The curriculum news keeps coming. Massachusetts legislation is poised to give a state new curriculum mandate powers. The Southern Surge is bringing fresh attention to the successful curriculum reforms in Louisiana and Tennessee. And the Pennsylvania Problem hit our radar.
Kata Solow was shook by the Pennsylvania list debacle, and an investigation was spawned. Read on for her findings…
TL;DR Summary: Someone has it out for UFLI…and inexplicably penalized it on the Pennsylvania state curriculum list. Who? The Reading League? WestEd? The state of Pennsylvania? I will investigate this mystery…and more below.
Earlier this year, the Pennsylvania Department of Education published a list of reading curricula (apparently compiled by WestEd) that compared ratings from two curriculum review organizations (EdReports and The Reading League) and two education departments (Ohio and Colorado). Within hours, the list was removed from the website because it was incomprehensible and unusable.
I recently read the list–and while I agree that it’s incomprehensible and unuseable, that’s a topic for another time.
Today, I want to investigate a mystery I encountered.
UFLI was one of the lowest-rated options. And the only source cited was the Reading League review.
How did this happen? What does TRL have against UFLI?
Everyone in the curriculum review space knows that yellow is THE kiss of death (ahem, Bookworms and EdReports)! But first, I needed to confirm what that yellow triangle actually meant. I reviewed the key that accompanied the list.
Sure enough, the yellow triangle means “mostly met requirements for necessary components.”
This is really bad news. That single yellow triangle will likely dissuade Pennsylvania districts from adopting the most affordable, usable, and evidence-based foundational skills program out there.
You might think I’m exaggerating, but this is already happening across the country. States are building bad curricula lists based on bad information, and districts are unknowingly adopting weaker options.
So how did this happen? What does TRL actually say about UFLI? I pulled up their review and scrolled to the summary section, eyes peeled for the yellow triangle of doom. But it wasn’t there. Instead, I found this:
For the first time, I was mildly sympathetic to the PA list-makers. TRL does, in fact, declare that UFLI “mostly met” their criteria. The yellow triangle makes sense, given this context.
But how did TRL reach this conclusion? The final report summary didn’t tell me very much, so I backtracked and read the entire review.
(Side note: TRL curriculum reviews are incredibly dense and difficult to navigate. I wonder how many people have the time AND stamina to read them in their entirety. I imagine most just skip to the end summary, like I did initially.)
And here’s the thing, as I read on, the actual review was positive. It confirmed many (all?) of the things I know to be true about UFLI: it is aligned to research, and it is structured, systematic, and easy to use. TRL did ding UFLI for missing opportunities to extend vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency instruction, but the reviewers also acknowledged that UFLI is not designed to do those things comprehensively. And yet, UFLI still got stuck with the “mostly met” label.
And if UFLI mostly met the TRL criteria, what curriculum did meet it? I returned to the PA list and did a doubletake.
TRL apparently gave Wonders the green light!
Sure enough. TRL review of Wonders was nearly identical to UFLI’s report summary, with one major difference.
My first thought: what a confusing way to characterize a curriculum! Does it meet or does it mostly meet the criteria? Which is it?
My second thought: in what universe does Wonders get a higher rating than UFLI?
I’m not going to catalog all of the problems with Wonders here. Other people have done that. But I will say when you compare Wonders’ foundational skills program to UFLI, UFLI is clearly superior in structure, usability, efficiency, AND content. This is widely acknowledged by teachers and administrators across the country. Many districts adopt both: UFLI for foundational skills and Wonders for content. In fact, EdReports gave a good review to UFLI (it just did so after WestEd compiled its PA list).
So back to the question: How did UFLI end up with a yellow rating on the PA list? Who is responsible?
The Reading League Review process bears a lot of responsibility here. I don’t think the organization intends for states to reduce their reviews to simple green, yellow, and red ratings like Pennsylvania and/or WestEd did. But I’m not surprised it happened here – EdReports has trained states to expect this kind of simplicity. The Reading League team needs to be prepared to push back and challenge states that misinterpret their work.
Moreover, TRL reviews are long, dense, and confusing. Very few people are going to take the time to read them. They’re just going to skip ahead to the executive summary and draw their conclusions from there. That’s how you get Pennsylvania greenlighting Wonders and yellowlighting UFLI. I doubt they would have reached that same conclusion if the deciders read both reports in their entirety. Again, TRL needs to anticipate and plan for this issue (and perhaps consider making their work more accessible). What is the point of these reviews if no one is actually reading them?
States need to wise up, too. These curriculum tools are deeply imperfect. EdReports’ issues are well-documented. There are problems with the TRL review tool beyond accessibility. States should look at other states making progress with reading instruction and seek to understand the materials and approaches that they’ve used to support teachers.
Pennsylvania has a huge opportunity right now. The state has the power to ensure that teachers and students have access to the excellent curricular materials that they deserve. If they want to make the most of this opportunity, they need to destroy this list and start over. And once they’ve done that, they should actually read TRL review of UFLI more closely and greenlight UFLI.
The TRL Curriculum Navigation Reports are helpful for identifying alignment with the science of reading, but they don’t fully capture the realities districts face—especially ease of use, coherence, pacing, and true implementability.
I recently supported a district reviewing its K–2 foundational skills program, which had earned top marks from TRL. Once we unpacked it, the materials were bloated, incoherent across lessons, and painfully slow-paced. Teachers were overloaded, fidelity was low, and—most importantly—student achievement data in K–2 was abysmal, not only for multilingual learners but for all students.
We compared the other program side-by-side with UFLI. UFLI’s structure, clarity, and coherence made it dramatically more usable. After two days of deep analysis, the district chose to offer UFLI as an option because teachers could actually implement it and students could finally make progress. However, because of all previous investment, they also kept the former program as an option because of the ratings it had received from TRL.
Alignment to SoR is necessary, but not sufficient. If a program is inefficient, incoherent, or burdensome, it will fail in practice—no matter how highly it scores. Ease of use—and actual student outcomes—must become formal criteria in any curriculum review.
Great detective work! 🕵️
We’re still in the Dark Ages with state reading curriculum approvals. Uggh.