Is today a good time to tweet about a new and interesting education policy study that's hot off the presses? https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA279-1.html?utm_source=WhatCountsEmail&utm_medium=NPA:2597:6465:Nov%204,%202020%206:05:46%20AM%20PST&utm_campaign=NPA:2597:6465:Nov%204,%202020%206:05:46%20AM%20PST

Well imma do it anyway because why not?

This is the first new report from our study of coherent instructional systems in ELA. This report uses data from the American Teacher Panel in three partner states to investigate the degree to which teachers are in districts with coherent policy systems.

We investigate issues like the presence of standards-aligned curriculum materials, the receipt of curriculum-aligned professional development, the coherence of district assessment and evaluation systems, and the presence of what we call "enabling conditions" for coherence.

Findings:

1) Quite few ELA teachers have access to/use standards-aligned curriculum materials. *Vanishingly* few in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but most in Louisiana (i.e., state curriculum policy matters).

2) Most teachers don't get much curriculum-oriented professional learning supports, instead getting more generic (but probably quite valuable!) supports like common planning time and PLCs.

3) There are big differences across states and types of students served in the curriculum supports teachers get. For students, the biggest gap we saw was for teachers who teach more students with disabilities--they reported less coherence across a range of supports.

4) Teachers reported really middling presence of the enabling conditions for curriculum coherence. They were especially bearish on leadership and on the opportunities they had for collaboration.

5) Last, we characterized teachers' overall instructional system in terms of its coherence, and we found low overall levels and huge differences across states (favoring LA over MA and RI) and students served (favoring teachers with more students of color and fewer SWDs).

The report is free to access here. There's a lot more in it, and a lot more work to come from this project! https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA279-1.html?utm_source=WhatCountsEmail&utm_medium=NPA:2597:6465:Nov%204,%202020%206:05:46%20AM%20PST&utm_campaign=NPA:2597:6465:Nov%204,%202020%206:05:46%20AM%20PST

All thanks to the incredible research team: @juliahkaufman, @VDarleenOpfer @Shira_Korn @dans1lver Elaine Wang and Ashley Woo!