Superintendents

Three-year roadmap

Three years: foundations, then curriculum, then depthEach year builds on the one before; none is skipped

Year 1Foundations

Screen every K–3 student
Tutoring as a scheduled period
Visits and weekly staff sessions

Year 2Curriculum

Adopt with the review rubric
Curriculum-specific training
Coaching cycles in every school

Year 3Depth

Knowledge units protected K–5
Mixed practice in all math
Results reported by group

Year 1 builds what doesn't depend on new materials: screening, scheduled tutoring, and leaders who visit classrooms weekly. Year 2 adopts curriculum with the training that makes it work. Year 3 deepens the practices whose payoff takes longest, especially knowledge-building, whose effects in the lottery study showed up in grades 3–6 (Grissmer et al.(opens in a new tab)).

What to stop paying for

Stop	Why	Redirect to
Learning styles training or assessments	No support when properly tested (Pashler et al.(opens in a new tab))	Explicit teaching and checking PD
Leveled readers with untaught patterns for K–1 beginners	Encourages guessing instead of decoding	Decodable texts matched to the phonics sequence
Optional after-school tutoring as the main intervention	Effects larger during the school day (Nickow et al.(opens in a new tab))	Scheduled in-school tutoring
New curriculum with no training budget	Materials alone moved scores little in a six-state study (Blazar et al.(opens in a new tab))	Curriculum-specific training and coaching
One-day PD with no follow-up	Nothing checks whether it changed teaching	Monthly coaching cycles and visits
Data platforms nobody acts on	Monitoring helps when teachers use it to change instruction (Stecker et al.(opens in a new tab))	Weekly data meetings with decision rules

Board brief: knowledge-building curriculum

Curriculum review rubric: math and ELA, K–5

Three-year roadmap

What to stop paying for

Listening path

District leaders

Principles

Sources