Kamala Harris’s presidential acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention promised Americans “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and the chance to succeed.” But working-class Americans are glum about their economic position today and what this promise means for them. For example, two out of three say the working class is worse off today than it was forty years ago, while only one out of five say the working class is better off.

That information comes from YouGov surveys of working-class voters—those without college degrees—conducted for the Progressive Policy Institute’s (PPI) Project on Center Left Renewal. They include a focus on seven Presidential or Senate battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

Working-class voters are divided on which political party will advance their interests. Asked who will “put the interests of working-class people first,” 38 percent said Democrats and 37 percent said Republicans. When asked which party would be best at “creating economic opportunities for working Americans,” 38 percent said Republicans and 33 percent said Democrats. Nearly one out of five said neither party.

Moreover, less than half of working-class voters said the federal government is responsive to their needs, compared to seven out of ten who said the government is responsive to the needs of the college-educated. No doubt this response reflects the fact that 62 percent of U.S. adults have no bachelor’s degree, rising to 72 percent for Black adults and 79 percent for Hispanic adults.

Harris must persuade working-class voters that her proposal for an opportunity economy responds to their concerns.

Opportunity pluralism

PPI’s Campaign for Working Americans suggests a key part of the opportunity economy is a career pathways system for young people and working adults without degrees. This system offers them more education and training options than current K–12 school-to-college-to-job pathway or workforce training programs. This career pathways approach can be called opportunity pluralism and has five elements.

1. Expand apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeships are jobs where individuals earn a paycheck and learn an occupation. Today, there are around 600,000 US registered apprenticeships, mostly in building trades and heavy industry. Countries like Great Britain, Germany, and Australia have many times more in countless occupations. Around 74 percent of working Americans believe that apprenticeships will help them acquire skills and advance in today’s economy. This earn-and-learn model can grow by changing the way federal apprenticeships are registered, increasing financial support for them, and tying support to pay for performance, which means apprentices get credentials and good jobs.

2. Recruit more organizations to offer work-based learning. An all-hands-on-deck partnership approach can create a larger system of career pathways programs. It should include coordinating or intermediary organizations like K–12 schools, community and four-year colleges, workforce boards, unions, industry and employer associations, and other nonprofit and for-profit ventures. In addition to apprenticeships, other work-based learning approaches like internships and cooperative programs should expand.

3. Allow the Pell Grant to support education and workforce development. Current federal (and state) policies favor subsidies to those who get a degree. For example, in 2018 the federal government spent around $149 billion on higher education versus $58 billion for workforce education and training. When the latter figure deducts Pell Grants and veteran’s programs, spending drops to around $16 billion for seventeen federal workforce-related programs. Pell Grants should include support for quality short-term workforce programs not now eligible for support.

4. Base hiring on skills not degrees. Many employers use the four-year degree as a quick way to judge a person’s job readiness, creating a bottleneck or paper ceiling that limits opportunities for those without degrees. Opportunity@Work research shows that not having a degree does not mean individuals are low-skilled. Rather, about half of the workforce—70 million individuals—are STARs or Skilled Through Alternative Routes like military service, training programs, or on-the-job experience. This is leading employers and government at all levels to drop degree requirements for jobs that do not need them and use skill-based hiring for these jobs. Reforming hiring practices will promote upward mobility in an opportunity economy.

5. Support a new high school movement. K–12 schools’ focus on the college-for-all model means many young people cannot access quality career counseling and education, including career and technical education or CTE. Roughly 1 out of 4 public high schools do not offer CTE. Only around one out of ifve high schoolers complete at least three CTE courses. High schoolers should have access to CTE, including work-based learning. The current inspiration for doing this is found in the early twentieth century when America faced new workforce challenges. A grassroots high school movement emerged and led to what Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz call America’s “spectacular educational transformation.” Today’s new movement can create “faster and cheaper” pathways to jobs.

Knowledge and networks

An important part of an opportunity economy is what Harvard economist David Deming calls the economics of skill development, especially the relationship between acquiring knowledge and developing social networks. He finds that the importance of cognitive skills has declined as a predictor of wage success.

On the other hand, the importance of relationships, networking, and social skills has increased, especially skills like communication, cooperation, collaboration, social intelligence, and conflict resolution. After age thirty-five, wage growth is greater in jobs requiring social skills.

This means that the building blocks of an opportunity economy are knowledge, skills, relationships, and networks, summarized in a simple equation: Knowledge + Networks = Opportunity. As the adage goes: It is not only what you know but whom you know.

The opportunity economy for working-class Americans is built on acquiring knowledge and networks and is an example of opportunity pluralism—ensuring that working-class families have multiple education and training pathways to prepare them for good jobs, satisfying careers, and flourishing lives.

If Harris offers working-class voters a positive opportunity pluralism agenda she can reap the rewards.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearEducation and made available via RealClearWire.

As school systems around the world continue trying to recover from learning losses caused by the pandemic, a new paper out of Germany gives us some historic context on what to look for and what to be wary of.

Researcher Kamila Cygan-Rehm from the Dresden University of Technology exploits a natural experiment that occurred when two school years were shortened in several West German states in the late 1960s. These were the result of a realignment of school start dates following several previous shifts during and immediately after World War II. Specifically, the two school years that ran from April to November 1966 and from December 1966 to July 1967 were each truncated by about one-third in order to ultimately move all schools’ starting dates from spring to fall. This shortened the amount of schooling received by all children attending school in ten states—excluding Bavaria, Hamburg, and Lower Saxony, which made the switch in other ways.

Although accommodations for the decreased instructional time varied from state to state, Cygan-Rehm notes important similarities. Emphasis was placed on maintaining the core curriculum, with priority given to mathematics, German, and modern foreign languages (mainly English). The weekly hours of instruction in these subjects increased when compared to a typical school year, as did the homework load. Consequently, instructional hours in non-core subjects like music, arts, and physical education were reduced. Extracurricular activities were not traditionally part of the school day, but certain annual school-based events like Christmas pageants and school trips—all of which took time away from instruction—were canceled until the new start dates were achieved. Many states also reduced the number of in-class tests and the requirements for final examinations to make up for the loss of instructional time. This effort, we are told, resulted at the time in massive outpourings of concern from academics, families, government, and media over the potential loss of student learning. However, short-term outcomes for students were not seen to be substantially negative, and thus no other remediation was taken when school years returned to the normal length. Yet students who graduated in either of those years did so having lost up to two-thirds of a year of instructional time.

This recent analysis, like those conducted in the 1960s, sees minimal short-term impact. Graduation and university enrollment did not change significantly in affected states from pre-1966/67 rates. Long-term outcomes, however, are a different story. Cygan-Rehm uses data from the Sample of Integrated Labor Market Biographies, a rich database of German employment data, as well as pension records, to identify over 278,000 individuals who were of compulsory school age during the 1966–1967 timeframe in the various states and whose work and earnings history are complete through 2017. While she cannot definitively state that her sample includes only workers who experienced shortened school years, she uses the same data from two of the unaffected states as a comparison and robustness check. As a result, she is satisfied that she has captured a large swath of impacted former students.

Her analysis finds that exposure to the shortened school years led to adverse labor market effects over almost the entirety of an individual’s working life. She estimates that one year of lost classroom instruction reduced lifetime earnings by almost 3 percent on average. The earnings losses were partly driven by higher rates of unemployment among affected individuals during the prime working ages (a 2 percent reduction in days worked) and partly by lower intelligence levels (yes, cognitive test scores were included in the data!) for individuals who ultimately received less instruction than their peers before and after the calendar changes. All this despite the fact that many students who experienced the shortened school years ended up graduating earlier in the year than they would have normally and actually experienced an initial earnings bump based on early entry into the workforce. The negative impacts of lost learning on lifetime income took hold shortly after that bump and persisted until retirement. The youngest and oldest students were impacted more strongly than those in the middle of the grade-level distribution. The largest earnings losses occurred at the bottom of the earnings distribution, suggesting that academically-disadvantaged students, already struggling while receiving a full year’s worth of instruction, fell even further behind in the shortened years.

What should we take from these historical data? Despite clear differences in context and setting, the West German example shares some obvious similarities to our current Covid-disrupted era: closed schools being replaced with a form of “remote learning” (extra homework), loss of instructional time being compensated for by narrowing the curriculum, and impacted students being given dispensation on work completion and assessment. All of these combined to lower the academic bar for students who moved on through the system with no accountability beyond the dates on the calendar. However, it is important to note one vital distinction: No remediation was provided for West German students in the 1960s. We know better now—and these new data show the dangers clearly—and we should expect better results. For those impacted students who remain in school today, we know what needs to be done to help avoid a repeat of history. And our schools still have time to do it.

SOURCE: Kamila Cygan-Rehm, “Lifetime Consequences of Lost Instructional Time in the Classroom: Evidence from Shortened School Years,” IZA Institute of Labor Economics (August 2024).

Cheers

• More high school students are participating in school-sponsored sports than ever before, driven in part by the increasing popularity of girls’ flag football. —K–12 Dive
• “Parents should ignore their children more often.” —Darby Saxbe, New York Times
• District leaders backed off of policy changes that would have altered admissions criteria and funding for selective enrollment, magnet, and charter schools in their five-year plan for Chicago Public Schools. —WBEZ
• “State superintendent doesn’t want Alabama students forced down one diploma path.” —The 74

Jeers

• A divided South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the state’s voucher program violates its constitution. —The State
• Test scores reveal that middle schoolers are still lagging months behind pre-pandemic achievement levels in science. —The 74
• Fewer teachers are assigning full-length novels to their students, likely due to “perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests, and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world.” —The Washington Post

• In general, wealthier schools have higher reading proficiency rates—but the focus should be on districts like Steubenville, Ohio, that are exceeding expectations despite their high rates of poverty. —Chad Aldeman, The 74
• Would a second-term Trump presidency mean major cuts in education? Would he focus only on popular policies? Or would he ignore education entirely? No one knows for sure. —Rick Hess, Education Next
• Private school choice programs like vouchers and ESAs are making the school budgeting process uncertain and challenging, according to some district officials and education experts. —Mark Lieberman, EducationWeek
• Following New York’s decision to make firing underperforming teachers more difficult, an author shares some concerns about public education today. —The 74

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1. Despite the district rising in overall report card ratings this year and cementing its status as the best-performing large urban district in the state… (Spectrum News 1, 9/16/24) …the president of Cincinnati City Schools’ elected board goes well beyond the usual negative rhetoric to blast Ohio’s state report cards, saying they are “designed…to have us fail.” Strong stuff, but it feels misplaced to me. As does her promise in response that “we will try desperately to improve on behalf of our kids and taxpayers.” I mean, shouldn’t that be your default mode anyway? (WCPO-TV, Cincinnati, 9/16/24)
   
   

2. Meanwhile, Cleveland Metropolitan School District leaders cannot shout loudly enough that it is, as a district, “meeting standards” for the first time ever… (Ideastream Public Media, 9/16/24) …and leaders of Columbus City Schools seem extremely receptive to the data their report cards show. Specifically, incremental improvement in certain buildings and certain categories, but lots of poor performance elsewhere that drags their overall ratings down. To an accurate level. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/18/24)
   
   

3. On the other end of the spectrum, the superintendent of Olmsted Falls City Schools considers his district’s stellar report card performance a matter of luck, the results of which he expresses minimal interest in. “I’m a public school superintendent, so it would be I guess irresponsible if I didn’t look at any of it,” he says. Charming. (Cleveland.com, 9/18/24)
   
   

4. Switching gears, I have to say there’s something very nostalgic for me in seeing the good folks at ProPublica taking aim at Ohio education issues again in recent months. It reminds me of the good old days of Academic Distress Commissions, the “Youngstown Plan”, and their extreme interest in The Vindicator newspaper for the first (and last) time in 150 years. Best part is: Nothing has changed about their M.O. In exactly the same way as they covered the previous issues back in the day, the good folks at ProPublica are discussing Ohio’s use of state funding to help private schools expand in the wake of voucher-assisted enrollment growth. Exactly the same way. I hope my long-suffering standing subscribers feel the same burn of nostalgia that I do over this. IYKYK. (ProPublica, 9/17/24) Meanwhile, the Cincinnati-area community that reckons Bishop Fenwick High School is a vital asset to everyone recently celebrated the Catholic school’s history, fondly recalled its growth, and looked toward its bright future. That includes the mayor of Middletown and members of school families who attend Fenwick from 30 different zip codes in the state. A very apt measurement of community in this case, I think. (Dayton Daily News, 9/17/24)

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Ohioans now have access to a brand-new set of school report cards based on results from the 2023–24 school year. The data they contain provide policymakers, advocates, and families with an updated look on how students are progressing academically in the wake of the pandemic. They also offer a closer look at some important non-academic measures—like chronic absenteeism, which skyrocketed during the pandemic and has remained persistently high.

For policymakers and advocates, report cards offer a wealth of information. But for parents and families, it might feel like too much of a good thing and, thus, overwhelming. The big takeaways—like overall ratings for districts and schools, graduation rates, and the percentage of students who are proficient on state exams—are typically front and center in media coverage. That’s understandable, given that they’re traditional and easily understood metrics. But there are also several other measures that, while not on the radar of major media, are exactly the kind of information that families want and need when making schooling decisions. Let’s take a look at three.

Improving K–3 literacy

Last year, Ohio policymakers established a statewide initiative aimed at ensuring that schools align their instruction with the science of reading, an evidence-based instructional approach that focuses on phonics and knowledge-building. Going forward, the early literacy component on state report cards will be a crucial part of monitoring the progress of this initiative. And of the component’s three graded measures, student proficiency—how many kids are reading proficiently by the end of third grade—will draw the lion’s share of attention. That makes sense, as proficiency numbers allow us to gauge where students stand at the end of third grade. But for families, the “improving K–3 literacy” measure is, arguably, far more important.

For this indicator, the Department of Education and Workforce (DEW) uses the results of fall diagnostic assessments to determine the percentage of students who move from “not on track” to “on track” in reading from one year to the next. These results indicate how well schools are improving K–3 literacy throughout all the early grades, not just third. And for the parents of young children, knowing whether their child’s school excels or lags behind empowers them to proactively make enrollment decisions or to hold schools accountable for a troubling lack of progress. Here’s what that looks like for Columbus—a picture that indicates plenty of cause for concern.

Image 1: 2023–24 Columbus City Schools results for the improving K–3 literacy measure

Student opportunity profiles

Most families likely haven’t heard of Ohio’s student opportunity profiles, as they weren’t included on report cards until 2023. Available via a district’s or school’s report card homepage, they include metrics in two categories: one for students and one for staff.

The student-level metrics capture a broad range of activities that “support and enhance” students’ educational and social-emotional development. They are disaggregated by student demographics and grade level and include indicators such as the percentage of students enrolled in CTE, AP, IB, College Credit Plus, or honors courses; how many students participate in co-curricular activities; and how many participate in enrichment or support programs offered by the district outside of the normal school day. Meanwhile, staff metrics offer a look at student-to-staff ratios—not just teachers, but also professionals like nurses, counselors, and social workers—as well as educator experience. Let’s again illustrate how this looks for Columbus.

Image 2: 2023–24 CTE course enrollment according to Columbus City Schools student opportunity profile

What makes these profiles particularly unique is that, in addition to reporting the data, they also provide comparisons to similar districts and the state. For example, according to the student opportunity profile for Columbus City Schools, the district has a higher percentage of students participating in co-curricular activities (91.3 percent) than similar districts (82.6 percent) and the state (83.3 percent), but a lower percentage of students participating in enrichment offered by the district outside school hours (5.9 percent) compared to similar districts (13.1 percent) and the state (18.2 percent). A larger percentage of teachers and principals in Columbus have fewer than three years of experience compared to peer districts and Ohio as a whole. But Columbus has smaller staff-to-student ratios in a variety of non-teaching areas, including school nurses, counselors, and librarians. By offering these comparisons, the profiles provide important context to families and taxpayers that could shape enrollment decisions (for families) and voting choices (for taxpayers considering school board elections or levies).

Image 3: 2023–24 CTE course enrollment in similar districts according to Columbus City Schools student opportunity profile

Special education profiles

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a federal law that provides civil rights protections to students with disabilities, including the right to a free appropriate public education tailored to their individual needs. IDEA includes a series of indicators that measure services and outcomes. Each year, DEW uses these indicators to create special education profiles for districts that show their progress over time in meeting state goals for students with disabilities. As is the case with student opportunity profiles, links to special education profiles are available on the report card homepage for every district and charter school.

Image 4: 2023–24* special education profile for Columbus City Schools

The profiles organize IDEA indicators into categories based on six essential questions, which are listed below. For each indicator, the profile identifies the district’s target goal, its result, and whether the indicator is considered met, not met, or not counted. The “more information” button provides an in-depth description of each indicator, as well as targets and results for the last five school years, which can be used to identify trends.

1. Are young children with disabilities entering kindergarten ready to learn?

2. Are children with disabilities achieving at high levels?

3. To what extent do students with disabilities have access to the general education environment?

4. Are youth with disabilities prepared for life, work, and postsecondary education?

5. Does the district implement IDEA to improve services and results for children with disabilities?

6. Are children receiving equitable services and support?

***

State report cards are a crucial resource. In some states, report card frameworks do the bare minimum required by federal law, which limits their usefulness. But Ohioans have access to detailed data that go above and beyond federal requirements. The state’s “improving K–3 literacy” measure, as well as its district-specific profiles for student opportunity and special education, offer families and taxpayers invaluable information that can help them make important decisions for their children.

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1. First up today, our own Aaron Churchill was one of the guests on a podcast called The Narrative, which dropped on Friday. The topic was school choice in Ohio and included discussion of the voucher groucher lawsuit and a whole bunch of myth busting based on the claims in that lawsuit—both areas where Aaron excels. Good stuff. (Citizens for Christian Virtue, 9/13/24)
   
   

2. Also dropping on Friday: School and district report cards. Coverage by a trio of Columbus Dispatch reporters focuses on all the positive info they can muster…mostly by most past Columbus City Schools’ data very quickly. Aaron is one of the analysts quoted toward the bottom of the piece, saying, “While there’s some signs pointing upward on literacy, the sobering part of this big statewide picture is with math. We are still way behind math relative to pre-pandemic.” he added. “There are way too many students in Ohio who are struggling in this area and just not making enough progress.” (Columbus Dispatch, 9/13/24) The Dayton Daily News is focused on the statewide numbers exclusively in their first piece. Aaron once again includes his sobering analysis of math outcomes. Interestingly, DDN thinks that math proficiency is the good news, noting that it was up statewide over last year, “improving from 53 percent in all grades and all students in the 2022-2023 school year to 53.5 percent.” Pop the champagne, right? (Wrong. Aaron said “sobering”, and I listen to him.) And, weirdly, DDN folks are down on ELA proficiency, noting that it “remained flat at 60.9 percent”. Weird. (Dayton Daily News, 9/13/24) Gongwer is non-committal in their own reporting, but give room for a number of quick takes (including Aaron’s) that appear to be a live-action reenactment of the blind men describing an elephant. (Gongwer Ohio, 9/13/24)
   
   

3. Cleveland.com doesn’t have need of Aaron Churchill (or any other outside analyst) to present their charter school report card table. (Cleveland.com, 9/13/24) The ABJ doesn’t seem to need much in the way of outside analysis either, focusing on its own downbeat assessment of Summit County district performance. This despite the fact that Akron City Schools—as they teased a couple of weeks ago—substantially boosted student math performance in several areas, including a nearly 10-point increase in algebra 1 scores and an almost seven-point increase in fifth grade math. I don’t want to speak for him, but I reckon even Aaron would toast to that. (Akron Beacon Journal, 9/13/24)
   
   

4. Without citing any data, the superintendent of the Allen County ESC declared victory over pandemic learning loss in his county on Friday. “The immediate impact” of $2 million in funding from the state, he says, was “to get the students back up to where they should be if the pandemic never occurred, and we think we’ve been very successful.” Having solved that pesky problem handily, bossman is sure that students are going to be ready “for jobs that don’t even exist in the marketplace yet.” By my reckoning, this dude is an expert in things that don’t exist yet. So he’s probably right. (WLIO-TV, Lima, 9/13/24)
   
   

5. On the other hand, the interim superintendent of the lowest-performing district in the entire state is realistic and cautious in his assessment of (despite his clear and infectious optimism for) academic improvement. Rusty Clifford, interim supe of very very tiny—and very very academically-impoverished—Jefferson Twp. Local Schools (19 kids in last year’s graduating class), explains many of the changes he’s made in his few months on the job, expresses enthusiasm about a tiny uptick in student enrollment, and acknowledges the many challenges that remain. But he says the community is behind him, there will be no discussion of merging with another district, and there are brighter days just ahead. (Dayton Daily News, 9/15/24)

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Today, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce released its annual school report card, which is based on data from the 2023–24 school year. Included are five-star ratings that provide parents and the public with a user-friendly overview of district and school performance. As customary, it also includes a wealth of data that shine light on where Ohio students stand academically and their progress over time.

“School report cards always ground us in reality,” said Aaron Churchill, Ohio Research Director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “This year’s data are another wake-up call, as they show too many Ohio students continuing to struggle in math and reading.”

As the chart below indicates, just 64.5 percent of Ohio third graders achieved reading proficiency last school year, while 55.9 percent were proficient in algebra I. Proficiency in these grades and subjects have risen since the pandemic low in 2020–21, yet still remain slightly behind pre-pandemic levels.

Statewide proficiency rates for 3rd grade reading and high school algebra (2018–19 to 2023–24)

“Research demonstrates that academic proficiency is highly predictive of college and career success,” continued Churchill. “While there are bright spots—including upticks in third grade reading proficiency—there is still more work ahead to ensure that all students have the skills needed for life after high school.”

High rates of absenteeism continue to hold back academic progress. As the chart below indicates, 25.6 percent of Ohio students were chronically absent last year (missing more than 10 percent of the school year). While lower than peak absenteeism shortly after the pandemic, these data indicate continuing challenges with student disengagement.

Statewide chronic absenteeism rates (2018–19 to 2023–24)

“Students need to attend school regularly to get the most from their education,” said Churchill. “To their credit, Ohio policymakers have recognized the attendance crisis and recently pledged to cut chronic absenteeism by half in the next five years. To make good on this promise, state leaders will need to reestablish a clear expectation of daily attendance, while also enlisting parents who can help make sure children are getting to school every day.”

As another school year begins, I have been struck by the many different ways leaders and educators talk about instructional materials. At meet-the-teacher nights or staff meetings to explain the move to a new curriculum or in board meetings to explain plans for the year, educators often talk about the role the curriculum will play with bold claims. I have heard:

• “These materials will ensure every student gets excellent instruction every day.”
• “These materials will improve student learning.”
• “These materials will shift us to the science of reading.”
• “These materials will ensure every teacher teaches grade-level work.”

As a big believer in the importance of instructional materials, I celebrate the focus they are getting. However, I observe these claims with growing concern.

As I reflect on what is driving that concern, I realize that supporting so many school systems through adoption and implementation has both increased my conviction in the critical role that high-quality instructional materials play and radically changed my perspective on why they matter.

At various points over the last ten years, I believed that better materials would—to some degree—improve instruction and student learning directly. Admittedly, I was a slow convert to high-quality materials playing any role in instructional improvement, having taken pride in writing my own materials as a teacher and coaching teachers with a focus on assessments and backwards design for many years. I came to see their value in helping teachers see what the new standards look like in action and allowing teachers to focus on engaging students rather than writing lessons. I believed they could support instructional improvement. There is compelling research on the impact of better tasks. I expected better materials would directly lead to significant instructional shifts (e.g., shifting from skills-based ELA instruction to knowledge-based instruction) and at least some improvement in student learning.

However, after seeing high-quality materials implemented in such a wide range of ways over time and across contexts, I have come to see materials as an unreliable lever to improve instruction. Seeing such a wide range of implementation gives me little faith the materials will cause instructional improvements or learning gains on their own.

In this same time, however, my conviction in the importance of high-quality instructional materials has grown because I have seen the powerful role they play in creating conditions for better instructional support for teachers. I have seen high-quality instructional materials improve teacher support better than any federal policy, professional development trend, or investment in people alone.

When the instructional materials are treated as the foundation for teacher support, I have seen their implementation lead to incredible growth in student learning and teacher satisfaction and efficacy. In those examples:

• Teachers used collaborative planning time to internalize the content of lessons.
• Leaders used the materials (not a set of instructional strategies) to anchor their vision of instruction and drive their feedback.
• Teachers used the materials like a common language to discuss instruction and focus problem solving.

In my experiences supporting implementation over ten years, high-quality instructional materials have had less direct impact on instruction than I imagined they would but more impact on teacher support than I imagined they could.

Changing perspective on why materials matter has changed what I see as important in their implementation. Because I believe their value lies primarily in improving teacher support:

• Above a threshold of quality and standard alignment, I care deeply about how understandable and accessible the materials are for coaches and principals.
• I focus more than I used to on principal and school leader training on supporting teachers’ use of the materials.
• I pay more attention to whether school system leaders are monitoring the way leaders are using the materials to improve the quality of teacher support.

Above all, shifting the role I see materials playing has shifted the way I think about success. I don’t expect to see better student learning outcomes if the implementation approach has not improved the quality of teacher support. Instead, I only expect to see these outcomes if a system effectively uses high-quality instructional materials to improve teacher support.

As a result, in the year to come, I hope to hear the messages about materials in board meetings and teacher conferences and faculty meetings shift to “these materials will allow us to provide better support for our teachers and leaders.”

Editor’s note: This was first published in an email newsletter from Emily Freitag in her role as CEO of Instruction Partners.