Choosing Curriculum Without Evidence
by Robert Pondiscio
If you wanted to improve medical care, would you focus on hospital administration and patient insurance? Or would you look at the treatment doctors were giving patients? Would you try to improve a sports team’s won-loss record by focusing on stadium layout and the team’s travel schedule? Then why, ask Brookings’ Matthew Chingos and Russ Whitehurst, do education policy makers focus most of their attention on academic standards, teacher evaluation, and school accountability policies? Shouldn’t we be looking instead at instructional materials?
“There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning—effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness,” the two write in a new paper from Brookings, Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness, and the Common Core.
“Whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming, making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick.”
There’s one big hurdle to clear in correcting this rather obvious problem: Little effort has been made by the field to differentiate effective curricular materials from ineffective ones. In fact, in