“It was one of the most powerful visits I’ve ever taken,” said Sheila Briggs, an assistant state superintendent with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She was describing a visit last fall to Lake Pontchartrain Elementary School, a low-income school in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, about thirty miles northwest of New Orleans. “The ability to hear what the state education agency was doing and then go into classrooms and see direct evidence was phenomenal,” Briggs gushed. “I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else.”
Officials of state education agencies are not known for hyperbole. Maintaining data systems, drafting rules and regulations, and monitoring compliance are not the stuff of breathless raves—especially in Louisiana, whose education system has long ranked near the bottom nationwide on measures of student achievement and high-school graduation rates. Yet in the last year, education leaders from across the country have beaten a path to the Pelican State to see what they might learn from education superintendent John White, assistant superintendent of academics Rebecca Kockler, and their colleagues. Together, this team has quietly engineered a system of curriculum-driven reforms that have prompted Louisiana’s public school teachers to change the quality of their instruction in measurable and observable ways unmatched in other states, including jurisdictions that, like Louisiana, adopted the Common Core or similar academic standards.
The linchpin of the state’s work has been providing incentives for districts and schools statewide to adopt and implement a coherent, high-quality curriculum, particularly in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics, and to use that curriculum as the hook on which everything else hangs: assessment, professional development, and teacher training. Most notably, White and Kockler have pulled off these reforms in the face of strident political resistance to Common Core and without running afoul of districts and teachers in this staunch local-control state.
In 2016, when RAND researchers set out to study Common Core implementation at the state level, they found something unexpected. Using data from the organization’s American Teacher Panel, a standing nationwide sample of about 2,700 teachers, the researchers noticed “large and intriguing differences” between Louisiana teachers and those in other states. The former were far more likely to be using instructional materials aligned with Common Core standards. They also demonstrated better understanding of the standards and taught their students in ways that the standards were meant to encourage. “We saw consistently higher results in Louisiana,” says Julia Kaufman, a RAND analyst. “There were occasional high points in other states, but we kept seeing this difference between Louisiana [teachers] and other teachers....We just thought there was a story there.”
There is a story, and it’s about curriculum—perhaps the last, best, yet almost entirely un-pulled education-reform lever. Despite persuasive evidence suggesting that a high-quality curriculum is a more cost-effective means of improving student outcomes than many more-popular measures, such as merit pay for teachers or reducing class size, states have largely ignored curriculum reform.
Louisiana began publishing free, annotated reviews of K–12 textbooks and curriculum programs in ELA and math, sorting the materials into three “tiers.” If a curriculum was judged to “exemplify quality,” it earned the Tier 1 designation; programs judged to be “approaching quality” were labeled Tier 2; and those seen as “not representing quality” went into Tier 3. Significantly, the quality reviews were not conducted by bureaucrats in Baton Rouge, but by a network of “teacher leaders,” handpicked by the Louisiana Department of Education for their demonstrated teaching and leadership prowess and drawn from every region of the state and every grade level. While the state created the rubrics for the curriculum, it was the teachers who did the evaluations—a feature that draws praise from the state’s largest teachers union. “We had lots of buy-in,” says Larry Carter, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers. “There’s some sense of stability to how education is being delivered to students.”
State leaders sweetened the adoption pot by giving all Tier 1 vendors statewide contracts. Typically, this enabled districts to use the products of those vendors at discounted prices and without having to undergo separate procurement processes. “Districts are going to do what they believe is best, and we want to help them be positioned to do so,” says Kockler. The key was offering incentives for districts to make good decisions, a process she describes as making the best choice the easy choice.
“American policymakers seldom view curriculum as a serious lever for change,” observes Ashley Berner, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. Requiring children to learn anything in particular, she notes, is considered “pedagogically suspect.” Pitched and passionate battles over course content have made curriculum resemble a third rail in many states. But the failure of states to exert influence or offer expertise on curriculum leaves these decisions to districts, schools, even individual teachers, which risks robbing students of coherence and consistency. Local control is a central feature of American public education, but Louisiana’s reforms offer a glimpse of how to thread the needle, honoring community control while encouraging high-quality curriculum statewide. The state’s children and schools are showing the positive effects of that strategy—and other states are beginning to take notice.
Editor’s note: This article was adapted from “Louisiana Threads the Needle on Ed Reform” in the Fall 2017 issue of Education Next, where portions of it will appear.
