Change Comes to Mississippi: Materials Matter and the Results Show It

I have been an educator in Simpson County Schools in rural Mississippi for the past 12 years and have taught everything from 4th grade math to algebra I. I am currently the math instructional coach for the entire district (seven schools).

I was part of a statewide team that helped align the state assessment to classroom curriculum, and subsequently part of a team that rewrote a more rigorous set of state standards. The team did a deep dive into the standards to see where our current and proposed curriculum aligned.  It was easy to spot the deficiencies and to see where it did not match the standards. Mississippi made it a priority to adopt HQIM, and I witnessed the change not just in our district, but in our state as a result.

As a district, we recognized that differences in curriculum was an equity issue. If students had poor materials and limited time with teachers, there was no way they were going to close gaps; and performance between schools within our district varied widely. Mississippi did not have ratings for secondary math materials. I knew we couldn't afford to wait another year so we used EdReports’ reviews and rubrics to select our math materials. We saw positive results of using HQIM within months of adopting and implementing.

I worked with a teacher in the Delta who was the only certified math teacher and taught all grades at her elementary school. She struggled because she didn’t have strong materials and had to plan lessons for several grades. I was able to help her find quality materials, and she no longer had to come up with individual lesson plans. She was able to invest time back into her students. 

Math scores in that district grew, but that particular teacher was just relieved to have strong support in place. Many high-quality materials have online components that help teachers identify gaps, student assessments to help identify student groups, and guidance on how to scaffold for student groups such as English learners or lower performing students. It is a game changer not just for teachers but for students.

When I was a classroom teacher, we stayed after school and reviewed all of the sample materials that the curriculum companies sent, picked our top picks, and then invited the sales people from those curriculum companies to present. We didn’t have any kind of rubric or way to evaluate for alignment and high-quality. 

A couple of years ago, the Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) valued our expertise as educators and convened a group of us from all over the state. We spent four days with EdReports to get trained on their rubric, scored materials with their rubric, and then brought in the top two scoring materials.  We asked each reviewer on the team to use each set of materials for a week in their classrooms and rate them on the rubric for usability. The ratings were shared with all teachers and they selected from those two sets of instructional materials. 

We have come a long way since the days of picking materials based on sales pitches! Now we have the knowledge of how to evaluate instructional materials for our districts, and educators from all over the state are speaking the same language about HQIM. Because of our experience with MDE, we created a district committee of math educators from each school and level that evaluates our district adopted curriculum materials regularly. 

EdReports increased our awareness of key details. We weren’t necessarily checking for how focused, coherent, usable, or aligned the materials were. Those were questions we weren’t really digging into; we were basing our decisions on what the sales people shared. 

Once we got the training from EdReports, we realized what we had been missing all along. There is a difference in just looking at the reports from EdReports and taking the rubric and applying it as you actually go through the materials yourself. This gave us a much deeper understanding of what quality materials looked like, and we could easily see the strengths and weaknesses of the instructional materials.

In our district this year we developed our own Curriculum Review Team and trained them on EdReports review rubric. This has allowed us to share our district vision for quality materials with others.  Even if we aren’t buying a new core curriculum at this moment, teachers have questions and may want supplemental materials. Additionally, the team analyzes situations in the classroom and provides teachers feedback on how to use the curriculum. We have some of the highest performing teachers on the team that are already getting great results every year, and they realize that when they utilize the quality materials in their classroom their teaching is even stronger.

They are the daily users. I can’t truly give materials a usability ranking from my office. It needs to be teachers leading the process because they know how it works for the students and how usable it is across the district with different types of teachers and students. Additionally, there is buy-in from the teachers that have the opportunity to teach the curriculum, evaluate and rate it, and then share with other teachers.

On the state level, bring in educators representing all of your schools and students and train them on why materials matter and how to use them. Across the state of Mississippi we all speak the same language and have the same expectations around high-quality materials. Districts should also develop their own curriculum evaluation team and develop teachers who share the vision and understand HQIM. This amplifies the teacher voice and creates more curriculum-minded teachers. 

Last year, I was on a panel with superintendents from across the country and most of the questions from the audience were directed at me—the non-Superintendent on the panel. Mississippi had been ranked 50th in the country in student performance and student outcomes. This has drastically shifted over the past few years. Folks in the audience were dying to know what we had done. MDE brought in people to help write the standards, to help write the test, to help rate materials. That strengthened our teaching and changed outcomes for all of our children—especially for our most vulnerable students who had been left behind for so long