focused on improving the quality of educational assessment and accountability systems — sought to solve when we our plan to review commercial interim assessment products last year. 

Unlike EdReports’ of K-12 instructional materials, for which products can be purchased independently, access to interim assessments requires publisher consent, because their test questions, reports and other tools are proprietary. Most publishers declined our invitation to participate in our new reviews. Two did agree, but then one pulled out. It simply wouldn’t have been meaningful to release a single review without context, so we had to bring the process to a halt. 

Particularly in the current moment, with districts making high-stakes instructional and budgetary decisions to try to accelerate post-COVID student learning, publicly available, independent reviews of interim assessments could have been a powerful resource. The impossibility of moving our reviews forward should be cause for concern. But by sharing what we’ve learned, we hope to inspire educators to demand greater transparency from publishers. Even without independent reviews, there’s a lot that districts can do to become critical consumers before purchasing interim assessments.

First, determine their needs:

• What are their and overall goals for student learning in the relevant content area, and what should students therefore experience on a daily, weekly and monthly basis?
  
• What will assessments look like over the course of the school year? How will they with other instructional components to help educators understand and improve student learning?
  
• Based on the above, what do districts need in a commercial assessment product? What specific gap should it fill? If the district already has high-quality instructional materials, to what extent do their meet those needs?

Districts that do need a commercial product should get clear on what they want before looking at options:

• What is their main goal for the product? Do they want to evaluate school or district-level trends or help educators understand student progress in a specific learning area? While a publisher may claim that a product can do both these things equally well, in practice, that’s very challenging to achieve.
  
• What questions does the district expect the product to help answer, and what information is needed to answer those questions?
  
• How will the product meet the needs of its primary user? If it’s for teachers, how will the district know if it provides accurate information that educators can use to help students? What professional learning will users need in order to use the product in conjunction with instructional materials to support student learning effectively?
  
• How will the district know if the product is well-aligned to standards? What type of test questions should educators expect to see, and what evidence will confirm that the exams genuinely assess students’ understanding of the full depth of each standard? Districts should communicate their needs and ask for evidence. Equipped with a clear picture of their requirements, they can leverage their role as a current or potential customer to get the information and evidence they need.

Questions publishers should be able to answer include:

• What are the intended uses of your product, and what research supports those uses?
  
• How should assessment scores be interpreted, and what decisions can they inform? What evidence supports the idea that using the data in this way helps improve student outcomes?
  
• How were the product’s test questions evaluated, and were educators involved?
  
• Are all the test questions standards-aligned? If so, what evidence supports that claim?

In the absence of independent reviews, we encourage districts to take up the baton and exercise their purchasing power to press the assessment market for greater transparency. Students are counting on their teachers, administrators and educational leaders — they deserve evidence-based support to help them learn and grow.