• Many Utah teachers are succeeding in their effort to be transparent with curriculum.
• State policy requires parent access to instructional materials, but many district websites are outdated.
• School districts and state policymakers should move to an incentive-based model, rather than a mandate-based model, for teachers.

​Education is always a top priority for Utahns, and many parents are looking for ways to be better informed about what their kids are learning in school. The state has made progress on parent access policies but still has room for improvement, according to Sutherland Institute Education Policy Fellow Christine Cooke Fairbanks.

“Utah has made important strides to make public education more accessible to parents,” Fairbanks wrote in a recent article. “Legislators have passed laws that require instructional materials to be ‘readily accessible and available to parents.’”

Despite these policies, parents’ ability to access learning materials still has some gaps – things like outdated website links and poor organization of data – as noted in a recent Sutherland review of Utah school districts.

“[T]here is a parent responsibility in education, which is to engage in constructive ways that support student learning,” Fairbanks said in a recent interview. “But this requires that parents have easily accessible, quickly digestible, user-friendly information about curriculum.”

Utah has implemented learning management tools like Canvas to aid in that effort, but they only solve part of the problem. Fairbanks explained that this is why a parent-teacher partnership is so important.

“Parents and teachers are two of the most important variables for a child’s education,” she said. “When they have shared goals, information and understanding, they can better support the individual student in their learning, which is the ultimate goal of education.”

Beyond this partnership, Fairbanks said, much of the needed improvements fall on school boards, school districts, and Utah lawmakers.

“There is space for districts to make information about approved instructional materials more accessible and user-friendly for parents on their websites,” Fairbanks said. “Likewise, Utah policymakers can incentivize, rather than mandate, teachers to make information about their individual classroom curriculum more accessible.”

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