• Sutherland Institute is launching a new project designed to publicly recognize Utah school districts achieving excellence in making curriculum information easily accessible online to parents.
• School districts that earn a perfect score based on our rubric will be publicly recognized as leaders in strengthening the parent-teacher partnership by increasing parent access to classroom learning materials.

Parents deserve user-friendly, easily accessible online information about the curriculum taught to their children.

The Utah legislature has enacted commendable laws on parent access to learning materials in recent years, but Sutherland Institute/Y2 Analytics survey data show too many parents still don’t feel like curriculum is accessible.

Sutherland Institute to give public recognition to districts with perfect scores

To further advance parent access to curriculum, Sutherland Institute is launching the Partners in Learning Certificate project, designed to publicly recognize Utah school districts achieving excellence in making curriculum information easily accessible online to parents.

School districts that earn a perfect score based on our rubric will be publicly recognized as leaders in strengthening the parent-teacher partnership by increasing parent access to classroom learning materials. These leading districts can also become a resource for best practices that other districts may look to for ideas for improvement.

The project will recognize districts for their websites on a rolling basis, meaning districts that don’t yet earn a perfect score can improve and receive recognition when they do.

What is on our rubric?

Sutherland Institute created a rubric that measures whether curriculum information posted on a district website is designed to produce a positive experience for parents (or other members of the public) seeking more information about curriculum.

First, Utah code says that local school boards are required to make “instructional material that the school district uses readily accessible and available for a parent to view,” annually notify parents how to access it, and post information on their website about how to access it. However, we view this statutory requirement as a minimum.

In addition to what’s required by statute to be on their website, we are looking for other features, such as a relevant district policy, a webpage dedicated to curriculum information, and how easy the information is to access and use.

Here’s what we are looking for in our rubric:

Conclusion

School districts have a notable workload in complying with statutory requirements (as seen in this non-exhaustive LEA Compliance and Assurance checklist). Still, the work of education leaders closest to families has the most significant effect in practice. Any positive changes local leaders make are magnified in impact because the local district or school is usually a parent’s first contact. As a result, we are interested in focusing on district-level wins so they can spread across the state.

Our goal is to highlight districts succeeding so we can expand parent access to curriculum information and increase the sentiment among parents that they have what they need to be better partners with schools. We hope this program does that.