Building District and School Systems to Promote Universally Effective Instruction

Erie’s Public Schools (EPS), based in Erie, Pennsylvania, serves 10,310 K-12 students across 15 schools. EPS and CORE’s partnership was initiated in the 2022-23 school year after the district adopted and started implementing new high-quality instructional materials (HQIM). The district’s elementary schools have adopted the Core Knowledge Language Arts® (CKLA) curriculum for elementary school literacy, and the middle schools have adopted i-Ready for mathematics.

Because the effective implementation of HQIM is a systems change, the CORE Curriculum Services model requires multiple years of work. In year 1, we start building leadership capacity to support educators as they implement materials as designed and continue through year 3 to build capacity to sustain the change at the district and school levels and scale to additional grade levels and subject areas as appropriate. With that in mind, the specific goals of our Curriculum Implementation services include:

• Building sustainable district- and school-level curriculum implementation systems,
• Providing professional learning experiences that enable leaders to effectively support the implementation of HQIM, and
• Engaging leaders to monitor and improve curriculum implementation.

Throughout the past 2 years, EPS has worked alongside CORE to provide services to 10 elementary schools and 3 middle schools. Due to this commitment, EPS has seen significant shifts–from building and improving district and school systems, to leader and educator practice changes, and improvements in student engagement and achievement.