The Case for Curriculum Infrastructure
In August, the U.S. Department of Education told states and districts to demand RCTs and hard evidence of effectiveness before buying instructional technology. Last week, Florida became the first state to write that standard into binding rule.
At the same time, state mandates keep multiplying, special populations and low-incidence programs keep going underserved, and every district wants its own voice in what its kids are taught.
Those two demands are pulling in opposite directions.
Boxed, standardized curriculum satisfies the first. It's fixed and easy to defend in a board meeting. It also doesn't cover state-specific mandates, doesn't address special populations, and gives a district zero say in how its own priorities show up in the material.
Teacher-sourced, generate-on-demand content does the opposite. It bends to whatever a teacher needs that day — local, responsive, fast. It also has no fixed form to study, no repeatable version to defend, and no way to show a school board it meets the bar regulators are now asking for.
Neither extreme actually works for a district trying to do both at once.
What's needed is a system that behaves like the first and adapts like the second — standards-aligned and reviewed like boxed curriculum, but built from what a district already has, shaped for its mandates, and scaled down to populations too small for anyone to have bothered building a program for.
That's the case for curriculum infrastructure over either extreme: not a fixed product, and not an unaccountable prompt — a governed system that adapts to every district's mandates and populations, evidence attached to the process that makes it, not just to one fixed artifact repeated everywhere.