Education Week - November 5, 2014 - 10

Educators Weigh Texts
For Common Core
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
fering each other feedback. A floor
below, a second group -new to the
process-learned to use the EdReports.org
evaluation tool.
The very-preliminary results
shared by the veteran group
were variable, to say the least.
Some texts they'd reviewed sailed
through the first "gateway," which
looks at whether the materials are
on grade level and follow the standards'
learning progressions, with
"
That's what we
struggle with. We all
want to call out the
strengths."
JENNIFER ABLER
Teacher, Livonia, Mich.
high scores. Other curricula received
barely a single point on the
scoring guide, giving the teachers,
despite their best efforts, little to
praise. (Education Week has agreed
not to disclose preliminary results
by publisher.)
"That's what we struggle with,"
said Jennifer Abler, a reviewer and
a high school math teacher from
Livonia, Mich. "We all want to call
out the strengths."
When the first set of reviews
from EdReports.org are made public
in February or March, they will
look at 21 instructional series for
K-8 mathematics from widely used
publishers, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill,
and Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, as well as a few smaller
publishers that were recommended
through state review processes.
The reviews will be free and easily
accessible online.
The group has about $3 million
in grant funding, most of which
comes from the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, the William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the
Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley
Charitable Trust. (The Gates and
Hewlett foundations also help, respectively,
to support news coverage
of college- and career-ready
standards and deeper learning in
Education Week.)
EdReports.org officially launched
in August with 19 curriculum reviewers,
about half of whom are
classroom teachers. (Not everyone
from this group was invited to the
New York City training partly because
of budget constraints.) It recently
added a second cohort with
28 more reviewers, again mostly
practicing teachers but also academic
coaches and school and district
leaders, selected from a larger
pool of more than 100 applicants.
The reviewers, more than a dozen
of whom are National Board-certified,
have on average about 14
years of teaching experience. They
are paid $2,000 for completing reviews
of two instructional series.
Eric Hirsch, the executive director
of EdReports.org and its only
full-time employee so far, said the
group pegged its initial reviews
for late winter "to be relevant for
purchasing decisions for next year."
The organization also plans to add
up to 150 more reviewers in 2015,
when it will begin examining high
school math and K-12 English/language
arts curricula.
Process Up Close
Working in teams of four, with
one person designated as facilitator,
the reviewers evaluate two instructional
series, either for grades K-5
or 6-8, over several months. They
spend about three or four hours a
week looking over the texts on their
own, then meet in a weekly video
conference to discuss their findings
with the rest of the team.
Most of the reviewers also participate
in a webinar at some point-
keeping their identities hidden-
with the publishing companies
they're evaluating to learn more
about the print or digital curricula's
features.
Each curriculum is measured
against three benchmarks, known
as gateways. The first gateway,
which a text must pass to move
along in the process, determines if
it meets the common core's expectations
for focus and coherence-in
other words, if it sticks mainly to
grade-level content and follows a
logical sequence for math learning.
The second gateway looks at rigor;
the third focuses on usability.
At the recent training, the veteran
cohort talked mainly about curricular
focus. For example, what if just
one or two questions in a textbook
were off grade level? Should it get
zero credit for that measure?
"It seems very harsh that if one
question is off, they get a zero," Ms.
Abler of Michigan said to a small
group. Another reviewer chimed
in that she wouldn't fail a student
for getting only a single question
wrong.
"One thing we're trying to do is
put pressure on the publishers to
do better," replied Melissa Hurt,
a curriculum coordinator for the
Germantown Municipal district in
Shelby County, Tenn. "If the grand
purpose is to make a better product,
then we need to be harsh."
Some of the teachers clearly
struggled with the process.
"At some point, you feel very bad"
when a text continually receives
poor scores, said Cassandra Joss,
a suburban Detroit kindergarten
teacher who works with BetterLesson's
Master Teacher Project, a
10 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 5, 2014 | www.edweek.org
partnership with the National Education
Association. That said, she
was steadfast that the scores were
justified, for instance, when a team
found 6th grade material embedded
in 3rd grade lessons.
The highest-scoring materials
seemed to warrant the least discussion,
though the reviewers did
remind each other to steer clear
of words like "great" in favor of offering
hard evidence for their decisions.
Views
From Publishers
What makes this work particularly
thorny is that the field hasn't
agreed on what curriculum alignment
looks like.
"The more one talks to various
education researchers, the more
they begin to feel that alignment
is to some degree in the eyes of the
beholder," said Jay A. Diskey, the
executive director of the Washington-based
Association of American
Publishers' P-12 learning group.
"We've seen cases where certain
education researchers look at material
and say it's not aligned, then we
see the same materials looked at by
states, and they say it is aligned."
Overall, publishers are eager to
see the results of the EdReports.org
reviews, said Mr. Diskey, but also
feel some anxiety about them.
Comments from some of those
publishers varied. While Lynne
Munson, the president and executive
director of Common Core, a
FROM TOP: Educators
work on evaluating K-8
mathematics materials
for their alignment with
the Common Core State
Standards during a
weekend training
session last month that
was organized by
EdReports.org in
New York City.
Educators scrutinized a
set of mathematics
textbooks during one of
EdReports.org's training
and evaluation sessions.
Washington-based nonprofit organization
that publishes the Eureka
Math curricula, has said she is "extremely
excited" about the EdReports.org
reviews, a spokesperson
from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
declined to comment "on a process
we have yet to experience." Pearson
and McGraw-Hill chose not to offer
comments.
The reviewers are eager as well-
mainly to ensure their efforts will
lead to better classroom materials.
"Every educator in my state is
constantly asking, 'What should I
be using and how do I know if it's
good?' " said Dana Cartier, a mathcontent
specialist at the Illinois
Center for School Improvement in
Chicago and Naperville, which supports
school-improvement efforts
across the state. "I think a lot of
publishers are going to be fairly unhappy
with the results. But that's
why it's so necessary."
"The reason I wanted to do this in
the first place is the resources we
have [in Tennessee] are very shallow,
and they don't reach the depth
where we're supposed to take students,"
said Ms. Hurt. "We can help
the publishers see that everything
they print has an impact. If we are
strategic in the way we're going to
present this to companies, they're
more likely to change for the better."
The CURRICULUM MATTERS blog
tracks news and trends on this issue.
www.edweek.org/go/
curriculummatters
Photos by Cassi Alexandra for Education Week
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Education Week - November 5, 2014

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