Ohio offers an object lesson on issues in the curriculum space

With renewed attention to Ohio’s curriculum list, I’m republishing an important column with national implications.

Emily Hanford’s reporting is back, and it’s turning the nation’s attention to Steubenville, Ohio, where a district success story has a curriculum at its heart – and that program wasn’t on Ohio’s state list.

Let’s revisit the Ohio story, for the Buckeye State continues to offer a fairly representative picture of the national curriculum landscape. Since I published this piece in March, 2024, Ohio’s curriculum list has seen a number of changes, some quite recent. The February 2025 Update explores the changes; the original article below is unedited.

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The Ohio curriculum survey is important, because It gives a rare glimpse into statewide curriculum use. To date, only a few states have offered this.

More importantly, Ohio illustrates basically every material problem in today's curriculum landscape.

Fordham’s coverage includes an analysis of the Ohio survey, and I’d recommend giving it a read.

Let’s unpack the curriculum landscape as of the 22-23 school year:

My key to this Ohio picture:

🟡 The most widely-used materials are foundational skills supplements… a telltale sign that “phonics patching” is happening, as districts address one layer of the problem, but leave other curriculum shortcomings In place.

🔴 The most-used core curricula are relatively weak basals. I’ve been saying that basals are coming to dominate the market, and Ohio certainly offers evidence (as did the CA Reading Coalition report).

🟢 Only one of the comprehensive core programs is considered high-quality by literacy experts, Core Knowledge.

🔵 TCRWP Units of Study and Fountas & Pinnell are hanging strong in a meaningful number of districts, most notably in Ohio suburbs (just as we saw in Massachusetts).

And EEK: the most-used product, by far, is the Heggerty phonemic awareness supplement… a product that isn’t supported by research, and represents an unfortunate case of the Science of Reading movement popularizing faddish ideas about phonemic awareness. If you haven’t been following this story, Jill Barshay’s reporting offers a superb window into the issues with oral-only phonemic awareness approaches. In fact, Heggerty is walking back its own product right now. This issue hasn’t had the attention it should, because it’s a bit of an embarrassment for the SoR movement. Oral-only phonemic awareness wasn’t promoted by most in the SoR space – in fact, many researchers expressed concerns – but influential voices and conferences promoted the idea and Heggerty spread like wildfire. This deserves attention, especially in light of the remarkable popularity of Heggerty (the company claims its products are in 70% of districts).

Also EEK: a sizable segment of districts have no reported curriculum: 34 out of 605 districts, including two large urban districts. There, teachers have DIY Curricula or a big pile of supplements.

Clearly, Ohio districts have a lot of varied issues to address.

The Fordham analysis is an object lesson, too. It illustrates the field's confusion in defining curriculum quality, because it treats all-green on EdReports as THE barometer. Fordham's reporting suggests that use of Into Reading and Wonders 2020 is good news, and it's not. Here we have savvy writers, with enough of sophistication to get into the nuances of supplement versus comprehensive curriculum, but the authors haven’t caught the breaking news that EdReports now quietly acknowledges the basal problem.

Fordham reports that half of Ohio districts need to change curricula under Ohio’s new law – a sobering stat by any measure. However, this reporting doesn’t offer a good measure of the use of quality programs, because flawed basals are deemed acceptable in Fordham’s analysis.

Looking ahead...

Ohio’s governor is pushing for change with a widely-watched Science of Reading initiative. You might think the new Ohio curriculum list will improve this situation.

Sadly, Ohio has one of the weaker curriculum lists to emerge from this year’s adoptions.

Ohio’s process was designed to rubber-stamp EdReports reviews. It took this to an extreme, leaving both the 2020 and 2023 versions of Wonders on the list, with curious disregard for the principle of highest-quality. Bookworms, the program with the most compelling evidence that it works of any program, isn’t on the list, presumably Because EdReports.

And when Ohio’s team didn’t have an EdReports review to go on, its assessments of programs are frequently suspect. For example, the widely-praised UFLI program is approved in kindergarten but not first grade, which simply makes no sense. In preK, Ohio’s list includes the Creative Curriculum for Preschool, a program widely-derided in literacy circles. Troubling stories are circulating to suggest that Ohio’s state team lacks qualified curriculum review capacity.

Ohio seeks to advance change, but its new curriculum list is poised to produce more of the same. We can predict that most Balanced Literacy and DIY curriculum districts will jump to the basal programs on Ohio’s list, because they best enable a DIY approach by teachers. In fact, they market themselves as Choose Your Own Adventure programs. It’s attractive to teachers – and anathema to systematic improvement.

The Buckeye State's next chapter seems poised to be dominated by flawed basal programs. The literacy community should be asking how many other states are poised for the same. From Georgia to South Carolina, we are seeing new state lists that are long on basals, a situation enabled by problematic EdReports reviews.

Ohio is often described as a bellwether state in national politics, and I fear it’s playing that role in the curriculum space, as well.

If Ohio’s Science of Reading initiative is stumbling at the critical curriculum juncture, your state’s can, too. Curriculum Matters. Flawed curricula can usher poor practices like cueing into classrooms, and strong curriculum can do the opposite, when paired with support for teachers. It’s time for states to show a lot more savvy in this realm, and for literacy advocates to come off “curriculum-agnostic” perches to proclaim it clearly: some curricula are vastly better than others, and our teachers deserve the best.

Update as of April 17, 2024

Following rumors that Ohio was considering additions based on the quirks in its list, the Ohio DOE has announced that additional materials are still being reviewed by its team, including UFLI (and other programs) in first and second grades. Some social media commentators have suggested that programs made modifications in order to secure further review; this appears to be speculation, as I've been unable to identify any programs for which this is the case. Instead, the Ohio team is responding to the public outcry about its list.

The review timeline is currently unclear.

Update as of February, 2025

Ohio’s elementary curriculum list is no longer simply a rubber stamp of EdReports, for better and for worse.

For better: Bookworms made the list. UFLI is now approved in all grades. The Success for All materials used in Steubenville were added in the last 30 days, on January 31st.

For worse: None of the mediocre programs previously on the list were removed, and it looks like a number of just-OK options were added.

Ohio’s list basically says: “You need to use a curriculum, and it can’t be Fountas & Pinnell or TCRWP Units of Study, but other than that, choose from this vast array!”

Districts must now choose from twenty-one options. That’s… a lot of options. No district has the capacity to review that many options. More importantly, this approach has nothing in common with the approach to curriculum lists in the states with the strongest post-pandemic reading growth.

As I detailed in my recent piece on the Southern Surge, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama published much more streamlined lists, and they really curated for quality. They also worked to nurture educator buy-in for change. I don’t hear much to suggest that Ohio is on a similar path.

I’m not bullish for the Buckeye State, given all of the above.