Louisiana Believes is a true inspiration for everyone committed to elevating high-quality instructional materials. For well over a decade, the curriculum review initiative has helped to drive impressive gains in student outcomes across the state.
So, we were honored and thrilled to welcome Rebecca Kockler, former assistant superintendent of academic content at the Louisiana Department of Education, to the EdVoices podcast to dive into the story behind this success. Now executive director of Reading Reimagined, Rebecca led the design and implementation of Louisiana’s overhaul of curriculum review.
As Rebecca shares, “the push came from our teachers” to rethink how the state reviewed and recommended curriculum—and their ongoing involvement was essential:
“We had so many teachers fired up about high-quality curriculum, which is why I think Louisiana is now 12 years into high-quality curriculum being used in the state. … It was critical to have the perspective of the people in the schools—because they had expertise that nobody else was going to have.”
That’s just one highlight from Rebecca’s conversation with EdReports Executive Director Eric Hirsch. They share a whole range of fascinating insights and learnings from their vast experience of conducting educator-led reviews of instructional materials.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jess Barrow 00:00
Hi, I am Jess Barrow, and this is the EdVoices podcast. Today, I’m just thrilled to be joined by Rebecca Kockler, who is the executive director for Reading Reimagined at the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund. She’s also the former assistant superintendent of academics at the Louisiana Department of Education, and I’m also joined by EdReports executive director Eric Hirsch.
And we are going to be chatting all things about reviewing K–12 instructional materials, what those processes look like. These are really two experts in the field who have years and years of experience, and we really want to learn from them and hear more about how that process went. But before we get into all that, I would love to allow Rebecca and Eric to introduce themselves. Rebecca, would you mind to share a little bit about your current work, your journey in education, before we dive into the nitty gritty questions?
Rebecca Kockler 01:10
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here. I love talking about curriculum adoption and implementation, because obviously I’m a nerd, and yeah, excited to be on with you all. I started my career teaching, and I was a middle school history and reading teacher in Newark, New Jersey, which I loved. I spent a lot of time coaching teachers after that and principals and trying to help folks really think about what grade instruction is and how to implement great instruction. And that’s what I loved.
I went to Louisiana and was, as you said, assistant superintendent there, and led academics. And we, I think, really believed that the state had a role to play in what kids learned every day, not dictating anything and telling people what to do, but ensuring that kids in our system were getting the kind of instruction every single day that they deserved, and obviously high-quality curriculum was a major part of our work, which I know we’ll talk about.
I spent some time in Los Angeles after that as the chief of staff in LAUSD, and when I left public education, I’ve since really focused my time and effort on the thing I most struggled with when I was in those school systems, which was really figuring out how to ensure that students succeed in learning to read, not just in elementary school, but up through middle school systems. All or most struggled, in the ones I was a part of, to see sort of permanent change and growth in middle school reading. And so now, as you said, Jess, I lead our work at Reading Reimagined, and our sister-partner organization Magpie Literacy, where we fund research to better understand why kids struggle to read and what to do about it and build more integrated research-based tools to help teachers deliver on that every day. So—great to be here.
Jess Barrow 03:05
Yeah, thanks so much. Great to hear a little more about your journey. Eric, what would you want to add? I know you’ve recently had your 10-year anniversary at EdReports, but there are many other aspects of your journey through the education field as well.
Eric Hirsch 03:20
No, no. I only want to add: I love where you ended up. Rebecca, I’ve known you my entire 10-year journey here at EdReports. I think you were the one of the first people I called to say, how on earth do you do this work? But one of the things—and it’s so clear, as I just listened to you talk about all the places you’ve been—is when you find things are not working and not there, you solve a problem. You did it in Louisiana when you couldn’t find ELA materials that were good enough in your mind for the kids of Louisiana, and you’re doing it again now.
So it’s just so nice to actually hear and listen to you. So I’m far more enamored with your career than mine. Mine is much more—I got certified to teach, realized how hard it was, and I lacked the grit that Rebecca has, and I ran for the hills into research and policy. And so I started out at the National Conference of State Legislatures and working with policy makers on teacher and teaching quality, really focused on who was teaching? What are the qualifications? What are the certifications? What do teachers need to know? How can they be prepared? And then I realized we’re not putting them in schools designed for their success.
So I started going and working on systems, and worked at the New Teacher Center, and I did these mass surveys of teaching and learning conditions where we’d ask, “Do you have enough time? Do you have leadership? Are you empowered to make the decisions you need to around instruction?” And there was only a single question on curriculum. So when the idea for EdReports was launched, and I was fortunate enough to get to jump on board and start this thing, focusing on the “what”—what happens in the classroom, the instructional core—and moving from who the teachers are and whether they had those systems to support them, right into the core: if they had the right materials to work directly with kids on conveying grade level content so that all kids could learn and become college and career ready. And I’m still sitting up kind of straight 10 years later, but it’s been a ride. And it’s been a ride because I’ve gotten to learn and build off of the work of folks like Rebecca.
Rebecca Kockler 05:38
I appreciate that, Eric, but I’m excited to talk about all the amazing ways 10 years later, you guys are influencing the field. So it’s very exciting—I appreciate that.
Jess Barrow 05:47
Well, I am so thrilled to have you both here. I think as we get started, kind of zooming out, because you both led significant efforts to conduct large scale reviews of K–12 instructional materials, even under different systems. We can get into the details of those processes, but before we do, I wondered, and we can start with you, Rebecca, if you could reflect on some of the guiding principles and understandings that governed your approach to evaluating those materials as you began the process.
Rebecca Kockler 06:22
Yeah, we started our reviews in Louisiana right as the Common Core Standards were coming out and being implemented. And I had just started my job, and I was looking at all these tools that were going into the classrooms, and I was very frustrated that they were obviously not aligned to the new standards. And in Louisiana, the new standards were very different from our old standards. And so thinking about all of these tools—that were so misaligned, and not at all going to be productive and helpful as we were making these really important and critical instructional shifts for kids—felt very frustrating and a little bit overwhelming.
And so I very quickly realized that, you know, we signed these state contracts and, like, people have to purchase off of our list, and I’m like, “Well, then why are these things on our list?” And I was very green. Like, sometimes, you know, that’s such a blessing, because you just think things should just change immediately when you, like, run into these big bureaucracies. And so I’m like, “Well, let’s take them off the list. These tools are terrible. We’re not putting those in front of our kids and in front of our teachers.”
But really, in some ways, the push came from our teachers, actually. So we had a group of about 100 teachers like to this day, some of the absolute most amazing educators I have ever worked with, many of whom have actually come to work at EdReports. And that group of teachers were helping us think through these new standards. They wanted the new standards. They wanted improved expectations for kids. They believed it was the right thing for the state, but they were helping us figure out what people need to actually deliver on them.
And they were the ones saying, “Hey, we need better tools. We need better training. Like, the stuff you’re giving us is not going to help us deliver on this. We’re up for the challenge, but like, at least give us some help here,” you know? And so and at the same time, we were in a state that had pretty intensive accountability policies coming. At the exact same time, we were changing tests and changing assessments, so we suddenly felt an incredible urgency. If we were going to have high accountability, a high bar for learning, we had to deliver on high support for teachers, because you can’t not have the high support if you’re going to have the high other things. And we felt that was what was best for kids.
So what really guided our tool and our reviews ultimately were: “Are these aligned to our expectations for what kids should learn every day in the classroom? And if not, they shouldn’t be in the classroom, because that’s not what kids deserve.” So at the end of the day, that was the thing that governed if something hit our bar for quality or not. And we can talk a lot more about details and policies and all the things required, but it was truly just about alignment to standards, alignment to the expectation that we believed kids deserved, and whether or not materials were truly delivering on that.
Jess Barrow 09:20
No, I appreciate that. And you mentioned that really this big push came from the teachers. And you kind of hinted at this a little bit, but there were, like you said, there were strict policies and rules that you had to consider and follow as part of your process. I think that’s something that’s a little bit different than at EdReports. Are there things you would highlight in terms of, like, what were those considerations you had to take, to follow, and what did you learn along the way from having to work within that structure?
Eric Hirsch 09:57
Yeah, an adoption state with rules and regulations is a lot different than starting and standing up a nonprofit, right?
Rebecca Kockler 10:05
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we have, in our setting, some more complications, and you guys in your setting have some different and harder complications. And they’re just unique and different, both with the goal of trying to help people purchase quality materials for kids, right? And so one of the things that felt counterintuitive when we did it, and I think people thought we were a little—they were surprised that we did it—our law, at the time, required you to buy off of our list, and we got rid of that law.
And it was one of the things that saved our process, actually, which, again, is very counterintuitive, because you would think, well, if you want everyone to change, require people to purchase off of your list and make sure that list is quality. And in some places that would work. In Louisiana, that doesn’t work. We’re a very intensely local, controlled state and our list was very long for a reason, so you could force people to purchase off of your list when you’re going to put everything on your list, but the minute you make that list really, really rigorous, and you have fewer things on there, you’re going to take a lot of heat.
And not only are you going to take heat, people might not be invested in the process. And we wanted a process that would still last a decade later, once we knew we would be gone and, you know, etc, we were trying to make really lasting change. And the process does still exist, and people do still purchase quality pretty regularly in Louisiana.
And I think part of that was because one of the major shifts we made was we said, “You can purchase whatever you want. Ultimately, this is your choice. We are going to do two things, well, primarily and mostly, we’re going to make the best quality stuff, the easiest stuff to purchase.” That was our ethos. Like, what does it take to make the absolute best stuff the easiest thing to get in people’s hands? If that is sort of your orientation, then you do a couple of things to make that orientation come to be.
One, you direct people towards quality, which were our reviews. Let’s be really transparent about what we think is quality or not. Take it or leave it. Do what you want. Direct people towards quality. Two, you have to incentivize quality. So what incentives can we give people to purchase the stuff at the top of the list instead of the stuff at the bottom of the list? And then three take away roadblocks in the way. There were all of these complicating things that made it harder to purchase the higher quality materials.
Some of them needed printing things set up. So we set up printers’ shops around the state where people could just like push a button and all the materials would show up on their doorstep. Some of them needed certain types of contracts set up that would make it easier for procurement. So we set up those statewide contracts to make it easier. So there were all of these barriers to purchasing the best quality things. And we obsessed about learning about those barriers from our school districts and then taking them away.
So again, this ethos of “my job as a state is to make the absolute best thing for kids the easiest to purchase, direct quality, incentivize, take down barriers.” And that was, like all we tried to do to really make change. But that was surprising, I think, to people that we didn’t mandate, and to me, that third bucket of “take down barriers,” I was surprised by how many weird operational and technical and bureaucratic barriers there were to purchasing the best thing. And I had a lot more time and ability to fix those things for districts than relying on districts to fix those things for themselves. And that was something I did not anticipate in the process that was interesting.
Eric Hirsch 13:41
I think one of the things in listening to you, Rebecca, is how much you hold as a state, right? So oftentimes we talk about our role as more like the judicial branch. We are adjudicating quality, but because you set the standards at the state, you are actually helping districts implement. You are both creating and helping districts around those barriers. You hold so much, and we, at EdReports, have, as a nonprofit, the laser focus, and to some degree, in comparison, the luxury to just say, “actually we only have to do one of the three things you did.”
We need to make states and districts aware of the barriers that how you choose actually matters in whether it’s used, and make sure they’re aware. But our job is just to signal quality and try to really define what quality is. And I think we learn so much from your work around a couple things. The ones who should determine what quality is are educators. They’re the ones who utilize the materials in the classroom. They’re the ones who should be looking at this material. We look at research, look at standards, right, and utilize advisories and experts, but it’s really having educators lead the process as a guiding principle, because they’re the ones who suffer so much if you don’t give them high quality scoped and sequence materials that allow them to really do their best work.
And one of the things I hope that we have—like you had—and it was one of the things, looking from afar, we weren’t sure. Do people believe in the list you created? And we think a lot about—what is it about the EdReports process? Because this is all undergirded by trust, right? It’s almost like trying on a shirt. If you don’t believe the evidence you’re reading or that the indicators matter, nobody will take that quality signal. And once you said “you can pick from these quality [options],” they have to be like, “no, I think these are quality.”
And for us, that has been so many different things. In the same way that you don’t mandate, we don’t make recommendations. More people talk about EdReports green as the be all, end all, than we do—where we think it’s a place to start and has some great evidence and information to help districts make the right choice. We pay for our materials. We’ve worked so hard to find educators who earn that trust, and we hope we earn it by training them and calibrating—and we learned so much from your training—and that’s why we’ve hired so many of your educators as well from Louisiana to do our reviews. They knew what we were trying to do, because you had raised the bar in a way no other state did, right. And of course, when you raise the bar, people who don’t hit the bar push back and push back hard, but that’s part of the work.
Rebecca Kockler 16:37
Yeah, it’s interesting. When I talk with states who are about to take on that work, I think there’s a great fear, like, teachers are not going to be into this, they’re going to push back. And I just like the thing I tell people over and over and talking to other states who have then gone through it’s like, teachers are not your challenge. Like, honestly, like teachers show up because they both want to serve kids period. Like most teachers could do many other things, and so they want to serve kids at the end of the day. And teachers do want high quality materials, actually, and want tools that they can use.
So we just did not find pushback from teachers as the primary challenge in our work. Now, yeah, are there sometimes teachers who are like, “Oh my gosh, these standards, kids aren’t capable of them”? Of course. Does it take time, do they need training on it? Yes, of course. Like, I’m not saying like, no teacher was frustrated by the change. Of course they were. And change takes time, but I think people also want it immediately. And there’s an arc to some of these things that I would always tell districts, you know, like, everyone cries in October. Guys like, you know, get on board. Like, it’s hard, like everyone’s stressing in October. And like, maybe I cried in October, you know, and then, like, it’s just the first October, and then the next October, everyone’s actually feeling so much better.
And so you have to, kind of, now we have, you know the gift of sort of the arcs and of the time. And three years in, we had so many teachers fired up about high quality curriculum, which is, again, why I think 10 years—and actually, Louisiana is now 12 years in to high quality curriculum being used in the state. It’s still being used. Most districts are still choosing it. Most teachers are still using it, because teachers actually really loved the materials and the tools. And over time, more and more saw the power of and the potential of it. We invested in their training and their support and kids liked it too, right? So, and that makes their jobs easier when kids like the experiences. So, you know, I think teachers are like, on board for this stuff. It’s just sometimes it’s district leaders who are more afraid than anyone else about the change more than even teachers are.
Eric Hirsch 18:52
Yeah, I was always so impressed by the change management aspects of what you were doing down into the classroom level, which gets at the removing barriers, but also the way you invested as a state in quality curriculum-based professional learning for those high quality choices, in ways that—sometimes that change management is hard, because teachers can be the greatest advocates for high quality instructional materials, and also the biggest detractors. And it’s because of their experience with materials as being a script to follow, right—a constraint versus a catalyst.
And by going down and pulling thousands of teachers together to say, “Actually, this is what it means to use curriculum with integrity versus fidelity, right? Like there’s a reason. There’s a scope and sequence. We expect you to cook with these ingredients. You don’t have to go out and grow all the ingredients yourself, lesson by lesson.” But you just really helped them understand how this was a resource. And I think, oh my gosh, I don’t think we’ve ever found teachers who are not grateful for quality resources that save them time, that engage their kids and help them focus on how to work with kids in the content, as opposed to spending all the time reinventing content.
And there are so many states and so many districts are just like, “Here you go. Here’s your login. Here’s the shrink wrap,” and you all never did that. You found the state money. You found the way to invest, and I think it’s why it’s still in use 12 years later, and even after your administration had left, or everyone from that administration left, the idea, and the way Louisiana does the reviews is still there—because it makes so much sense.
And hopefully that’s why, again, we’re still reviewing 10 years later. Helping people understand how to use these reviews in context, as a place to start, but also helping them understand why curriculum is important in the first place. We know they won’t come to the website and look at a review if they think curriculum is something meant to beat down teachers, as opposed to a resource to lift them up.
Jess Barrow 21:07
You know, you both speak really powerfully about the role of educators as part of the review process and in pushing for instructional materials and in using instructional materials. This is a little more of a specific question, but I wonder—I know we’ve dealt with this on the EdReports side—but if you could both reflect a little bit on, how do you work to calibrate and ensure quality while centering a wide range of educator perspectives? Since we know that’s important, but we also know we have to come to consensus and have a high standard for the reviews themselves.
Rebecca Kockler 21:50
Yeah, we were a little different than EdReports in that we definitely started with—we start and believe that teachers are so critical to those reviews for so many reasons, and Eric so well articulated that. And truly, like, you know, the educators we had doing those reviews are like, seriously, just incredibly talented, super knowledgeable educators who are also, to Eric’s point, very well respected in their careers and in the field, and people trusted their voice and their perspective.
And I think that really matters, because to have a bunch of bureaucrats, you know, in Baton Rouge reviewing curriculum saying “You can and cannot teach this,” teachers are a little bit like, “Okay, but you’ve literally never taught the new standards we have.” And that was true. I never taught Common Core standards. No one on my team taught Common Core standards. And you, you know, we really felt like it was critical to have the perspective of the people in the schools, in the classrooms, actually doing it, both because they had expertise that nobody else was going to have, and the reviews would be done really well, and because they had a lot of credibility in the field, for good reason. And those reviews, to Eric’s point, would have more credibility and would be more trusted.
So for both of those reasons, I think that was so powerful. We did actually say that our teacher reviews could be trumped by our decision at the State Department. We had a policy for that, and I think we only did it two times in all of our reviews. And the times we did it, we were public about that, the fact that we did it, so we put the teacher summary reviews on, and then we put our final reviews on, and we said why we did it and where we did it. And we ultimately let—again, people could purchase whatever they wanted—we let people make their own choice on those things. But we did allow for that if we felt like there was something that, just like we really couldn’t reconcile, or like the committee actually could not reconcile.
Like, I think we had one of those decisions, I think, was a committee that, just like, could not agree on the final rating. So we had a process of, we did a really intensive training with our teachers. They did independent reviews. They were not allowed to talk to each other. Actually, we thought that was super important. So they were doing like, you know, self opinions. Then they had to bring those together. They had to calibrate. They had to debate their things where they differed, and they had to submit, as one committee, a final report, just one final report. We published everything, but we use that final report for reviews. And then again, I think, one time the committee could not agree, and then we made the final decision. And one time we disagreed with the final committee’s review. But otherwise, those reviews were the reviews we landed on.
Eric Hirsch 24:51
That’s so interesting, Rebecca. And I know, again, in an adoption state, with rules and regs, there are things you have to follow and not follow into how you do the work, in being able to start from scratch. So much of what we do is similar. All of this is about finding educators who know content deeply. We hope they’re great educators, but even great educators may not be able to look at curriculum as designed using a rubric and evidence guides, versus just be able to put in their teacher magic and their ability. So we have to really find the right educators who know their content deeply, and we think and apply it with a team with rubrics.
We do so much face to face training now, 10 years later, my gosh, online portal, PD in real time. The one thing we do different is our folks work together all the time. So they’ll go in week to week, spending about five to 10 hours per week independently, but they get together every week—with a facilitator and someone there writing—to have those conversations in real time. And I think one of the benefits for us is it makes the process almost more iterative. They kind of learn as they go, and then can go back in real time, and we hope they learn and the reviews get better.
But I think you situated that kind of at the end. In the end, the most important thing is, for example, we have staff and expert advisories who can help try to make sense, ask probing questions and go back to those educators to help them reach consensus for a report. And then I know you’ve worked with publishers, and one of the key pieces is: “We’re not ready to publish.” We have an entire error and omissions process where publishers say, an error: “you got this wrong”—or an omission: “how did you not see that this meets this indicator?” We’re like, Oh my goodness.
And you know how thrilled educators are to go back into the material and check their work, but actually, I’m amazed that they are. They’re like, because educators are superheroes, they’re like, “Oh my God, thank you for this constructive feedback. Let me go in and dig deeper and learn more.” It is amazing, but so much of the way we do that kind of reaches hundreds of hours to get to a conclusion of whether something for you was tier one, tier two, tier three, and for us is the gateways or the criterion or the indicator, meets, partially meets, or doesn’t meet. And we, both of us, unlike some states and some other processes, put a pretty good chunk of detailed evidence to help districts make those choices and help teachers understand what they’re getting.
Rebecca Kockler 26:48
It’s just an incredibly laborious process, you know, like, teachers just put in so many hours. And sometimes publishers would say, like, “People didn’t look at our full materials.” And I’m like, “No, teachers looked at your full materials. Like, I know the hours that they put in. I was in those working groups, like, they are looking at those materials in incredible depth. I think people would be shocked how much time it takes to do it.
Eric Hirsch 28:04
Oh, yeah, touch every page, click every link. And I always kind of want to say back, but I know how snarky it would sound, is, “Maybe, have you thought about the design of the materials? Because if it was that hard to find for folks who have literally put in hundreds of hours, perhaps you should think about the design structure.” Particularly given teacher turnover and folks who are like, “I never got the orientation from the publishers when we took this.” Are they going to be able to find it?
Jess Barrow 28:34
This next question I’m curious about— it’s a big question, and can maybe be a little hard to pick and choose—but given all the experience you have, I would love if you could each share: What can other states or districts or nonprofits—or other entities who are thinking about reviewing instructional materials—what can they learn from Louisiana or EdReports’ approach and what’s involved in signaling that quality to the field?
Eric Hirsch 29:07
I can jump on this one, Rebecca, because I think it feeds in but you and I have had this conversation. My question is, why? Why are you doing it? It’s really flipping hard, the amount of time, the amount of cost— thank you philanthropy—that we bear to purchase the materials, to pay our educators, to train staff and maintain a staff to do all these hard things. Why? So I think my question back is—hopefully, we are transparent. That is our goal. The only way to build trust in the field is to be transparent in what you do and what you know, and reflect and be willing to keep getting better and doing better.
But I think one area I hope we’re getting better at—and Jess, since you are in our communications wing, it’s in part with your great voice—is really making clear: EdReports is a place to start. So I would actually redirect the question (and maybe this will help you answer it better than me, Rebecca): You shouldn’t be reviewing materials, at least for the same things we do. We have a lot of evidence. We have 120 pages of evidence guides, a 19 page rubric, but we can’t review for everything.
Your community and your context matters. Which is why we know, states [have] not only differences in standards, different communities—as we think about what it means for students to be engaged and affirmed, as we think about a whole host of criteria. But then I would tell you to build off of the hard work we did for you and think about what else could be reviewed, what else could be enhanced. How can you contextualize? What can you look for in the materials?
And we’ve done this a little bit. We did this when we tried to put out a primer on looking at cultural responsiveness. What do people mean? Here are some additional tools. Here are some things we’ve looked at and where we think the evidence is. But more, this is something—here’s some support if you want to do it. But do you really need to re-adjudicate, relitigate grade level content standards? And it’s not just the standards: the content and some of the real instructional changes. Around focusing coherence in math. Oh my gosh, we’ve done our best—Rebecca in your world—to look at text complexity, to try to really document what kids are reading. And hopefully you can then say: “Fantastic. What else can I do as a nonprofit to illuminate different things?” Or as a state, “I care about these things too in my state or district context.”
Rebecca Kockler 31:50
Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I still get emails and calls regularly from folks who say like, “Oh, we want to learn how to do our own process. We want to learn honestly.” I still get like, “How do we write our own curriculum. We saw you did both. Can we chat?” And I’m like, don’t do either. I did that, it was crazy. So, yeah, we don’t recommend, I don’t recommend that anybody do the same kind of reviews we were doing in Louisiana, you know, 12 years ago. We did that because EdReports didn’t exist.
And we, you know, were trying to direct things in that way—but I totally agree: our rubrics were not as complicated as EdReports’ are because we didn’t have the time to, like, do all of that thorough review. EdReports’ rubrics are more comprehensive. They’re more thorough than ours were. Like, there’s just a set of things you can do when your whole organization is focused on those reviews.
Eric Hirsch 32:55
What did you have, three staff, Rebecca?
Rebecca Kockler 32:57
Yes, exactly. So, yeah. And that’s the other thing, folks are like, “I only have one person to do this.” I’m like, “Yes, exactly. You will not do this. Like, it’s not possible.” So, and there are, like, there’s a lot of green programs, right? And so, to Eric’s point, there’s still a lot to sift out, even when you say you’ve met this bar for quality, and so—and frankly, getting people to purchase quality materials was not the hardest thing I did in Louisiana.
Getting people to implement quality materials is so much harder. And so, like, if you can focus your time and money on the implementation side, which is like, a many, multi year process and complex and hard and expensive, like: do that, like, focus your time there, because that is so much harder to do than just getting people to purchase the right stuff. That’s hard. I’m not saying it’s not hard, but the implementation side of it is so complex and so to me, that’s just not where I would spend my time today.
If I was a system, I would spend my time picking the right green product because it’s the right fit for our community or school or setting, and then I would focus a lot more on implementation efforts. And there’s supports out there now for that too, but it’s still a really complex piece to think about supporting implementation statewide.
Jess Barrow 34:23
Yeah, it’s helpful to hear from both of you and I think it really illustrates how much has changed in the last decade in terms of what’s available and the information that’s out there. Well, as we’re as we’re getting closer to wrapping up, I would love to hear from both of your perspectives—and you’ve both touched on this a little bit. Rebecca, you especially just did—but what would you highlight as some of the biggest opportunities and challenges of the future as you think about how we can ensure that students actually get access to the materials they need to support them to learn and grow? And in terms of how the field is changing and where those energies might be best focused?
Rebecca Kockler 35:15
Technology. You know, I say this because we are, in my current role, trying to figure out how to best leverage technology to get kids instructional experiences at scale. It’s a wild west world out there, and the products there’s, you know, to me right now, the technology market, the tech market, feels like what the immediately post Common Core market felt like. Like, everyone has flashy labels, everyone has AI, everyone has these things. It’s totally impossible to figure out what’s of quality and what’s not.
And the way we measure it is like, really much more complex, because there isn’t something static for the most part. So I think that’s really the new space and frontier of where we’re headed, is figuring out how to direct quality in that space, which is going to be complicated. And you see a ton of those products flooding into classrooms. You see a bunch of kids sitting in front of them a lot, and lots of them are not having an impact on kids, or they’re having a very different impact on different kinds of kids. So to me, that’s, you know, a real place of need in our system.
And I know EdReports and Eric and team are thinking about that and trying to figure out, like, what does that mean and look like? Because it is such a unique and different model. So I’m excited about that and and just feel very passionate about that, because that field is obviously only going to get bigger and bigger for our field. And then, yeah, I just think, no matter what, implementation is always just a focus, like, how do we help? Teaching is hard. Kids’ learning is hard. Kids are unique and special, and teachers have lots to do.
And so how do we help teachers do manageable jobs and still get all kids unique learning experiences every single day that they deserve to have when they show up to school? That’s just—we have not cracked that code, I would say, yet, and so continuing to figure out our evolution of teacher support implementation work, I think, is just a continued focus for us as a field. Those are the two things I would probably highlight.
Eric Hirsch 37:32
Those are amazing things. So we are trying to keep up with more generative materials, AI and technology, in part because we understand and take very seriously our signaling importance in the marketplace. And if we can’t figure out how to review—which, Rebecca, you and everyone at Magpie are doing the hard work of trying to figure out how to actually design—we are going to inadvertently keep the market from innovating and finding the best things, if we can’t figure out a way to review things that are less static.
So we’ve been spending a lot of time, and we are currently revising our tools. Now, we thought it was a great time, given what research is known, and thinking about what other evidence and other things—can we be ready to review adaptive materials? But what’s settled research and known about multilingual learners, engaging and affirming instruction, back-mapped into the materials? We can do more and get more information out there.
So ideally, we are continuing to signal and provide evidence and information around things that are really important to the field, that are research based and evidence based, and hopefully that helps on the implementation side too. Because I think we all said it: buying curriculum is hard. It is. Making the right choice, understanding how that choice is there. Because nobody changes practice because somebody dropped a book on your doorstep or gave you a login. You change practice through really hard work, learning together, and that is what has to happen.
And I think we keep thinking about what kind of information [to provide] so that right choice is known for that district, and they’re like, “We can build an implementation plan. We can really think about support, because we know about scaffolds, we know about multilingual learner supports. We know the kind of professional learning it will take for our folks to be ready to implement this curriculum well, technology or not technology.” But again, as the technology starts to help you implement it, and actually does some of that scaffolding on its own, which I know you’ve been working on so much—like, that’s hard, hard stuff.
Jess Barrow 40:00
Is there anything I didn’t ask about that either of you would want to close with or reflect on? There’s so many sort of facets to this conversation, and I know we did not cover them all, but if there’s anything like, “Oh, I really, I want to say this, This comes to mind”?
Eric Hirsch 40:26
Yes, and I want to start because it brings me full circle to our introductions. And I want to embarrass Rebecca. It is amazing what you were able to do as a chief academic officer in a state, and how you were able to put students first and use curriculum as a scalable lever for change. So much of our work is predicated on yours. So many states are still replicating and stepping up to do some of the things you all roadmapped, and I don’t think EdReports would have close to the impact we’ve had.
We would have spent at least an extra decade trying to figure out how to do certain things if your tenacity and commitment and just general awesomeness weren’t really put out there at a time when—I sometimes think our job is hard, and I can’t imagine how hard that was. We’ve talked about, because we’ve each gotten a lot of pushback, and our work would not have been possible without you showing people it was possible. Oh my God, I’m not going to continue to say the number of years, because you and I are so young. Rebecca.
So, no, the only thing I want to say is, I’ve been looking forward to this because, like, truly, when you think about the decade, there are just some key Marvel cinematic universe superheroes in our curriculum space, and you are one of them. I just want to say thank you. We don’t get thanked a lot in this work, we get yelled at a lot more, and so I’m thrilled you got to come in and I got to say thank you, because it’s meant so much to us and the way we do our work.
Rebecca Kockler 46:51
Well, I very much appreciate that, and I would love to take all of that credit, but we had just an outrageously talented team, and as I said, just an incredible set of educators. I just cannot underestimate both the role they played in demanding it, the role they played in actually doing the work and the role they played in scaling it.
It was just like an amazingly talented team, so I appreciate that, and it was fun work, and felt so necessary at the time, and it’s so exciting that it’s not necessary now, which is just incredible, because there was so much untouched work at our time in Louisiana. And I know the administration now is taking on so much of the ongoing work, and so to be able to just jump in now where states can actually do now the next set of work, because they don’t actually have to start at that place, is so incredible.
And it is just amazing how conversational EdReports is in the world right now and just wildly powerful. You know, I’m now on the other side of it, right? I’m building tools that I want to be green on EdReports, and hope to be green on EdReports, and how common it is, you know, for us to be using those rubrics as we design to make sure that we’re going to meet bars of quality. That’s just powerful. Lots of publishers are doing that now. Funders require it as a metric for quality when you’re getting funding for them. Districts demand it when they put out RFPs, like, that is market change.
And I think sometimes we have these kind of simplistic views like, oh, we have to, you know, just help people, just convince them that this matters. Oh, we just have to, you know, really spend time investing people in the purpose of this work. And I’m like, of course, yes, you have to do that. And real change is tactical, operational, boring, implementation work, and I think EdReports is such a model of that, like you have changed a market. Not just because you did a whole bunch of communication strategies around convincing people this matters and winning hearts and minds, but because you did really hard, disciplined work around actually holding a bar for quality and showing people over and over again the way that can have an influence with kids and in the system, and that, I think, is such an important lesson for us in education, like: change takes time.
It’s a decade, and now EdReports is just a common part of the ecosystem to hold a high bar, and it takes deliberate strategy and execution and implementation, not just kind of hearts and mind, stuff alone. And so I think you guys are such a symbol of that in our field. And I think we need to understand that more for change management systems overall. You can change an entire industry in our country, which is pretty incredible to think about. But there are real disciplined ways of doing that. So just really amazing the power of that, not only for what it’s doing, which is holding people accountable to higher expectations and curriculum, which it is fundamentally doing in our marketplace—but also for how to change marketplaces, which is pretty cool. So just wanted to note that as well, people are thinking about that.
Eric Hirsch 45:44
I appreciate it. And what’s at the core of what we do? Students, of course, but it’s teachers—again, the educator-led part. It’s all based on the wisdom of educators who are working with kids every day. And if that’s your North Star, and you can do all the other things around it, I think we’re all doing all right. Yeah, doing better than we were at the very least.
Rebecca Kockler 46:05
That’s right—just keep doing better. It’s all we can keep doing and making hard decisions, including taking those yellings, because we think it’s what’s best for the kids that we’re serving.
Jess Barrow 46:15
Well, I can’t thank you both enough for taking the time to share your expertise, your knowledge, all the experiences that you have. We are just so excited to share this conversation and really appreciate it. Hopefully we can have you both back on in another 10 years to reflect on what the decade has been— or before! But really appreciate it and hope to see you soon.
