The number of teachers using curriculum aligned to academic standards has ticked up since 2019, rising more quickly in states that have adopted policies incentivizing the use of high-quality materials than in others, according to a new report from the RAND Corp. Teachers are much more likely to use standards-aligned math curriculum than English language arts, and more likely to use it in elementary and middle school grades than high school, researchers found.
The results buoy a four-year-old effort by 13 states to push teachers to use higher-quality classroom materials. States belonging to the network, organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers, generally saw quicker adoption of curricula vetted for quality by the nonprofit ratings group EdReports.
By incentivizing the use of better materials, members of the network hope to influence what is taught, by extension increasing students’ academic achievement. Past research has shown that the mere existence of academic standards has little effect on what happens in classrooms, but early efforts to promote the use of curriculum that conforms to expectations of what students should know at any particular grade level appear promising.
Just 22 percent of a nationally representative sample of high school teachers surveyed in spring 2021 as a part of RAND’s American Instructional Resources Survey reported using aligned math and reading materials, with more than 70 percent using no curriculum at all or materials that did not conform to state academic standards or were unrated.