Teachers are more likely to be using high-quality curriculum materials than they were five years ago. But many are still using older materials or other supplements, too, a new survey shows.
In fact, the average teacher reported using two core curricula and five supplemental resources.
The findings are from the RAND Corp.’s American Instructional Resources Survey, which has asked a nationally representative sample of K-12 English/language arts, math, and science teachers about the classroom materials they use since 2019.
They confirm a long-standing norm in schools: Regardless of state or district requirements, teachers mix and match the lessons and resources they use in their classrooms, using what they think will best serve their students’ needs.
“It’s relatively rare that teachers are only using one curriculum material and that they don’t modify it,” said Sy Doan, a policy researcher at RAND and the lead author on the report. “The instruction that students receive in the classroom is going to be a bunch of different things,” he added—years-old materials that teachers have held onto, or resources they’ve sourced from colleagues or lesson-sharing sites.
But the data also suggest states’ efforts to institute more coherent, less anything-goes approaches to materials have started to shift practice.
States are taking a heavier hand in shaping what materials districts use
Over the past five years, a growing number of states have unveiled policies to incentivize or mandate schools to adopt high-quality materials—a term with a somewhat nebulous definition.
The RAND report relies on ratings from the nonprofit curriculum reviewer EdReports, which measures alignment to the Common Core State Standards and several other dimensions, including usability. States have relied on this criterion, as well as others.
More than two dozen states have passed “science of reading” legislation, for example, in many cases requiring schools to adopt new curricula aligned with the evidence base on how children learn to read.
Doan also referenced the Council of Chief State School Officers’ High Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development Network, a 15-state initiative to encourage schools’ use of standards-aligned curricula that provides “meaningful, affirming, grade-level” instruction, launched in 2017.
The data in this new report suggest that state efforts are shaping which resources end up in front of students.
In the 2023-24 school year, 55% of math teachers and 44% of ELA teachers said they were using at least one standards-aligned material regularly, compared with 31% of math teachers and 15% of ELA teachers in the 2018-19 school year.
Still, the data show that this change has been incremental and piecemeal.
“We still have a long way to go from teachers using [high-quality materials] a few times a week to teachers using these 75 percent of their teaching time a week, for example,” said Anne Bowles, the senior director of programs at CCSSO.
If education leaders want that to change, the RAND data indicate, teachers need more support to meet the vast range of student abilities most encounter in their classrooms. And, it may also indicate that teachers feel that districts’ favored curricula have flaws, such as not enough support for lower- or higher-achieving students, problems with pacing, or too many features.
“Teachers who say that they need to add new materials to the mix may be signaling about inadequacies in the materials that are provided to them,” the report’s authors write.
Too many materials make it hard to create a ‘coherent instructional system’
Using a variety of instructional materials in the classroom isn’t necessarily a problem, said Doan.
Teachers can draw on extra practice problems, for example, or additional writing prompts outside their core curriculum to deepen or broaden lessons.
Forty-five percent of the teachers in the RAND survey combined resources in this way, using several commercially available materials or adding in some of their own self-created work. Another quarter of teachers used self-created materials all or most of the time. Thirty percent of teachers only used one curriculum. Of this group, two-thirds mostly used that material as-is, while one-third modified it significantly.
But there are some logistical and instructional downsides to that much variability, Doan said.
With so many options in rotation, “it gets more and more difficult for school systems to build that coherent instructional system,” said Doan, in which teachers have a strong sense of the material their students have learned in prior grades, and schoolwide professional-learning opportunities draw on the same playbook.
There’s also a time cost for teachers to add new materials every year.
Across grades and subject areas, between 40% and 50% of teachers in the RAND survey said they were implementing something new in any given year. Those educators who were using something new said they spent about 30 minutes more per week on instructional planning than their peers reported.
But there are reasons why teachers bring in their own choice of materials. Previous RAND data have shown that between a quarter and a third of teachers say that the materials their districts recommend or require are too challenging for their students. Other educators say the curricula they’re expected to use try to cover more content than can reasonably be taught in one school year.
Still others contend that the resources states or districts have identified as “high quality” don’t actually clear that bar.
Several of the curricula that states have green-lit as science of reading-aligned, for example, include features that some teachers have criticized: Some rely on text excerpts, rather than whole novels. Others include few books that center characters of color or offer little guidance for how to adapt instruction for English learners.
What changes might get more teachers on board with curriculum shifts
These critiques help explain one of the findings that’s not so surprising: Teachers are more likely to use materials they like.
More specifically, teachers in the RAND survey who said they used one curriculum material without much modification—what the researchers called “by-the-book” use—were more likely to say that their materials were adequate for meeting state standards and prepared students for state tests. They were less likely to say that their materials were too challenging for their students.
They also said their principal had a bigger role in materials selection and implementation, actively encouraging use of the recommended curriculum.
Some demographic factors also played a role in teachers’ choice of materials. Those teachers who had more students with individualized education programs and more students from low-income families were more likely to use a wider array of resources and to make modifications.
These findings suggest that teachers’ perception of curriculum quality matters and should be taken into account during the adoption and implementation process, the researchers write.
“It’s one thing to get these materials in the hands of teachers, but there’s a next step of what can we do to support teachers so they’re actually using these materials?” Doan said.
