Are High-Quality-Instructional Materials Actually Quality?
I have been part of or have led curriculum adoptions for two school districts over the past four years, and one thing is abundantly clear: high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) are not always as high quality as one would hope. As is often the case with curriculum adoptions, the procurement process is mired in bureaucracy, bidding requirements, and compromise. Writing a tailored curriculum rubric that anticipates every potential flaw deeply ingrained in a vendor’s materials can feel like guessing how many needles are hidden in the proverbial haystack. Many procurements start with a long wishlist, only to end in quiet acceptance that no curriculum package will include all the shiny bells and whistles a district wants. Small-scale pilots can help teachers and curriculum leaders gauge the effectiveness of materials in the real setting of a classroom and school year, but in many cases, adoptions become a matter of choosing the best among imperfect options.
In the aftermath of COVID-related school closures, access to ESSER funding meant districts suddenly had the resources to purchase new instructional materials, expand professional development, and respond to students’ urgent academic recovery needs—often for the first time. This was particularly true in the relatively large coastal North Carolina district where I worked. Suddenly, vendors were calling the district office more insistently, peddling one curriculum over another and bragging about their EdReports scores. Thanks to billions in federal aid, publishers and edtech companies won big on the promise of better outcomes for students.
If HQIM could, on their own, guarantee better achievement for students, it might be easier to accept the uncomfortable reality that publishers and edtech companies have profited enormously from students’ educational losses. High-quality instructional materials (HQIM) have become the latest “must-have” trend in school systems around the United States. While relatively few states require districts to use specific state-approved instructional materials across all subject areas, many states have boards or review processes that evaluate textbooks and create approved adoption lists for districts to consider (Doan & Kaufman, 2024). With the rise of Science of Reading legislation requiring or encouraging the adoption of approved early-literacy materials, alongside a shrinking pool of qualified teachers, more districts now find themselves in the HQIM conundrum. Yet the real question remains: Are HQIM really all they’re cracked up to be? And do they consistently deliver on their promise of improving student outcomes?
Take, for instance, a ninth-grade lesson from a recently adopted secondary ELA curriculum. The lesson is designed to practice Common Core Standard RI.9-10.3, which asks students to analyze how an author unfolds a series of ideas or events, including the order in which the points are made, how they are introduced and developed, and the connections drawn between them. In other words, several complex and somewhat distinct analytical tasks bundled into one standard. Unsurprisingly, the standard becomes the entire focus of the lesson. The activity appears in the course sequence labeled as “knowledge building,” intended to help students access the complex analytical work required by the unit’s anchor text. The culminating activity asks students to explore conceptions of “villainy” within this text and others that students will read throughout the unit.
Yet the accompanying activity is little more than a rudimentary graphic organizer. Students are asked to analyze how the author organizes the ideas in the essay by first identifying connections in the text and then explaining how the author introduces and develops those connections. On the surface, this lesson addresses the standard. It may also, on the surface, check a box that provides the illusion it is building knowledge about “villainy” as a broader, perspective-dependent theme.
Ironically, the lesson’s emphasis on “close reading” keeps students at the surface of the text. Rather than helping them understand why this essay matters or how it deepens the unit’s larger questions about villainy, the activity largely asks students to dissect the text through strategy-based analysis. It does little to build on the historical or authorial context of the piece. Had it assumed that approach, students might have learned that the author was a prominent Latin American journalist, essayist, and political activist whose work explored the moral and psychological toll of political violence in Colombia during La Violencia, a deeply divided and bloody period of mid-20th-century Colombian history marked by widespread displacement and loss of life. With that context, students might also be better positioned to consider the moral weight of the story’s title, the choices made by its characters, and the ways the piece may reflect the author’s own values and beliefs.
Given how many American students are unlikely to be familiar with Colombia’s political history, it seems a disservice that this context is not meaningfully addressed in the lesson’s “knowledge building” section. To the publisher’s credit, teachers are given a brief, two-page context document that provides some of this overview. But there is no activity in which the teacher is expected to teach that context directly to students. Educators would have to know enough about the discipline, the text, and the historical moment to recognize that this background knowledge is essential—not optional—for helping students understand the purpose of the piece. Without it, students are left to practice arbitrary skills like “drawing connections” between ideas, events, and people without fully understanding the world those ideas, events, and people come from. Like many commercial curricula, these materials rely on cold reading under the illusion of building knowledge, while continuing to treat comprehension as isolated skills practice rather than the complex work of helping students enter, question, and interpret a text.
A cursory glance at EdReports shows that this curriculum meets expectations in all three gateways: standards alignment, building knowledge/content, and usability. The truth is, no curriculum has everything, and many districts decide that vetted materials are still better than relying entirely on the variance inherent in teacher-created resources. The problem is that meeting review criteria is not the same as ensuring every lesson is instructionally sound. To meet one of EdReports’ primary gateways, curricula must emphasize alignment to state standards, because that’s how they are evaluated, marketed, and sold. Since many states align closely with the Common Core State Standards still, even when they have renamed or slightly revised them, publishers often begin with standards alignment as their foundation.
That creates a deeper problem when many teachers report learning how to teach their discipline from the curriculum itself rather than from their preparation programs (Griffith & Fitzpatrick, 2026). Something is inherently missing when teachers do not know enough about their discipline to judge whether a lesson actually teaches students what it claims to teach. Teachers who lack strong subject-matter expertise may struggle to identify gaps or misconceptions embedded in the materials. Instead, they may assume the content is too difficult and water it down or conclude that students are not making adequate progress and move them into an intervention. In reality, the problem may be poorly constructed core instruction: lessons that appear aligned on paper but do not provide the knowledge, modeling or connections students need to do the harder work of analyzing texts efficiently. One can’t help but wonder: have we effectively handicapped our teachers by making them so dependent on HQIM that we have weakened their ability to judge the quality of instruction itself?
The same can be said for math curricula. Even when materials are rated as high-quality, standards alignment does not guarantee that the curriculum is cognitively coherent, explicit enough for novices, or sufficient to build procedural fluency. In many American standards-aligned materials, this problem appears in an emphasis on “multiple representations” as flexibility before mastery. Students are often exposed to a rotating set of models and strategies—number bonds, tape diagrams, arrays, area models, open number lines, partial-product methods—before one reliable method has been modeled, practiced, or connected to efficient calculation. Common Core did not require fluency with the standard algorithm for multi-digit addition and subtraction until Grade 4, and many curricula reflect that delayed consolidation. A predictable result is that districts often attempt to patch fluency gaps with adaptive ed-tech programs, outsourcing basic subtraction, addition, multiplication and division practice to software rather than addressing those gaps through explicit instruction and guided practice, while also introducing foundational skills earlier in the course sequence. While several states have either rejected or revised Common Core, few have built a fundamentally different instructional model that gives students one powerful representation to learn deeply, use repeatedly, and connect to abstract procedures. Unlike many American standards-aligned curricula, Singapore math does not treat representation as a substitute for fluency. Students are introduced early to algorithms, mental calculation, and repeated practice, while visual models serve as a bridge to abstraction rather than a rotating menu of strategies.
Curriculum is incredibly important. Nowadays, there is something almost mythical about educators who can still skillfully write their own lessons or design curricula that require students to wrestle deeply with texts, ideas and problems. In ELA, that means building lessons around complex texts, historical context, syntax, language and meaning. In math, it means presenting concepts and procedures coherently rather than relying on a pick-a-tool approach, activity rotations, or the latest instructional trend. But if teachers are learning how to teach their content from curriculum, then it is even more important that the instructional materials we give them are teaching them well. Too many ELA curricula still rely heavily on a skills-based approach to comprehension, under the guise of “building knowledge,” and savvy content experts can tell the difference. Likewise, many math curricula rely on a strategy-heavy approach to calculation, under the guise of “conceptual understanding,” delaying fluency while mistaking representational variety for mathematical depth.
HQIM was not yet a common phrase when I first entered a classroom in 2009. I had an old, likely outdated textbook from Prentice Hall, which is still on the bottom shelf of my bookcase, a few novels, and a whiteboard (at least it wasn’t chalk). There was one SmartBoard in the whole school, and we had to share it by rolling it down the hallway and into our classrooms, with plenty of advance notice to the other teachers vying for this new “digital projector.”
That world feels distant now. Today, districts are surrounded by curriculum vendors, edtech platforms, adaptive programs, and promises of personalization through AI. Yet contrary to the assumption that older instructional systems were uniformly ineffective, the years between 1990 and 2013 were a period of significant academic growth in the United States, driven in large part by the expansion of test-based accountability systems (Dewey et al., 2026). Since 2013, performance in the United States has notably declined, with 8th-grade reading scores reaching their lowest point since 1990 and 4th-grade scores returning to pre-2003 levels (Dewey et al., 2026). Some argue that this decline has less to do with the adoption of the Common Core standards, launched in 2010, and more to do with the dismantling of accountability systems put in place during the No Child Left Behind era (Dewey et al., 2026). Still, the timing is difficult to ignore.
Many districts opt into HQIM because they are stuck between a rock and a hard place: fewer teachers are graduating from schools of education, and many more alternatively licensed teachers are filling the void. Most of these educators do not hold degrees in the disciplines they teach, let alone have the content knowledge needed to identify when a lesson appears aligned but is instructionally weak. In that context, HQIM can seem like a necessary support system.
But this creates a deeper problem when teachers have been trained to believe that “the standards are the curriculum” and that curriculum is merely a resource. In practice, this is often a distinction without a difference. If a state standard explicitly requires second graders to solve subtraction problems using drawings based on place value, publishers will happily fill pages with messy boxes and circles to win a state contract. The underlying assumption is that early mathematics instruction should prioritize flexible reasoning over efficient computation. But the primary goal of elementary and middle school arithmetic is not to turn every child into a professional mathematician, engineer, or rocket scientist. It is to develop functional numeracy: the ability to compute numbers accurately, estimate values efficiently, manage personal finances, reason with quantities, and handle everyday mathematical tasks without immediately opening an app on their smartphone. It should also open the door to more complex mathematical opportunities down the road,because students who have mastered foundational skills are better equipped to take on algebra, proportional reasoning, and higher-level problem solving. Perhaps more telling still, math scores have largely stalled and ultimately declined since the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (Dewey et al., 2026), and we still are not graduating millions of mathematicians across the nation. A similar problem exists in literacy, where educators believe that repeated standards-based skills practice is how students learn to comprehend texts.
It should not seem radical to suggest that we make a real effort to train teachers to become the content experts we expect them to be, as well as artful professionals within their discipline. That doesn’t mean embedding flashier tech, designing more “engaging” activities, or offering more “relatable” readings so students can supposedly “see themselves” in the course content. These approaches often mistake surface-level engagement for deeper learning. Instead, there is something powerful about groups of teachers sitting together to design coherent course sequences built around texts that require students to grapple with complex syntax, historical periods, language, and meaning. Teams of teachers can and shouldundertake this work collaboratively, with the support of content experts. This might be one way of preemptively adjusting poorly constructed lessons like the ones mentioned above. Even though teachers are often scolded for supplementing or supplanting HQIM, one must wonder what support they are given to determine whether a lesson actually works—or only appears to, under the guise of being “high quality.”
Despite all the potential of HQIM to improve student outcomes, it would be foolish to suggest that most states had anything remotely resembling a coherent curriculum system prior to the explosion of federal funding from COVID. Before and during the pandemic, nineteen states had policies in which state-appointed boards reviewed textbooks and created approved adoption lists. Historically, however, most states focused on setting standards rather than identifying specific instructional materials (CCSSO, 2021).
Since then, the promise of “robust improvement” from HQIM has remained complicated. There may be early signs of academic recovery since 2022, particularly in states that have paired HQIM with broader instructional reforms (Dewey et al., 2026). If that’s the case, imagine what might be possible if every classroom had both well-constructed curriculum and knowledgeable content experts who knew how to use, adapt and improve those materials. Either way, materials alone will never substitute for teacher expertise. If we want curriculum to improve student outcomes, we need both: well-constructed materials and knowledgeable teachers who understand their discipline well enough to know when a lesson builds understanding—and when it doesn’t.
References
Coleman, D., & Pimentel, S. (2012). Revised publishers’ criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and literacy, grades 3–12. Common Core State Standards Initiative. https://www.thecorestandards.org/assets/Publishers_Criteria_for_3-12.pdf
Council of Chief State School Officers. (2021). How states can support the adoption and effective use of high-quality standards-aligned instructional materials: Overview of CCSSO’s High Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development Network. https://753a0706.flowpaper.com/CCSSOIMPDCaseStudyOVERVIEWFINAL/docs/CCSSO_IMPD_Case_Study-OVERVIEW-FINAL.pdf
Dewey, D. C., Fahle, E., Kane, T. J., Reardon, S., & Staiger, D. O. (2026). From learning recession to learning recovery: Understanding the sources of U.S. K–12 improvement. Education Scorecard. https://educationscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Education_Scorecard_May_2026_Report.pdf
Doan, S., Woo, A., Shapiro, A., Bellows, L., & Kassan, E. B. (2025). Teachers’ use of instructional materials from 2019–2024: Trends from the American Instructional Resources Survey. RAND Corporation. https://doi.org/10.7249/RRA134-30
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Ministry of Education Singapore. (2025). Mathematics syllabus: Primary One to Six: Implementation starting with 2021 Primary One cohort [Updated October 2025]. https://www.moe.gov.sg/api/media/92bff26d-b2b4-4535-b868-b8415c744b91/2021-Primary-Mathematics-Syllabus-P1-to-P6-Updated-October-2025.pdf
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). English language arts standards: Reading: Informational text, grades 9–10. Common Core State Standards Initiative. https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/9-10/
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards for mathematics. Common Core State Standards Initiative. https://learning.ccsso.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Math_Standards1.pdf
RAND Corporation. (n.d.). RAND American Instructional Resources Survey (AIRS) project. https://www.rand.org/education-employment-infrastructure/projects/airs.html
Shanahan, T. (2012, June 18). What is close reading? Shanahan on Literacy. https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/what-is-close-reading
Silberstein, K., & Roza, M. (2023, April 4). The massive ESSER experiment: Here’s what we’re learning. Edunomics Lab. https://edunomicslab.org/2023/04/04/the-massive-esser-experiment/
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