What’s in Your Child’s Classroom?

My Views Are My Own

By Lisa Schonhoff, Ed.S.

11/19/2025

When my daughter came home in fourth grade talking about Muhammad and the Mecca, I decided to learn more about the lessons being taught in her classroom. I discovered that the newly purchased Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) curriculum materials is where this particular lesson came from. In my role as an English Learner teacher, I had the opportunity to be in classrooms from kindergarten through 12th grade, which allowed me to gain an insider's perspective on instructional materials taught at all grade levels.

In my observations, I learned that the CKLA curriculum is heavy in world history and religious content. It has been criticized for its heavy usage of terms and concepts that are beyond a student’s capabilities to grasp. When I asked for the evidence behind the effectiveness of the newly adopted CKLA, I was informed that CKLA is one of the High-Quality Instructional Materials (HQIM) with a green rating on EdReports and was provided with the CKLA Impact Brochure. This led me to many more questions and a lot more digging. Although CKLA gets all green on EdReports, the curriculum is not measured on the actual results it produces in classrooms in realizing successful reading outcomes. To learn more about CKLA, please refer to my prior blog post.

As classrooms across our state and nation make the shift back to phonics with the Science of Reading (SoR), another long list of acronyms makes its way into the education field as well.  One of the most prevalent acronyms touted in today's schools is HQIM (High Quality Instructional Materials).  This is defined across many states and educational resources as materials that are reviewed by EdReports against the Common Core Standards.  In Nebraska, curriculum materials that receive a green (highest) rating on EdReports are recommended on the Nebraska Instructional Materials Collaborative via the Nebraska Department of Education. CKLA is listed first. It should be noted that many Literacy Experts Say Some EdReports Ratings Are Misleading

“Kate Crist, a literacy consultant focusing on secondary grades who worked as a reviewer and writer for EdReports from 2015 to 2017, says the rubric itself is flawed. When she was at EdReports, she said, it was hard for reviewers to agree on the meaning of terms like “text complexity” and “knowledge-building.” There was no mechanism to clarify the definitions, she said.”

When reviewing the CKLA Impact Brochure, I noticed that the study listed (Building content knowledge to boost comprehension in the primary grades) to fulfill the evidence requirement by the Every Student Succeeds Act, states “further rigorous trials are needed to examine the efficacy of this integrative approach to teaching reading for understanding.”  There also may be irregularities in the study due to using Randomized Control Studies (RCT).

This is “where participants are divided into two groups: one receives an intervention or treatment, while the other (the control group) does not. By comparing outcomes across the groups, researchers claim they can determine the effectiveness of an EdTech tool or practice. But the use of RCTs in EdTech research can be deeply problematic and should not be blindly applied. In many cases, they’re poorly executed, and it’s often difficult to isolate the treatment effect. Learning is messy.”  The Problem with Randomized Controlled Trials in EdTech Research is that the “Widely considered gold standard for measuring the efficacy of interventions, RCT is a type of experiment that encompasses randomly assigning subjects into control and experimental groups to compare the effects of given interventions…This gold standard assumption around RCTs gets the process backward, as the method is chosen before defining and understand the problem.”  

As districts across our state and nation turn to EdReports for selecting curriculum materials, we are seeing the same materials being used across the nation in some of the highest performing states as well as the lowest performing states in our country. Could it be possible that classrooms are filling up with inadequate, overpriced curriculum materials as a result of flawed evidence provided by the vendor's claims of efficacy?  While we may observe literacy gains as a result of bringing phonics back into Nebraska's classrooms, we need to be mindful about the content within these curriculum materials. It’s important to look beyond EdReports when determining what curriculum materials are considered High Quality. As Science of Reading experts state in their popular book, Shifting the Balance, “Every school needs a program of phonics instruction.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to buy one.  What really matters is a strong and research-informed scope and sequence alongside instructional routines, whether homegrown or purchased."  (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development 2000; Moats and Tolman 2019)

Photo Credit:  Literacy Experts Say Some EdReports Ratings Are Misleading