Russ Whitehurst, former director of the Institute of Education Sciences, has written a long article for Brookings titled “Don’t Forget Curriculum.” He compares the effectiveness of reforms such as charter schools and merit pay to the reform of improving curriculum, noting that the effect of the latter on academic achievement seems to be markedly higher. He concludes:

Curriculum effects are large compared to most popular policy levers.

Further, in many cases they are a free good. That is, there are minimal differences between the costs of purchase and implementation of more vs. less effective curricula. In contrast, the other policy levers reviewed here range from very to extremely expensive and often carry with them significant political challenges, e.g., union opposition to merit pay for teachers. This is not to say that curriculum reforms should be pursued instead of efforts to create more choice and competition through charters, or to reconstitute the teacher workforce towards higher levels of effectiveness, or to establish high quality, intensive, and targeted preschool programs, all of which have evidence of effectiveness. It is to say that leaving curriculum reform off the table or giving it a very small place makes no sense. Let’s do what works for the kids, and let’s give particular attention to efficient and practical ways of doing so.

A stumbling block for curricular reform, however, is that lots of people don’t really want more effective curriculum. For example, Whitehurst cites evidence that Saxon Math is a superior math curriculum, but Saxon Math has been controversial because of its alleged “drill and kill” methodology. Indeed, when Saxon Math first became known back in the 1980s, the head of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics said that Saxon “ has chosen to teach mathematics which would have been appropriate in the 1890s to children who are going to have to live in the 21st century.”

The curriculum adoption process can be coopted and dominated by people who, for whatever reason, don’t wish to use a curriculum with proven results. Freer educational choice has the benefit of allowing parents to opt out more readily and seek a more rigorous curriculum elsewhere.

UPDATE: Mary Damer has several excellent and lengthy comments in the thread here. An excerpt that illustrates my point:

Ten years ago, I naively thought that when objective, valid tests showed the predictable achievement gains from research-based reading instruction, reading instruction would change to what was objectively more effective. But when the students we’d worked with were outscoring most of the other students in the district, the reading administrators who were so opposed to the systematic, explicit reading instruction we had introduced in three schools said that the scores didn’t matter. Our students didn’t have the critical thinking skills of the other students and more importantly they didn’t like reading as much. So naively, for two years we administered the developmental reading attitude survey which asks kids questions like, ‘How do you like going to reading class?” “How do you like the stories you read in reading class?” How do you feel when someone gives you a book as a birthday present? and so on. . . .

No surprise to us that these students from poverty revealed that with the systematic explicit phonics, even the most struggling readers who were getting Direct Instruction liked reading and their reading classes as much as typical students – even our struggling readers who typically don’t by third grade. But this didn’t match the assumptions of what students liked and so was routinely dismissed.