What We Teach Matters: Great Schools Start with Great Curriculum

Many aspects of the education reform agenda have taken a beating over the past two years — states across the country have dumbed down tests, abandoned meaningful teacher evaluations, and loosened accountability for poor school performance. In one important way, however, it is a fruitful time for reform: There is more attention being paid than ever before to the essential building blocks of great schools, content and curriculum.

Twenty years ago, no one viewed curriculum as a solution to poor academic performance. The conversation was focused on class size, teacher quality, higher standards, and greater accountability. Some of these priorities drove policy changes that did have an impact, at least in math: proficiency across the nation rose, particularly for the lowest performing students. But with only incremental gains in reading over the same period, many are turning their attention to what is actually being taught in our classrooms.

At Success Academy, we have always believed passionately that what kids were taught each day in the classroom was just as important as the systems and structures within which this learning took place. From the beginning, we sought to deliver a thoughtfully sequenced, content-rich, and challenging curriculum to our kids. That meant making sure that scholars had daily science, that they studied chess, art, music, and theater, and that they went on regular field trips to expand their knowledge about the world. It also meant implementing a great literacy curriculum that immersed our scholars in great books, cultivated their love of reading, and built their capacity to uncover and analyze the big ideas in everything they read. Such a curriculum did not seem to exist on the market, so we developed our own.

In 2014, Success Academy gained national attention when our schools’ performance remained relatively steady and then rapidly rose in the wake of the more rigorous Common Core-aligned state tests. In district and charter school networks across the country, proficiency had plummeted; educators were eager to find out what was different about our model. One answer I unfailingly gave to those who asked was that we pay an immense amount of attention to content. Strong teachers, engaging instruction, and a supportive school culture are all vital, but if you are not exposing students to rich, challenging subject matter — to high-quality literature, complex math problems, and sophisticated science concepts — they cannot possibly become truly college ready.

In this experience lay the seeds of the Success Academy Education Institute, an enterprise to share our curriculum and school design broadly and at no cost. We saw that schools and teachers lacked access to a great curriculum — teachers told us stories of cobbling together materials from the internet — and we realized we could meet a chronic need by sharing resources that were classroom-tested and had a track record of achieving great results for kids. Last June, we launched the Ed Institute’s digital platform, making available our complete elementary school THINK Literacy curriculum. Since then, 30,000 visitors — representing 49 states and more than 90 countries — have come to the site.

This week marks a new milestone. We published our middle school literacy curriculum, along with our first set of online courses for educators. With these new releases, our comprehensive K-8 literacy curriculum is now available on demand and at no cost to educators across the country and the globe (register at Ed Institute for access).

Middle schools is a tricky time for literacy. Teachers must lead students in the kind of rigorous reading, writing, and literary analysis they will encounter in high school and college, but they still need to teach fluency and reading comprehension. As texts become more complex, many students continue to need scaffolded support.

The Success Academy middle school curriculum gives teachers the tools to address both these needs, while instilling in students a passion for reading. Our literacy curriculum is, above all, about teaching students to uncover, analyze, and write about the powerful ideas in the texts they read. Too many literacy programs focus on skills and strategies such as “making predictions,” or “drawing inferences.” This approach is not only boring for kids, it misses the reason why we read in the first place. Ideas are what engage us as readers — they are what makes us fall in love with reading! — and uncovering the big ideas is what we focus on in every aspect of our literacy instruction.

Of course, curriculum is just a starting point — ongoing planning and training are necessary to ensure teachers are equipped to deliver it through rigorous, engaging instruction. Too many teachers don’t have time for this kind of planning however, because they are forced to spend hours every day creating lesson plans and hunting down texts and other materials they hope will engage students. By sharing the resources we have painstakingly developed over 12 years of trial and error in the classroom, we hope to free teachers from this time-consuming burden. Instead, they can spend their time on the intellectual preparation necessary to deliver top-notch literacy instruction that helps students become lifelong readers and learners.

I hope you will take a moment to explore the new materials on the Ed Institute, and share them widely with educators in your network.