Declining Student Performance Exposes Failures in Widely Used Curriculum

  • Select companies, like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), which about 90% of schools use for programming, exercise outsized market control over school curriculum.
  • Replacing tried-and-true phonics in the 1990s and 2000s for Lucy Calkins’s “balanced literacy” contributed to a literacy crisis that has reached a climax—65% of American fourth graders can’t read.
  • 78 out of the 83 largest school districts in the country used the “balanced literacy” curriculum published by Heinemann, and from 2012 to 2022, the company generated at least $215 million from these districts.
  • Heinemann is now being sued for “deceptive and fraudulent marketing” that left children unable to read.

Public School Curriculum Embraces Woke Ideological Fads 

  • Savvas’ American history curriculum perpetuates Black Lives Matter rhetoric, including the notion that America suffers from “systemic racism” and “disproportionate police violence.”
  • Math problems in a Pearson textbook “suggested a correlation between racial prejudice, age and education level and that called attention to the [debunked] wage gap between women and men.” 
  • Refusing to educate children on woke ideology, states like Florida have pressured academic publishers to moderate their curriculum. 

Responsible Adults Must Resist Mindlessly Following the Status Quo

  • When it comes to curriculum—unlike, say, pharmaceuticals or hardware—there is a fairly low barrier to entry, so there are plenty of alternative curricula that schools could use, but frequently don’t. 
  • States and districts, insofar as they choose bad curricula, often do so because of status quo bias and ignorance more than any dearth of better options.
  • Thoughtful adults in positions of authority—in government, in school districts, and, most importantly, in classrooms—must carefully consider whether or not what is being taught is in the best interest of the children in their charge, rather than going with the seemingly safe option that turns out to be anything but.

Click HERE to read the policy focus and learn more about the curriculum monopoly.