MAKING THE GRADE: The jury’s still out as to whether any education technology materials really “works.” (And some researchers have found that school decision-makers don’t actually care about efficacy as people assume). But that’s not stopping one North Carolina-based nonprofit from trying to help school leaders make more informed choices around the curriculum they use.
Last week, EdReports, a group that reviews curriculum materials for alignment to Common Core and other state standards, has reviewed and awarded high grades for two programs: Carnegie Learning’s blended middle-school math program for grades 6-8, and Open Up Resource’s English Language Arts curriculum for grades K-5.
Launched in 2015, EdReports enlists a team of educators who review curricular materials according to three “gateways”:
- focus and coherence;
- rigor;
- usability.
Each curriculum is evaluated by a team of five reviewers, who each pore through the materials to see whether they meet the criteria for the three gateways. (There’s a rubric that EdReports provides that helps guide them through this process.) But only curricula that meet or partially meet expectations for the first gateway will be evaluated for the second, and so forth for the third gateway. This means that curricula that do not pass the first gateway (focus and coherence) are not evaluated for rigor and usability.
To date, EdReports lists reviews for 57 math curriculum sets and 21 English Language Arts curriculum sets for grades K-12. Each curriculum set gets a report for each grade it covers. (So a middle-school math set covering grades 6 to 8 will have 3 reports.) Here are some numbers provided by the organization about how the materials stack up to their rating:
