About Us
The Curriculum Insight Project is a collaborative effort to illuminate the K-12 curriculum landscape and advance the conversation about curriculum quality. We get into the important weeds for popular and emerging programs.
Our Mission
We are working to make the curriculum landscape easier to navigate, by bringing together K-12 educators and curriculum experts on grassroots efforts to increase transparency about curriculum options.
The curriculum landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade, and it promises to keep evolving. Curriculum is complex by its nature, and programs come with a substantial amount of content, so it’s incredibly challenging for any district team to explore all of the options in detail – and understand which programs work best in practice.
What’s more, you understand a curriculum best once you have used it, or observed its lessons in the classroom. So, our work is grounded in the perspectives of educators who have used materials and professionals who have seen the programs in action. Today, the curriculum review landscape falls short on this front, and we want to change that.
Our goal is to make curriculum conversations more tangible, more current and of-the-moment, and more grounded in classroom realities, while making it easier for schools to find programs that genuinely work to improve student outcomes.
Join the Curriculum Insight Project
If you are an educator or you work professionally in schools, and you’d like to contribute to our curriculum reviews and commentary, please get in touch here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is behind your work?
The project is a collaboration between educators and ELA curriculum experts from various parts of the K-12 education community. We have dozens of collaborators, and hundreds of educators have reached out to offer their support for our work.
If you would like to join this effort, please let us know here.
All reports or posts about specific curriculum are written by authoring teams that include educators using the program in question.
Which curricula will you be focusing on?
We have announced plans to write reports about six ELA curricula, detailed here. However, the curriculum landscape is ever-evolving, and we are evolving with it. We plan to publish columns on other materials, and we share important curriculum developments and perspectives in social media and our writing.
If you know of a curriculum story that deserves our attention, please get in touch.
Are you affiliated with any publishers? How do you guard against conflicts of interest?
We require all members to disclose any professional relationships or personal financial ties to curriculum providers, so we can assure that anything we publish is authored by a team with no conflicts of interest on the topic or program in question.
Neither the authors of our curriculum reports nor organizers of this effort have professional relationships with curriculum publishers. If we do publish any content (ex. columns) from anyone affiliated with a publisher, we will disclose that as part of the publication.
How is your work funded?
The Curriculum Insight Project is a grassroots initiative, and we have been grateful to the many people who have generously given their time to this work.
Our work has been supported by pledges to support our work in Substack, as well as a few small direct donations, none of which have come from the K-12 curriculum publishing community or individuals with ties to curriculum providers. Our primary funder is the Goyen Foundation, whose own efforts to illuminate the work in Science of Reading Classrooms are aligned with our mission and vision.
We are eager to build additional capacity and increase the velocity of our work, and we would welcome conversations with individuals or foundations interested in supporting this initiative. Please contact us at curriculuminsightproject@gmail.com, or subscribe to our Substack.
Subscribe to get updates on our work and access to our previous publications.
