Delivering Content to the Classroom

If you ever wondered how educational content marries up to your state’s standards, or who the players are that make it all happen, you’re not alone. With over 5 million educational standards, it’s certainly a daunting task, and the actors tend to run ‘under the radar’.

Consider this — all 50 U.S. states produce their own K-12 education standards, so early on, a majority of K-12 publishers agreed that managing such a monumental task would be daunting, and would certainly de-focus their writers from their most critical work: creating educational content. They needed a partner who would take on the heavy lifting of standards correlations.

Enter stage right, EdGate

Founded in 1997, our goal has been to build the world’s largest standards repository, helping power the educational landscape. To do this, we formed a highly trained group of educators, developed patented methodologies, and designed systems to streamline the creation of subject-specific correlations. If there were an Oscars award ceremony for education standards, we feel confident we'd be bringing home that golden statue. While not as cool as acting, our work is critical to the classroom. With the K-12 core, plus SEL, Technology Education, Early Childhood, and a huge collection of CTE standards, we can adeptly provide standards correlations across a multitude of subjects, states, grades, and countries.

EdTech is a big field with many actors. Without our many partners and clients, there would be no end product, no standards-aligned content to deliver to the millions of students and educators, and definitely no chance to make an acceptance speech. So, what are the components needed to build high quality education content and who are a few of the players that make it all happen.

Overture

For years U.S. states have required that K-12 educational content publishers provide proof that their content aligns to state standards. If not aligned, it's nearly impossible to get past the RFP stage and into curriculum adoption. That’s because educators understand that the standards help to ensure that all students have the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life upon graduation from high school.  At the same time, content publishers understand that the curriculum they develop must align to specific standards in order to be used successfully in the classroom.

According to EdReport's State of the Instructional Materials Market 2021 "Teachers want materials that are aligned to state standards, offer support for multilingual learners, and provide culturally relevant content and approaches, but few believe their materials meet these needs.”

So, are the state instructional material adoption committees listening? Absolutely, yes. In EdGate's home state of Washington, the very first line of the K-12 Instructional Material Adoption Toolkit states the following, "The importance of carefully crafted course design and the selection of effective instructional materials that are well aligned to Washington State K–12 Learning Standards cannot be overstated." Additionally included is an 18-page document outlining how the state screens for biased content in instructional materials.

With so many requirements to be met, educational content publishers need to know that they are covering all their bases, and not being left by the wayside because their content didn’t meet the needs specified. Publishers and EdTech providers rely on EdGate, a partner that understands the standards space, and can speed time of delivery. However, the plot thickens, even with EdGate at the helm of the K-12 education standards space, more expertise may be required. Other supporting industry players are often needed to fill important roles within the storyline of standards correlations.

Without further ado, here are a couple of those players, and how they round out the playbill of compliance.

Westchester Education Services

It's rare to find a publishing company that can do everything in-house. Most publishers outsource some of the most difficult work to the experts, e.g., the content development and digital production. That's where Westchester comes in. Westchester provides a full suite of product development services. EdGate provides Westchester with the most up-to-date education standards, as well as the option for EdGate's SMEs to assist with standards alignment services. Additionally, Westchester offers:

• Content authoring, state customizations, and assessment development for literacy, math, ELT, science, social studies, CTE, SEL, and more.
• Design services, including covers and interior pages.
• Illustration and tech art creation.
• Art and photo management.
• Translation services.
• Review of and creation of materials that support the whole student, embedding the principles of culturally responsive education and social-emotional learning into all of the products they create. In fact, the company’s proven Culturally Responsive Education rubric is at the center of their work. This rubric draws from the best practices of educational, academic, and library anti-bias and culturally responsible programs.

Content2Classroom

Evotext provides Content2Classroom, a Curriculum Creation, Management, and Delivery Platform for K-12 Publishers. C2C gives publishers the tools to organize, build, and deliver standards-aligned curriculum. Publishers can use EdGate verified standards feeds for alignment in C2C and utilize a skill spine to crosswalk content from one state to another. It also has an array of other features and capabilities for easily creating engaging digital content without expensive engineering. Out of the box, it’s 100% prepared for publishers to build, manage and deliver standards-based instruction, assessment and reporting. Features include:

• Your own branded, configurable experiences for administrators, teachers, students and parents
• Efficient classroom, course, and assignment management
• Powerful standards-based reporting tracking performance, usage, progress and engagement

Reprise

Working with hundreds of K-12 publishing clients, our team of former educators not only maintains the aforementioned standards database, but also provides the expertise and tools to align content to state and international standards and to a robust taxonomy of educational concepts. However, it's our clients and partners who are creating the content, designing, illustrating, digitizing and providing authoring and delivery platforms. Working hand-in-hand with our EdTech partners, we are able to provide our mutual clients with a full menu of services and a seamless, interoperable workflow, including data transfer via API and 1EdTech CASE identifiers.

By: Gina Faulk
General Manager