Key Takeaways
When reviewing programs, curriculum adoption committees often find it helpful to examine:
- The quality and complexity of the texts
- Whether knowledge builds across units and grade levels
- The kinds of questions students encounter
- How reading, writing, and discussion are connected
- Whether foundational skills are integrated with meaning-making
Choosing a literacy curriculum has become increasingly challenging for district leaders.
As more states adopt evidence-based literacy policies, curriculum publishers across the industry now claim alignment with the science of reading. Websites reference research. Marketing materials highlight phonics, decodable texts, and structured literacy. On the surface, many programs appear remarkably similar.
This raises an important question for district teams: How do you determine whether a literacy program's design actually reflects what research suggests students need?
One resource that can help is The Reading League's Curriculum Navigation Reports.
These reports are not endorsements of particular programs. Instead, they help districts examine how curriculum materials reflect research-informed literacy practices and identify opportunities for refinement.
The Reading League encourages educators to consider its findings alongside other important factors, including standards alignment, usability, implementation supports, and evidence of efficacy.
For district leaders, the reports offer an independent lens on how a curriculum is built. Looking at the criteria The Reading League uses, and the findings from its recent review of RedThread Literacy provides a useful framework for evaluating how any K–8 literacy program supports reading development over time.
Is There a Best Literacy Program for Grades K-8?
There is no single best literacy program for every district. The strongest curriculum depends on student needs, implementation capacity, professional learning support, and instructional priorities. Programs are best evaluated using consistent criteria, including instruction in foundational skills, knowledge building, reading-writing integration, vocabulary development, and opportunities for deep comprehension.
There is no single best literacy program for every district.
The strongest curriculum depends on student needs, instructional priorities, staffing capacity, and implementation support. At the same time, high-quality literacy programs tend to share several important characteristics.
When evaluating literacy curricula, district leaders could ask:
The answers to these questions often reveal more about curriculum quality than a checklist of features.
One of the first things district leaders look for is phonics instruction, but we believe it is more important to ask how that instruction is designed.
Students benefit from explicit instruction that helps them connect sounds to letters, apply those relationships while reading and spelling, and build increasingly sophisticated word-reading skills over time.
Strong literacy instruction pushes beyond phonics as an isolated set of lessons. Instead, students are learning how written language works so that they can apply that knowledge while reading, writing, and building understanding.
In its review of RedThread Literacy, The Reading League highlighted the program's explicit and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, and morphology. Reviewers noted that instruction in phoneme-grapheme correspondences is taught explicitly rather than opportunistically and that students are taught to attend to letter-sound relationships and sound out words rather than rely on memorization.
The report also pointed to the program's sustained focus on morphology and syllabication. As students progress through the grades, they study roots, prefixes, suffixes, and word patterns that help them make sense of increasingly complex vocabulary.
When evaluating a curriculum, district leaders may want to look beyond whether phonics exists and ask how skills develop across grades and whether students have opportunities to apply those skills in meaningful reading and writing contexts.
We often hear comprehension discussed as a set of skills or strategies students can apply to any text. But in classrooms, understanding rarely works that way.
A student reading about the Civil Rights Movement, climate science, or space exploration brings more to the text than decoding skills alone. Their understanding depends on what they already know, the vocabulary they have encountered, and the connections they can make between new ideas and prior learning.
Strong literacy curricula recognize this. Rather than treating each unit as a fresh start, they create opportunities for knowledge to build over time.
The Reading League's review identified RedThread's knowledge-building approach as a notable strength. Reviewers highlighted the alignment between the Foundations and Knowledge strands and noted how students build understanding across topics, including geography, culture, technology, science, and social studies.
What stands out is not the range of topics students encounter, but rather it is the way ideas accumulate. Students return to related concepts across texts, discussions, and writing experiences. Vocabulary reappears in new contexts, and questions become more sophisticated as students draw on more knowledge.
We see the impact of this kind of design in classrooms. Students are more likely to make connections between texts, recognize references that an author assumes readers will understand, and contribute more substantively to discussion because they have something to think with.
For district leaders, one useful evaluation question is whether knowledge builds across a curriculum or resets each time students begin a new unit. The answer often reveals a great deal about the kind of comprehension students are being asked to develop.
In many schools, reading and writing are scheduled as separate instructional blocks. Students finish a reading lesson in the morning and move to writing later in the day, with little connection between the two.
Strong literacy instruction often looks different. Students might read to learn about a topic, discuss a character's decision or an author's argument, then return to the text to test an idea or find evidence. They may write, not because writing is a separate task to complete, but because writing helps them clarify what they think.
We often see this shift in classrooms when students move from answering questions about a text to developing their own ideas. A student might begin by identifying details from a chapter and end by explaining how those details reveal a larger theme. Reading and writing do the same work: helping students make sense of the text.
The Reading League highlighted RedThread's integration of reading and writing as a significant strength. Reviewers noted that students regularly write in response to texts, engage in extended projects, and receive explicit instruction in selecting and using textual evidence. What stands out is that writing is consistently used to help students deepen their understanding of what they read.
For district leaders, this is another useful lens for evaluating curriculum. It may be most revealing to ask how writing connects to reading and what students are asked to think through as they write.
Most programs include vocabulary instruction, but another layer to consider is how students encounter new words. In some programs, words are introduced one at a time and practiced in isolation.
In others, students meet those words inside a text, return to them during discussion, and use them as they write and think about ideas. The word is no longer something to memorize for a quiz; it becomes part of how students make sense of what they're reading.
The Reading League's review highlighted RedThread's approach to contextualized vocabulary instruction. Reviewers noted that students encounter complex vocabulary and syntax beginning in kindergarten and that Tier 2 vocabulary is explicitly taught within meaningful contexts rather than through memorization.
The report also pointed to the program's emphasis on morphology. Rather than learning vocabulary one word at a time, students learn how word parts carry meaning, helping them make sense of unfamiliar words as texts become more complex.
For district leaders, the question is: How do students encounter and use new language throughout the curriculum?
A curriculum reveals its approach through the experiences it creates for students. New words can be introduced in isolation or embedded in texts, discussions, and writing tasks that give students repeated opportunities to connect language to meaning.
Perhaps the most important curriculum evaluation question is this:
What are students actually being asked to think about?
A curriculum can include phonics lessons, vocabulary activities, and writing assignments. But those components alone do not tell us much about students' experience as readers.
In one classroom, students might finish a vocabulary activity and move on. In another, students encounter a new word while reading, debate its meaning with a partner, see it appear again in a later text, and use it in their own writing. Both lessons include vocabulary instruction. The difference is what students are asked to do with it.
The same is true across a curriculum. Are students primarily completing tasks? Or are they returning to texts, connecting ideas across lessons, discussing interpretations, evaluating evidence, and revising their understanding as they read?
The Reading League's review repeatedly pointed to RedThread's use of authentic texts, text-based writing, discussion, and knowledge-building experiences. What stands out across these findings is not simply the presence of individual instructional components. It is the way those components work together to create sustained opportunities for students to think.
Curriculum decisions often shape instruction for years. Districts invest in professional learning, coaching, assessments, and implementation supports tied to the materials they select. As a result, it can be difficult to evaluate programs based solely on publisher materials.
Independent reviews provide another perspective. Reviews examine how curriculum components work together and what kinds of learning experiences students encounter every day.
The Reading League's review of RedThread highlighted strengths in foundational skills instruction, knowledge-building, reading and writing integration, vocabulary development, and the use of authentic texts. It also identified opportunities for continued refinement, reinforcing the idea that strong curriculum development is an ongoing process.
One challenge for adoption committees is that many programs look strong at first glance. Lessons are engaging, materials are polished, and standards are listed throughout the program.
This challenge is becoming more common as publishers increasingly make similar claims about alignment with the science of reading. As literacy researcher Dr. Susan Neuman recently wrote about in her article on the conditions that make learning possible, "Children don't learn from how a curriculum looks. They learn from how it's built."
That distinction is key for district leaders. A curriculum may include the right components on paper, but evaluation requires looking at how those components work together over time.
Do knowledge and vocabulary accumulate? Do texts, questions, and writing tasks build toward larger ideas? Does today's lesson prepare students for tomorrow's learning?
Independent reviews help create a clearer picture of what those claims look like in practice. They allow district leaders to move beyond marketing language and examine how a curriculum is designed, what opportunities students have to learn, and how research-informed principles show up in daily instruction.
That transparency is what makes reviews like The Reading League's Curriculum Navigation Reports so valuable. They do not make the decision for districts. They help districts make better-informed decisions for themselves.
Ultimately, curriculum adoption is not about finding a program with the strongest claims. It is about understanding the learning experiences a curriculum creates for students and whether those experiences reflect what we know about how literacy develops.
Before selecting a literacy curriculum, district leaders might consider looking beyond whether a program includes the right components to ask whether learning is designed to build over time.
Curriculum Evaluation Checklist
✓ Explicit and systematic foundational skills instruction
✓ Knowledge-building that accumulates across units and grades
✓ Vocabulary and language development through meaningful texts
✓ Reading, writing, and discussion work together
✓ Opportunities for students to analyze, explain, and connect ideas
✓ Assessment systems that support instruction
✓ Professional learning and implementation supports
✓ Independent review findings
✓ Research evidence and efficacy data
✓ Practical implementation requirements
There is no single "best" literacy program for every district. The better question is whether a program helps students become stronger readers over time.
We suggest school leaders look beyond isolated skills and ask whether students are building knowledge, reading increasingly complex texts, and engaging in meaningful thinking about what they read. Strong programs do more than teach decoding or comprehension strategies in isolation. They create coherent experiences in which foundational skills, knowledge-building, discussion, and writing work together.
In many classrooms, one pattern that shows up is students successfully completing literacy tasks without necessarily developing a deeper understanding of the text. The strongest K–8 literacy programs are designed so that understanding grows across lessons, units, and grades rather than resetting with each new skill focus.
One challenge for adoption committees is that many programs look strong at first glance. We often encourage districts to look beyond whether activities are present and ask whether knowledge, vocabulary, and thinking accumulate across lessons and units.
A curriculum may align with standards and include research-based practices, but the daily experience matters. Are students primarily identifying details and completing organizers, or are they being asked to explain ideas, connect evidence, and revise their thinking?
When reviewing programs, adoption committees often find it helpful to examine:
Ultimately, curriculum evaluation is less about checking for individual features and more about understanding the learning experience the materials create.
Many programs identify themselves as aligned to the science of reading, but the classroom experience can look very different from one curriculum to another.
Some programs place most of their emphasis on foundational skills. Others integrate foundational skills with knowledge-building, writing, discussion, and the use of complex texts from the earliest grades.
One difference we often notice is how programs approach comprehension. In some materials, comprehension appears after decoding instruction. In others, students make meaning from text while learning foundational skills. Even beginning readers can discuss ideas, build knowledge, and connect information across texts when the curriculum is designed to support that work.
Strong adoption processes usually move beyond asking whether a program includes a particular feature.
Instead, committees might ask:
These questions often reveal more about a curriculum's strengths than a checklist of components alone.
Independent curriculum reviews can be extremely valuable because they provide an external perspective and a common framework for comparison.
At the same time, reviews rarely capture everything that matters about instruction.
A review can tell you whether a program includes specific research-aligned components. It cannot fully show how knowledge develops across a year, what classroom discussions sound like, or how students experience a sequence of texts over time.
For that reason, many districts use independent reviews as a starting point. They then examine sample lessons, student tasks, scope-and-sequence documents, and classroom implementation to understand how the curriculum actually supports reading development.
The strongest adoption decisions tend to combine independent reviews with a close look at what students will read, discuss, write about, and learn throughout the full K–8 experience.
Read the Reading League’s Curriculum Evaluations Here