MARCH 25, 2025

The Truth About EdReports Curriculum Reviews

Explore how EdReports curriculum reviews help districts select and implement high-quality materials, with insights from Chief Academic Officer Courtney Allison.

EdReports Chief Academic Officer Courtney Allison joins the EdVoices podcast to give us an overview of EdReports curriculum reviews. What’s in an EdReports review? How have the review criteria changed over the years? What is the right way for districts and educators to use the reviews to help them select and implement the best instructional materials for their students? We dive into all this and more.

Related Links:

Related resources to check out:

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Alexis Gentry 00:07

Hi, I'm Alexis, and this is the EdVoices Podcast. and today we're going to talk about EdReports reviews. What's in a review? How should you use reviews? And joining us to have this conversation is EdReports Chief Academic Officer, Courtney Allison. Courtney, thank you so much for being on the pod!

Courtney Allison 00:22

Thanks, Alexis, really happy to be here!

Alexis Gentry 00:26

So let’s just get started with: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in education for people who don't know you?

Courtney Allison 00:32

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Courtney Allison. This is, I believe, my seventh year at EdReports, which is amazing, but my journey in education started over 20 years ago. Now, what few people know is that I actually started in the pre-K space, and really love preschoolers, but also really love middle schoolers, and so became a middle school teacher, taught math in New York City, and from there, took on some leadership responsibilities with lots of transitions in our school then, and was able to learn more from coaching, and then eventually went into school leadership. And that led me to district leadership, where I was coaching in districts in New York City, when the Common Core first came into play, and then at the district level, when the city adopted its first instructional materials that were aligned to the standards. And from there, I really thought a lot about the role of teachers, the voice of teachers in education and in their own ability to talk about what's working in their classrooms. And that led me to work in nonprofits and eventually at EdReports.

Alexis Gentry 01:44

Awesome. Well, speaking of standards, can you give us a little information about: What does an EdReports review evaluate, and what are its limits?

Courtney Allison 01:53

So, an EdReports review looks at a set of criteria that we've developed against, yes, standards, and some of those are rooted in the Common Core. We know that some states still hew very closely to the Common Core standards, and so we recognize that those are still really useful, but it also gives lots of information about other things. We have information on teacher and student supports. We have information on assessment, we have information on the kinds of other materials that might exist for extension or for catching students up if they have some learning loss. And so the reviews really try to encompass everything that's in a curriculum, and we produce all of our criteria and our evidence guides online. So something really key to EdReports is transparency, so you can actually see what we look at and see what's there and what's not there.

Alexis Gentry 02:50

Yeah, there's a reason our reviews are long. They're very dense with information. And there are places where people can find all the things we're looking for just right on our website, very available. Let's say a district finds a program that's highly rated by EdReports. What's next? Like, how should they be using these reviews to help them select the right materials?

Courtney Allison 03:15

Yeah, I'd say that before a district even looks at the EdReports website, you want to think about, what do you need, what are you really looking for? And so, of course, that's what content area and what grade bands you're looking to purchase materials for. You've got to think about what your local context is and what you're able to support as a district. Are you looking for materials because you need to make a change, and you have coaches in every school and you're able to do extended professional learning? Or is this going to be something that you can launch with teachers in the fall, but then you don't have a lot of professional learning support, and so they're going to have to do that in teacher teams and schools. And so even a question like that, how your implementation support is going to roll out, is going to affect what you want to look for in materials, how you want to look at those teacher supports, to see: What are teachers going to be set up with? And then what you might choose overall. So while you might look at a material that is highly rated on EdReports, it doesn't mean it's the right material for you. It means that it has met our criteria, and then you’ve still got to do the really hard work at the district level or the school level and at the state level of saying, what do we need? What's important to us, and then what materials really match for that.

Alexis Gentry 04:29

And professional learning is such an important aspect of this. I know, like in some of our data, we've shown that teachers just never really get enough professional learning, and that's such a big part of how good materials are maybe not used. So yeah, the emphasis on: Yes, professional learning is also a key component in this as well.

Courtney Allison 04:49

It's really essential. And I mean, conversely, we see that where implementation has high levels of professional learning and really curriculum-based professional learning—so professional learning that really ties into the materials that are being used—teachers are more satisfied with the curricula. They understand how to use it, and then that actually is going to be what translates into student gains.

Alexis Gentry 05:13

So, I think you know, for us having the review criteria on the website, it's part of transparency, we want to make sure people can really see what's in there, and we've recently updated our review tools, so we are now on version 2.0. Can you tell us a little bit about some of those changes, and kind of why we updated those review criteria?

Courtney Allison 05:37

Yeah, so EdReports is always listening, and we're always learning, and we have review criteria, and we have evidence guides, and every year, we make small adjustments to our evidence guides based on what we hear and what we're learning, to make sure that we're really assessing materials as best as possible against those criteria. But periodically, you kind of need a full renovation. And so version 2.0 is more of a full renovation. So we recognized that some of the research had evolved, and we needed to really have that reflected in our tools, particularly in ELA in thinking about foundational skills and the science of reading. We had some work to do to bring our comprehensive materials tool really in line with our foundational skills tool, and make sure that you were looking for those foundational skills in all the grades in upper elementary as well. And so we had some more work to do there. In math, we wanted to think carefully about how we were assessing the Standards for Mathematical Standards. And we talked to state folks and district folks and educators in classrooms and researchers, and asked them lots of questions. And that led us to make some changes in math. And then in science, that was our newest tool. And so thinking about how phenomena and problem solving really show up in materials, and then what that means about how they should show up in our tool made us think it's time to make some adjustments. And so those are some of the places where, if you are looking at our version 1.5 tool and our 2.0 tools, that you'll see some differences.

Alexis Gentry 07:14

Yeah, you know, when we say “by educator, for educator,” that educator feedback is such a huge part of how those decisions are made, in changing what we're looking for with these reviews. So I think that's such a big part of it.

Courtney Allison 07:27

Absolutely, there are no shortcuts there. So it took us about a year to do all of the listening that we needed to do and put that together so that we again had a coherent set of criteria.

Alexis Gentry 07:38

For sure. If people want to find out more about the version 2.0 tools, where can they find that information? What would be the best way for someone, if they want to do a deep dive on what's the difference between 1.5 and 2.0, where can they find that?

Courtney Allison 07:53

Yeah, we've made that even easier to find. So it's on our website, but actually any report that you open up. So if you are using materials, or you're interested in a certain set of materials, any report you open up right now has a banner right on top, and that banner says that the tool, the information about the tool, can be found here. And you can click that, and it'll take you into a deep dive of all of our tools. Because we haven't released any reports on our version 2.0 right now, all of the reports have a banner that says this might not be the most recent version of our tool. And so that can help you understand what criteria the educators looked at for this report, and it can help you understand what's going to change in 2.0 and how to make use of prior reports, which I think is really important. Because we're not just throwing out every report we've ever done. Educators worked for hundreds of hours to provide really valuable information, but we know that some of that information needs to change, and so we have some guides on being able to use older reports and what you can look at and how you can still use some of that educator information, even if there's some new information that you should probably be looking at those materials to see for yourself, or even asking publishers if they can help you understand how they've kept up with recent research and changes.

Alexis Gentry 09:16

Beyond the information about the 2.0 tools, how can districts and educators learn more about EdReports in general, deepen their understanding of our reviews, and figure out where to use these tools to help them make more informed curriculum decisions? Like, what do you think would be the best place to start if they're trying to figure out: how do we use this to apply to us?

Courtney Allison 09:43

Yeah, we've got more than just reports on our website. Our website is really deep, and so I'd say one place to learn just generally about EdReports is it was recently our 10 year anniversary, which is incredibly exciting, and we produced some materials that you can link to right from our home page that really talk about the impact of EdReports, but also just our trajectory as a whole. So you can understand: how did EdReports begin, and what's the impact over time, and what's going on now with EdReports?

And then we have a regular blog, and so you can read about some deep dives we've done into review criteria, different topics that are current in the field right now. We've got really talented staff with a lot of expertise, and they often write about the work beyond the reports. And then finally, there are Adoption Steps. So there's guidance for selection and adoption that we have on our website that actually is also linked from reports, so that you can think about what are all the things that you need to do when you're thinking about material selection. EdReports is one piece of that puzzle, but there's a ton of other steps, like we talked to like we talked about before, and, you know, there's no shortcuts. You really have to sit and do all of those steps. And one of those is buy-in with educators where you are locally. And so we want to emphasize that engaging educators is incredibly important. We believe it's important in reviews, but it's incredibly important when you're making lists of any curriculum or selecting curriculum to purchase, too.

Alexis Gentry 11:20

For sure, yeah, I mean, the teachers and the people who are working with the curriculum are so crucial in this process. You know, students learn from the materials and their teachers, and it's such an important combination of things.

Courtney Allison 11:35

Yeah. I mean, you have to keep the teacher centered in all of this work. It's really incredibly important, and you notice when that drifts away, then teachers don't feel connected to what they're using in their classrooms, and then they're going to leave that to the side. And then that places such a burden on teachers when they don't have good materials to draw from, then it's up to them to go find things and create things. And we already know that teachers do fantastic adjustments to materials, like no material is going to be perfect for every classroom, or certainly not for every student. So teachers are already using their expertise to make adjustments in their materials. When they don't have those materials, they've got an even bigger job. And so we really believe that if you center the needs of educators, give them a ton of information about what's going to be in their classroom, then they can make the right choices for the students that are in their classes and the kids as a whole in their district.

Alexis Gentry 12:30

Completely—it’s like, we want to make things easier for teachers. It's already a difficult job!

Courtney Allison 12:33

Yes, so, so difficult and so amazingly rewarding, but we want to make sure that they've got the best tools possible in the classroom to be able to use. We are producing these reports and keeping up with our criteria to be able to be of service to the field in this really, really important decision and complicated decision, and we hope we can play a small part in what we know is going to be very impactful for students and for teachers.

Alexis Gentry 13:03

Well, Courtney, thank you so much for being here. You know, I think we wanted this to be sort of like an EdReports 101—here's how you use the reviews, here's what the reviews look for. Because I think it can be a little confusing—the reviews are long and so information dense, and we want to make sure that people know where to start. So thank you so much for doing this for us.

And if you would like to find out more information, we will have links to all sorts of things in the episode description and the show notes. And of course, you can always go to edreports.org/resources to find more information on any of the topics we discussed in this podcast. But be sure to subscribe to follow this podcast, follow us on social. We are always sharing information and resources, so that's a great place to find more information about us, and we will catch you in the next podcast!