Stephanie Tank retweetledi
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.
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