We have had several sets of federal education standards, the most recent being Common Core, but the focus has been on what, not how. These standards outline a broad set of topics and skills students should accumulate, but very little guidance on how to go about it.
It’s a good thing there is no centralized government curriculum that everyone works from. That would make it impossible for the company I work for to have the freedom to build out new ideas and ways of working with mathematics. However, just like we regulate food and beverages (mostly) to try and weed out things that are at best a placebo, it follows that how curriculum is implemented should have some level of regulation as well. Parents want to know their students are being given a fair chance, and leaving everything to the luck of the draw on which teacher you get is not enjoyable.
Enter the standard of evidence-based education. Curriculum implementations (sometimes called initiatives) are evidence-based when there is a scientific study showing a significant improvement in students under the initiative. There are varying standards these studies can achieve, detailed here, as well as a hidden tier where there is no published study but the initiative is working towards it and has a logical basis in an evidence-based initiative. In other words, an initiative based on some evidence-based initiative, perhaps as part of university research, could be considered evdience-based. However such initiatives are more limited in when they can be funded.
There’s an open question of how effective these changes will be. Perusing one of the official sites detailing initiatives that clearly align with the evidence-based criteria, it’s clear there’s no timeline within which the scientific study has to be published. Students change, and so we change approaches with them. It’s not clear that an approach that showed significant improvement in the late 1990s can have the same impact over twenty years later.
Similarly, there’s a chicken-and-egg game of bootstrapping a new curriculum without a study, yet needing to get the curriculum in front of students and willing teachers so a study can be run. While this hasn’t come up yet, likely due to many states treating evidence-based initiatives as a guideline (and the aforementioned official sites as a resource, not a dictated list), it’s possible that just the right person who is convinced of this path could make it very difficult for unestablished groups to give a new type of pedagogy its fair shake.
I think working towards evidence as a significant tool in choosing curriculum, rather than loose sales pitches or heavy-hitting names of universities involved in the development, is an improvement. Students need options that work for them, and while nothing is a silver bullet, we can continue to improve both the quality of materials and the way we teach them.