A Recipe for Student Success Glosses Over a Key Ingredient

A new report from TNTP lists some important factors but downplays the role of curriculum.

Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash

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The education organization TNTP has issued a number of influential reports, including The Widget Effect (2009), which found that schools treat teachers as though they were all the same, regardless of their effectiveness; The Mirage (2015), which revealed that professional development for teachers, as typically delivered, has no discernible impact; and The Opportunity Myth (2018), which laid out the case that most students aren’t being assigned grade-level work or receiving strong instruction.

Last month TNTP issued yet another report, Paths of Opportunity, which concluded that education alone isn’t enough to ensure socioeconomic mobility. At the same time, the report found that students from poor families with strong academic records were almost three times as likely to earn a living wage and twice as likely to report high levels of well-being by age 30 as their socioeconomic peers with weak academic outcomes. As I argued in a previous post, such dramatic results are nothing to be sneezed at.

Today, in a report called The Opportunity Makers, TNTP digs deeper into how schools can enable students to defy the odds. While it’s certainly not the first time this kind of inquiry has been undertaken, it’s a question that bears repeated analyses.

After studying 28,000 elementary and middle schools where students start out below grade level—schools serving low-income and historically marginalized populations—TNTP found that only five percent helped their students catch up by enabling them to gain at least 1.3 years of learning in one school year, as measured by standardized test scores. These schools were able to maintain those kinds of results for a decade.

TNTP studied seven of the schools with the goal of identifying the keys to their success—policies and practices that could be replicated by other schools and school systems across the country to change the trajectories of many thousands more students.

The researchers identified three areas schools in which the schools excelled, and used an in-depth case study to illustrate each one:

• Create a culture of belonging: Instead of focusing on proficiency targets or groups of students—or even just individual warm teacher-student relationships—these schools have policies, practices, and systems that, according to the report, respect students’ identities, recognize their agency, and affirm their ability to succeed.

• Deliver consistent grade-level instruction: In The Opportunity Myth, TNTP found that at most schools students receive good or strong instruction in only half their classrooms. At these “trajectory-changing schools,” the average lesson was good or strong in 90 percent of classrooms, and very few were considered poor. That was the result of “school-wide structures like a strong shared curriculum, structured collaboration, and focused feedback.”

• Build a coherent instructional program: At many schools, students who are struggling get “intervention” using different materials and assessments from those being used in regular classrooms. Trajectory-changing schools ensure that the curricula and assessments in these settings are coordinated—so that, for example, during intervention a student might get a preview of a concept that will soon be covered in class, helping to set her up for success.

These are all great suggestions, but based on my own observations in schools—including one of the three profiled in the report—TNTP has downplayed a crucial factor: curriculum. While the authors of the report make a few passing references to it, they also take pains to stress that, as they put it, “it’s possible to get trajectory-changing results without a perfect curriculum.”

The Role of Curriculum

That’s loading the dice a bit, because there’s no such thing as a perfect curriculum. But there are surely better and worse curricula. And it’s a lot harder to get these kinds of results with an inferior one.

The report doesn’t say that, but it’s what I was told by Michael Franco, vice president of national consulting at TNTP and a member of the team that produced the report. Numerous studies have backed up that perception, finding that a “high-quality” curriculum can have a larger impact on student achievement than measures like decreasing class size or offering teachers merit pay.

Micah Westerman, the principal of one of the schools profiled in the report, told me that his school “wouldn’t have been able to achieve the same level of success if we weren’t simultaneously focusing on the curriculum we were putting in front of our students.” And yet the report didn’t even mention that the school—the Brightwood campus of the Center City Public Charter School network in Washington, D.C.—is using curriculum that is considered highly effective.

The report does mention that another of the profiled schools, Trousdale County Elementary, uses “high-quality instructional materials,” or HQIM, but it doesn’t name the specific curricula. In an email, Franco told me that TNTP made that choice because it “did not want to unintentionally communicate that it was the only curriculum that would lead to similar success.”

Franco also noted that in its work with schools, TNTP emphasizes that using HQIM is “one of the best strategies for accelerating grade-level and content-rich experiences for all students.”  He pointed out that the report acknowledges—in the case of Trousdale—that HQIM can take consistency of instruction “to the next level.” In addition, he said TNTP is recommending the adoption of HQIM in “action guides” for policy makers and school and system leaders that accompany the report.

The report itself doesn’t emphasize HQIM, Franco told me, because some of the seven schools in the study were able to achieve remarkable results even without such resources. In the case of Brightwood, he said, curriculum wasn’t mentioned because the school was being profiled to illustrate its success with just one of the key factors TNTP identified, “creating a sense of belonging.”

The connection between an effective curriculum and the other two factors—consistency and coherence—is obvious. If you have a defined curriculum in place, and teachers actually use it, it’s easier to achieve consistent and coherent instruction. And having a good curriculum appears to make it more likely that teachers will use it. According to the TNTP report, only about a third of elementary school teachers nationwide say they “mostly use” the curriculum adopted by their school. At Trousdale, 80 percent of teachers said that.

In addition, a curriculum that proceeds in a logical sequence can ensure that students are acquiring the knowledge and skills that will be assumed by the texts they’re expected to read at higher grade levels. If teachers are left to create their own curriculum—which happens more often than non-educators might think—or if they’re expected to use ineffective curriculum, students are more likely to get a patchwork, ineffective approach that prevents them from developing to their full potential. TNTP emphasizes that students should get “grade-level” content, but the curriculum plays a crucial role in equipping them to access that content.

Perhaps less obviously, curriculum can also be crucial in regard to that third factor—belonging—for which Brightwood was profiled. If students are getting a curriculum that sets them up for failure by depriving them of the knowledge they need to be academically successful, it’s much harder for them to feel they “belong.” Conversely, if the curriculum is enabling them to succeed, they’re more likely to feel part of the school community. Having spent a year following a second-grade class at Brightwood as part of my research for a book—and comparing that classroom to one at another school that was using an ineffective curriculum—I saw that happening with my own eyes.

Effective vs. Ineffective Elementary Literacy Curricula

While much of the research on the power of curriculum has been done in the area of math, there is similar evidence with regard to literacy curricula. I would argue that the difference between an effective and ineffective curriculum is even more significant in the area of literacy, especially at the elementary level. Clearly, it’s crucial to provide children with the systematic instruction in phonics and other foundational reading skills that many need to become proficient readers. But that’s only part of what a literacy curriculum generally covers.

Most literacy curricula also try to teach reading comprehension, and the standard approach there has been to focus on supposedly abstract skills, like making inferences. Students practice the skills on texts on random topics that are theoretically easy enough for them to read on their own. In some schools, teachers are left to their own devices to figure out which skills to teach and how to teach them. Many others use literacy curricula that put comprehension skills in the foreground.

The assumption is that such skills are transferable, but evidence from cognitive science indicates that they’re not. Whether you can, for example, make an inference depends far more on whether you have the background knowledge and vocabulary needed to understand a text than on how many hours you’ve spent practicing making inferences.

In the last ten years or so, a different kind of literacy curriculum has started appearing—one that puts content in the foreground rather than comprehension skills. There are now several such curricula available, all of which immerse children in topics in history and science as well as literature. They focus on building the kind of knowledge and vocabulary that fuel reading comprehension, bringing in whatever skills and strategies are appropriate to a particular text or topic. From what I’ve seen and heard, kids not only are better equipped for future success through such a curriculum but also find it far more engaging than the usual round of “skills.”

The Problem of “HQIM”

To the extent that the TNTP report mentions curriculum, it says nothing about the difference between a literacy curriculum focused on comprehension skills and one that puts content in the foreground. Instead, it uses the vague term “strong” to describe the kind of curriculum that works—or, like many other education organizations, the blanket term “HQIM.” The report doesn’t define what it means by that term, but it’s generally used to refer to curricula that got high ratings from an organization called EdReports. And that’s a whole other problem.

While EdReports has given its blessing to some curricula that do a good job of building knowledge, in recent years it’s also applied that label to some curricula that don’t. So even if TNTP had placed more emphasis on the role of strong curriculum, the report wouldn’t have been particularly helpful in guiding schools to identify which curricula are likely to work best.

There is no perfect guide to effective curriculum—just as there is no perfect curriculum—but the most reliable resource, in my view, is the website of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. (I serve on the board of its parent organization.) Brightwood and Trousdale have long been using curricula identified by both EdReports and the Campaign as effective in building knowledge. According to Franco, two other schools of the seven that TNTP studied were using literacy curricula that were highly rated by EdReports but not identified as knowledge-building by the Campaign.

I was able to find out from the Trousdale website that the school uses Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) in K-2 and EL Education in 3-5, although it was not clear how long they had been doing that. Brightwood—along with the other schools in the Center City network—started using CKLA in K-3 in 2012, according to Westerman. In 2017, the network switched to a curriculum called Wit & Wisdom for grades 3 to 8 while continuing to use CKLA in K-2. In 2021, they extended Wit & Wisdom to K-2.

(It’s important to know how long a school has been using a knowledge-building curriculum, because it can take several years for the results to be reflected in standardized test scores. It would also be helpful to know how these schools’ students fare in high school, because that’s when the benefits of a knowledge-building elementary curriculum may become truly apparent. The test scores TNTP used to measure progress extend only through eighth grade.)

Why Not Talk More About Curriculum?

All trajectory-changing schools deserve kudos—and those that manage to change students’ trajectories in the absence of truly effective curricula probably deserve even more credit than others, since their road has been harder. As the report makes clear, an effective curriculum isn’t an absolute necessity.

Nor, of course, is it a guarantee of success. If administrators don’t provide teachers with good training and support in using an effective curriculum, they may not see results. Many other factors—including strong leadership and caring faculty—are also crucial. To take a case in point, all six schools in the Center City network have been using the same knowledge-building curricula as the Brightwood campus for the same amount of time, but—presumably for a variety of reasons—the other campuses have apparently not achieved the same results.

TNTP has provided a valuable service in shedding light on factors that can lead schools to success, and I understand its reluctance to give the impression that effective curriculum is a sine qua non. Plus, getting into the nuances of what makes a curriculum truly effective can be complicated.

Still, I find it puzzling that TNTP chose to more or less bury the curriculum issue in its report. True, you don’t want to discourage teachers and administrators who aren’t using a knowledge-building curriculum from trying to improve outcomes for their students. But shouldn’t they at least be aware that it would be a lot easier if they had one?

Here’s an analogy: Let’s say I was writing a report that analyzed the careers of successful runners, and I found that a certain kind of running shoe was enormously helpful to their performance. Some runners managed to do well without it, but they had to do much more training (or whatever—I’m not a runner). I wouldn’t want to give the impression that runners need to have that kind of shoe to win a race. But if I were writing a report intended to guide other runners to success, I would certainly mention the advantages of having the shoe. And if I were a runner, I’d definitely want to know about it. Eventually, that knowledge might create the kind of awareness and demand that would lead to better running shoes for all.

I’d say it’s at least as important to know about the potential impact of a good curriculum as a good running shoe. Without oversimplifying the issue, we need to give it the attention it deserves—for the sake of millions of students and their teachers.