Our schools have a curriculum problem. As states move toward education systems driven by parent choice, our lack of curricular coherence and transparency is increasingly impossible to ignore. For parents to choose, they must know what schools are teaching, yet most schools make this frustratingly difficult for families to discern. As the issue of curricular oversight begins to gain momentum, there is an obvious opportunity for states to empower parents to make better decisions about their children’s education.
Curriculum is a messy topic in American education. Unlike academic standards, which are broad instructional goals set by the state, curriculum is the comprehensive set of content and materials that teachers and students interact with every day in their classrooms. Two curricula could be considered “standards-aligned,” for example, but feature different content knowledge or organize it in different ways. Schools and districts also have broad discretion to cobble together curricula and, even when provided to them, teachers don’t consistently use high-quality instructional materials. Furthermore, traditional teacher preparation programs care little about the content teachers deliver, and existing tools to review curricular quality are weak.
That leaves parents navigating education marketplaces in a difficult position to evaluate what schools actually teach. Major surveys about schooling show that, although parents do not have the same expectations about the purposes of public education, they overwhelmingly agree across ideological lines that core academic subjects—reading, writing, and math—are very important for children to learn in school. EdChoice’s latest Schooling in America public opinion poll, for example, reveals that “academic quality” is the primary reason for parents choosing charter and private schools for their children. As parents across the country increasingly have the choice to drive their children’s education and, in turn, school offerings themselves, it’s crucial that those schools make transparent what they are teaching. The answer to that lies not in high-level state standards or vague school mission statements, but in the curriculum students spend the majority of their day learning.
Unfortunately, curriculum is the most difficult information for parents to find—and understand—when making education choices.
Imagine you have just settled in Hialeah, Florida, a working-class suburb of Miami. As a savvy parent, you are searching for middle school options for your oldest child. You explore Miami-Dade County Public Schools’ website and find considerable resources outlining your choices: online schools, magnet schools, career technical education, “a la carte” services. You find nothing, however, about what students learn inside the district’s classrooms. In Miami-Dade’s yearly “Curriculum Bulletin,” a nearly 60-page document that describes graduation requirements and details about the Florida College System, you also find nothing, ironically, that plainly states what curricula are used in the district’s schools.
On the Florida Department of Education’s official portal, there are ample details about schools’ results on state standardized tests and their students’ demographics. There is very little, however, about what topics, knowledge, and skills these schools teach. You visit local schools’ websites. Your zoned district school boasts about its specialized programs and activities—performance and visual arts, model UN—but not about what your child will learn daily in the classroom. Next, you explore the website of a nearby, top-rated charter school. Under a heading titled “Curriculum” in the “School Profile” page, two short paragraphs only tell you that the school offers a dual enrollment program at nearby colleges and Advanced Placement classes.
These are examples from real schools, and I invite the reader to try this experiment in their own area.
Karen Vaites, who runs the Curriculum Insight Project, recently proposed that schools be required to report their curriculum to a national database. Curriculum transparency has been proposed by Congress in the past; however, federal intrusion into the workings of public schools, particularly when it’s overtly partisan, is never popular. Instead, states should view curricular transparency from the perspective of parent choice. States can improve parents’ ability to choose by:
- Requiring public schools, including charters, and private schools receiving public funding through ESAs to explicitly state on their website all the curricula used at each grade level and for each subject, including additional external assessments, with links to curriculum publishers’ websites.
- Requiring schools to include on their website a clear description of the instructional approach used at the school—not a vague mission statement, but a deliberate explanation of how the school’s curriculum amounts to a coherent course of learning for its students.
- Featuring schools’ curriculum on the state’s publicly available school report cards or accountability reports.
There are notable examples to follow. Put yourself in the shoes of our Florida parent again, as you have heard from a friend about classical charter schools in the Miami area. Unlike the other schools you have explored, Miami’s classical schools provide a clear vision of what goes on inside their classrooms: they list specific curricula like Core Knowledge, Singapore Math, and Story of the World, and explain how the content in these curricula contributes to distinct stages of learning from first to twelfth grade. It’s no surprise that private and charter classical schools, for whom curriculum is central to their model, are increasingly drawing parents in choice-forward states like Texas and Florida.
It is up to individual states to consider how such policies serve their systems of choice. Parents don’t need to study a curriculum in granular detail, but they deserve to know and understand the curriculum their child is taught every day. Accountability and transparency are necessary hallmarks of education choice, and leaving curriculum—the primary indication of what students are learning—out of that equation is simply indefensible.
