EdReports doesn’t rate materials on whether they have a successful track record in helping students learn, but rather how well they align with Common Core State Standards. And even after they amended their process to try to correct for some of these challenges, experts say EdReports hasn’t gone back and re-reviewed materials using the new criteria—so materials green-lit before remain so today.
“Relying on EdReports blindly is not reliable,” said education journalist Natalie Wexler, who wrote her own widely-read critique examining how EdReports reviews could be misleading to consumers last year.
That would be big news to practically every state leader looking for something good their schools can use. And when I asked a small group of researchers and experts whether a better review platform exists? Also, no. Maybe. With caveats.
I think it goes without saying that curriculum choice, what students actually learn all day at school, is important; research has confirmed it. Using learning materials that are well-designed, organized, and sequential, year upon year, add up to more than the sum of their parts, according to cognitive science, because a store of knowledge in long-term memory is so crucial to the kind of thinking and analyzing we want students to be able to do.
But U.S. schools have just recently jumped back on the bandwagon of believing that using a curriculum—any curriculum—is good in the first place.