Dr. Leah Q. Peoples 

Over the last seven years, school communities from all over the world used the Culturally Responsive English Language Arts and Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math Curriculum Scorecards. These Scorecards were designed to facilitate a participatory evaluation process where teachers, students, administrators, families, and communities evaluate curricula collectively using Scorecard statements to deliberate about their levels of satisfaction. Sparked by lots of informal feedback, we designed a study to formally investigate and document outcomes associated with using the Scorecards.

About the Study

To understand how the Scorecards were being used and outcomes like powerful conversations, curriculum modifications, and changes in practice, we invited Scorecard users to participate in a questionnaire and interview. Just over 40 people, from across the United States, participated in the study. Our research participants included education professionals, teachers, administrators, and one parent.

What We Learned from the Study

We found three key findings from the study about what happened after people used the Curriculum Scorecards. Together, these findings show the power of participatory research tools like the Scorecards, and how they advance steps towards cultural responsiveness in curriculum.

Finding #1: The Scorecards prompted powerful conversations.

There were three key factors that made conversations powerful. First, the Scorecards fostered a shared understanding of curricula by guiding teams through a systematic review of materials. “Charles”, a superintendent who used the Scorecard in his school community, shared, “So the benefit of [using the Scorecard] is it forced some really good conversations. [We asked questions like] who is in this [curriculum]? Who are in these books? What do they look like? Who wrote the books? Those are things that our teachers had never really looked at before.” Second, using the Scorecards developed participants’ awareness of cultural inequities in curricula and provided language to engage in meaningful conversations about those inequities. 

The full report also explores a third key finding: how using the Scorecards sparked shifts in how some school communities operated. To learn more about the data behind these findings and to read about the third finding, please check out the full report, here: https://bit.ly/4kz2pxR

Why This Matters in Today’s Education Context

The need for education equity and culturally responsive curriculum has long been essential to actually serve all students. Studies have shown that culturally responsive education increases student academic engagement, grade point averages, graduation rates, civic engagement, positive racial self-images, positive self-definition, attendance, and critical thinking  (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Browman, 2011; Butler-Barnes, 2017; Cabrera, 2012; Carter, 2008; Dee & Penner, 2016; Morell, 2013; Laird, 2005). Just as consistently, efforts to break through the status quo and expand education equity have been met with backlash aimed at upholding systems of oppression. This dynamic,breakthrough and backlash, is a recurring theme within US education and history. There’s the breakthroughs that come from those advancing equity, who want to ensure that children are taught and learn in ways that are relevant to their lives, prepare them for futures and careers of their choosing, and equip them to navigate and create institutions where all enjoy freedoms. Then, there’s the backlash for stepping out of a status quo that systematically locks out marginalized groups while continuing to center dominant groups. 

Four examples of breakthroughs and backlash:

Example #1: Black Reconstruction

The Status Quo: White supremacist systems reinforced the idea that White people were the superior people and that Black people were subhuman property. These systems also made it illegal for Black Americans to read and write, and denied them access to schools at all levels (Anderson, 1988).

The Breakthrough: Enslaved Black Americans gained freedom and began working for pay, building their own schools, businesses, and communities, and participating in governance (Anderson, 1988; DuBois, 1998). 

The Backlash: State-sanctioned and vigilante violence led to wide-spread burning and destruction of Black schools and businesses, murders and lynchings, and intimidation of Black communities working toward rebuilding. These acts were accompanied by laws and policies deliberately designed to disrupt Black American’s progress. The on-going refusal to reconcile past harms, ensuring their consequences endure (Anderson, 1988; DuBois, 1998). 

Example #2: The Creation of Ethnic Studies 

The Status Quo: A crafting of history through a lens that centered wealthy White men while erasing, diminishing, and sanitizing a legacy of genocide, subjugation, violence, and exclusion. This version of history asserting freedom and democracy of all in the U.S.A. and ignoring the glaring contradictions between those ideals and the lived experiences of anyone who was not a White man (Zinn, 1980). 

The Breakthrough: The creation of ethnic studies programs from the late 1960s to 2020s. African American and Black Studies, Mexican American and Chicano/a Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies and more, finally shed light on the experiences, contributions, and knowledge generated by groups with marginalized identities that were long excluded from mainstream history and social studies (Morgan, 2024; Acosta & Mir, 2012).  

The Backlash: The steady creation of ethnic studies programs was and still is consistently met with accusations of separatism and targeted for dismantlement. These efforts are reinforced by false claims that existing curricula already meaningfully includes ethnic studies, along with state-wide policies that ban, restrict, or sanitize ethnic studies (Watson, 2023; Duncan-Andrade, 2014). 

Example #3:  The Creation of Indigenous Schools

The Status Quo: After committing genocide, land and cultural theft, and the systematic dehumanization of Indigenous people, the US established schools designed to assimilate, erase, and exploit Indigenous people. These schools also served as tools to literally, physically separate Indigenous children from their families and communities (Kingston, 2015; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015).

The Breakthrough: The advancement and development of schools and programs led by and serving Indigenous people. These schools and programs are rooted in language and cultural revitalization, truth-telling, and a reclamation of identity and culture. These efforts also reconnect communities, restore humanization, and resist continued efforts of erasure (Lee & Cerecer, 2010; McCarty & Lee, 2014). 

The Backlash: The persistent underfunding of tribally controlled schools and Indigenous-led schools and programs. Continued legal battles over land, curriculum control, and sovereignty. The legacy of systemic oppression persists today, marked by a continued failure to reconcile its harms (Mackey, 2017).

Today’s educational context is yet another example of breakthroughs and backlash. Over the last thirty years, educators have embraced culturally responsive education in the face of education policy that positioned marginalized students as pathologically deficient and framed their cultures through racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic tropes. In contrast, proponents of culturally responsive education assert that students’ cultural backgrounds are valuable, integral to success, and required for an equitable education for all students (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Gay, 2010; Paris, 2012). 

Example #4:  Today's Educational Context-Textbooks, Curricula, and Curricular Materials

The Status Quo: Over the last 30 years, textbooks, curricula, and curricular materials notoriously continue to struggle with diversity, centering overwhelming White people and characters while struggling to establish meaningfully diverse and inclusive materials.

The Breakthrough: Educators, communities, and students call for, build pathways for, and advance toward culturally responsive education and curriculum (among other approaches, like anti-racist education) that serves all students.

The Backlash: A public and political discourse that reframes these attempts toward education equity and culturally responsive education as threat, promotes the further sanitization of already sanitized curricula and erases even more from already erased histories and the insistence that culturally responsive education is divisive, anti-White, anti-American, and rooted in identity politics and victimhood (Miller, Liu, & Ball, 2023; Jayakumar & Kohli, 2023; Corbin, 2024) .

Why this Matters: One of the study’s most prominent findings was that using the Scorecards prompted powerful conversations. These conversations may be crucial for interrupting the breakthrough-backlash dynamic. A central feature of this dynamic is who holds the authority to define the status quo and if it should be upended. The Scorecard created opportunities for users to collaboratively move beyond assumptions by developing a shared understanding of what’s in curriculum, to systematically review curriculum, and useful language to engage in complex and nuanced conversation. This shared understanding may help school communities decide on next steps, collaboratively think through what kind of curriculum best serves their students, and resist backlash designed to reinforce educational inequities.

An Opportunity for Reflection: As you read the report or contemplate using one of the Scorecards to evaluate curriculum within your own school community, consider the following questions:

1.     What do you assume/know to be true about what culture is and isn’t and how it does or does not show up in curriculum? How do you know?

2.     What cultural perspectives are most visible in curricula, and which are most minimized or completely absent? How do you know?

3.     Which students, families, and communities are served and what is reinforced by the way culture is represented in curricula? How do you know?

Leah Q. Peoples, PhD, is a researcher, evaluator, educational equity advocate with Transformative Research.