Overcoming challenges facing contemporary curriculum: Lessons from Louisiana

The history of the state of Louisiana has not been known for educational success. One of the poorest states in the country, its schools have consistently been among the lowest performing. While Louisiana’s reading and mathematics scores are still significantly lower than the US average, improvements on several key measures began to catch the attention of educators and policymakers around the world around 2015.

For example:

• Compared with their performance in 2013, fourth-grade students in Louisiana achieved the highest growth of all US states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test.

• In 2015, students in Louisiana gained more points on their composite American College Testing (ACT) college-readiness assessment5 than students in any of the other 12 participating US states.

• The number of Louisiana high school students taking Advanced Placement (college-level) courses more than doubled between 2012 and 2016.

• Louisiana’s high school graduation rate and the number of students enrolled in college have reached all-time highs.

These developments raise two questions: what changed in Louisiana, and what are the lessons for other school systems?

If you ask the Academic Content team at the Louisiana Department of Education (the Department), they will say that the 2009 introduction of the Common Core State Standards, a set of rigorous standards in mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA), along with aligned assessments, were a catalyst for the reform. By 2010, Louisiana had begun to align its own standards, called the Louisiana Student Standards, with the Common Core, becoming one of 47 US states, territories and districts to voluntarily do so.

Remaking the Louisiana Student Standards to align with the Common Core represented a significant shift for school education. Before this, there was no coherent curriculum to inform classroom instruction; instead, “teachers just had access to a bunch of disconnected activities under a framework”. While many states stopped reforming their curriculum once they had simply adopted or adapted the Common Core State Standards and aligned assessments, Louisiana kept going. The team at the Department understood the potential of curriculum, more than many other school improvement levers, to truly influence day-to-day teaching and learning in classrooms. As former Assistant Superintendent of Academic Content, Rebecca Kockler, explains: “once we realised the potential of curriculum to see improvements in classrooms at scale, it became the core of our theory of change”. Led by Kockler and state Superintendent John White, the Academic Content team devised a strategy to ensure that all teachers in Louisiana had access to high quality curriculum materials and were supported to use them effectively in their classrooms. The quality curriculum strategy is changing teaching and learning in Louisiana, and teachers are the first to say so. As one explains, “It’s been a complete shift to an academic environment. Before, it was social, enjoyable – it wasn’t about learning. Now it’s a deep dive on learning. I realise now that I never got below surface level before”. For many teachers, consistently implementing quality curriculum has meant fundamentally transforming their professional practice, which is clearly challenging. Yet teachers are up for the challenge because they can see the payoff: “You need to take the bad with the good. You might have to sacrifice a few of your freedoms, but you’ll see students performing at a level that will make you so happy. It will give you more information about student learning than you had when everyone was doing their own thing – you will see what does and doesn’t work, and you will be a better teacher for it”.

Louisiana is still on its improvement journey. Make no mistake, it is a long-term, comprehensive change strategy that has required political mettle and a lot of what Kockler describes as “stick-with-it-ness”. It’s not just about making sure quality curriculum is available to all teachers, though that is an important first step. It’s about getting teachers on board to create quality curriculum when no curriculum publisher can meet the bar. It’s about aligning professional development and student assessment with curriculum so that teachers are supported and held accountable for implementing it, and about managing stakeholders and controlling communications in and outside schools so that teachers can get on with what matters.