Since we at Fordham began reviewing state academic standards in 1997, we have understood—and made clear—that standards alone are insufficient to drive improvements in student achievement. Standards describe the destination, but they don’t chart the journey for leaders, teachers, or schools, which means that for standards to have any impact on what students actually learn, they must influence curriculum decisions, assessments, and accountability. Educators intuitively understand this, but not all policy makers and pundits appear to. The need for standards-aligned curricula is undoubtedly the most cited challenge for states, districts, and schools implementing the Common Core.
Yet five years into that implementation, teachers still report scrambling to find high-quality, standards-aligned instructional materials. Despite publishers’ claims, there is a dearth of programs that are truly aligned to the demands of the Common Core for content and rigor. Fixing America’s curriculum problem is no small challenge.
In Uncommonly Engaging? A Review of the EngageNY English Language Arts Common Core Curriculum, Fordham analyzes New York State’s Common Core-aligned ELA curriculum, built from scratch and made available online for all to use for free. How solid is this product? Is it well aligned to the Common Core? Is it teachable?
Here’s what we found:
- Impressively, EngageNY’s alignment to the Common Core is generally strong.
- Selected texts are high-quality and appropriately rigorous, and the program allows educators greater flexibility than other scripted programs.
- But because New York engaged multiple curriculum developers to create separate resources for different grade bands, each set of materials reflects a distinctive underlying approach to curriculum and literacy, meaning that the progression across grade bands is bumpy.
- While content and foundational skills in the early grades appear thoughtfully developed, the sheer quantity of content across all grade bands can be overwhelming.
- Additionally, EngageNY’s high school curriculum (not yet complete) lacks a critical emphasis on literary content, a problem that is amplified by the fact that students read only excerpts of great books rather than full novels, biographies, and so on.
While not perfect, the materials offer educators—both inside and outside New York State—an important alternative to traditional textbooks of questionable quality and alignment. Sadly, however, we’re not aware of any other state that’s done as well as this on behalf of its own educators.
Download the report to learn more.
