Part 3 – The SPS adoption of Inquiry by Design: Budget games and a lack of evidence

by Julie Letchner

This is Part 3 of a four-part series on middle school English instruction at Seattle Public Schools.

Bluntly, I believe SPS adopted the inadequate Inquiry by Design curriculum primarily through misguided attempts to save money, with side plots involving an unwillingness to listen to teachers and an overemphasis on standardization.

The adoption committee was instructed to eliminate candidate curricula from consideration for being marginally over budget, in a penny-wise, pound-foolish move. More importantly, the committee was presented only with digital options, again for budget reasons.

Each curriculum adoption within SPS is handled by its own curriculum adoption committee, formed specifically for a single adoption. Ultimately, the committee’s recommendation must be approved by the school board before it is final. 

In this case, the committee’s written records, my discussions with committee members, and the board discussion itself show that a budget-driven focus on digital technology overshadowed considerations about curriculum effectiveness.

Adoption Committee Proceedings

The 6-8 ELA adoption committee comprised thirteen teachers and two parents (one listed teacher had to step away early in the process). It was led by SPS’s Literacy Program Manager Kathleen Vasquez.

Importantly, it’s Vasquez—not the committee members—who shaped the Request For Proposal (RFP) soliciting curricula for consideration. I haven’t yet been able to track down a copy of the RFP for the 2024 6-8 ELA adoption to determine how specific it was about digital restrictions. The SPS procurement office did not answer my inquiries.

The committee went through four phases to select a finalist.

Phase 1: Convene & develop criteria

Meeting minutes from the committee’s initial gathering echo a top-down directive to select a digital curriculum: “[The committee members] learned about and discussed the rationale for the move away from a physical instructional materials adoption to a digital adoption…” (emphasis mine).

How many established, effective curricula weren’t even considered as a result of this digital mandate? 

Phase 2: Initial screenings & finalist selection

Of the eleven RFP responses, three were eliminated for being supplemental rather than full curricula. Could these not have been evaluated alongside the others? Perhaps they could have provided a suitable balance between standardization and flexibility.

Two more were eliminated based on the early-stage bias screening criteria.

The remaining six curricula were evaluated with cost included as a factor. Meeting minutes reflect that two curricula were eliminated for being $800,000 over budget. 

This level of penny pinching on an ELA curriculum is ridiculously shortsighted, even in a budget crisis. $800,000 is roughly 20% of the final cost of the Inquiry by Design adoption. Recall, too, that this expense is on a nine-year contract. 

Is an additional $89,000 a year really not worth spending for the right curriculum?

The committee eventually selected three finalists: Study Sync by McGraw Hill, Into Literature by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Inquiry by Design. McGraw Hill had the highest degree of support from teachers at this point.

Phase 3: Field testing

Each of the three finalists was field tested by at least four teachers for a month. The field test teachers then reported back to the adoption committee as a panel. 

The final report presented to the school board emphasizes: “None of the nine field testers who piloted HMH Into Literature or McGraw Hill Study Sync endorsed them for adoption, while all four members who piloted Inquiry By Design recommended it for adoption.” This has become the primary refrain used by central office staff in defense of IBD, though it is not noted in the committee meeting minutes.

One member of the IBD adoption committee explained to me that the other two finalists were truly digital-first curricula, and therefore required onboarding and teacher training. The field testers weren’t provided with adequate training, and so they quickly became frustrated. Skeptics of the adoption process point to this inadequate training as the reason why these curricula were left unendorsed.

IBD, on the other hand, is meant to be print-first. Their “portal of pdfs” was simple enough for teachers to figure out the mechanics within the four-week pilot period.

Also noteworthy, for those who recall that IBD had no evaluation from EdReports, is the quality of the EdReports reviews for the other two finalists. They were “all green,” meaning that both HMH Into Literature and McGraw Hill Study Sync met all aspects of the educational standards set out by EdReports. This detail, too, is absent from the adoption committee notes.

Phase 4: Final selection

Adoption committee meeting minutes reflect that the group was evenly split on their top choice of curriculum. 

Why was the committee evenly split if the field test results were unanimous in favor of IBD and against the other two finalists? What other factors were in play? The notes don’t say.

The group had to reconvene for an additional meeting to break the tie. The minutes for the additional meeting read ominously: “The adoption coordinator [Kathleen Vasquez] made clear that if consensus is not reached, the committee will meet until a finalist is named through consensus.” Nothing says “authentic engagement” like a good old hostage situation!

The meeting notes reflect an eventual consensus in favor of Inquiry By Design, but they don’t explain how or why this consensus was achieved. A member of the committee told me directly that they never expressed approval of Inquiry by Design, which begs the question of what “unanimous” means in this context.

Board discussion & approval

The board discussed the IBD adoption proposal (formally, a Board Action Report, or BAR) in an April 25, 2024 meeting. They then passed the proposal unanimously at the May 8, 2024 meeting, with no further discussion.

The April board discussion raised a number of warning signs that went unheeded.

SPS Director of College and Career Readiness Dr. Caleb Perkins presented the proposal to the board and answered their questions. In his opening remarks, he emphasized the value of having a digital curriculum for two reasons:

1. Digital resources can be accessed by students no matter where they are; and
2. Digital resources can be paid for from levy money that is separate from the operating budget that was (and is still, in 2026) in deficit. Perkins was clear: “And ultimately, this digital resource allows us to use available tech levy funding at a time when, of course, resources are challenged.” 

In terms of the quality of the curriculum itself, he said that it aligns to state (Common Core) standards and that it was endorsed by its field testers. Perkins also noted that the new curriculum aligns with SPS values of racial equity and improved instruction.

What Perkins didn’t mention was how Inquiry by Design specifically would benefit students or teachers, as compared to any other curriculum aligned to Common Core standards.

Several board members picked up on the absence of references to the quality of the curriculum and made attempts to dig deeper. 

Director Brandon Hersey, a former classroom teacher himself, asked Perkins to explain the ways in which Inquiry by Design was going to be more beneficial for our students than what SPS had at the time*. Perkins’s response:

In the case of Inquiry by Design, as I said, unanimous approval from the field testers, saying this is going to be good for students. We’ve seen how this interacts across a number of schools, and it’s going to be beneficial, to say the least.

Director Evan Briggs then asked whether SPS had consulted research and reviews, or consulted with other nearby or similar schools, to see what curricula they are using and why. She jokingly summarized her question as asking if SPS had “read the Yelp reviews.”

Perkins’s response:

If you look through the BAR, there are many different reviews, including national reviews. There’s a group called EdReports that does a thorough analysis of various options to ensure standards alignment, to ensure cultural responsiveness. So, in that sense, yes. I don’t believe we went to specific districts to study other districts.

Three things stand out here:

First, Perkins’s responses to both questions lack meaningful content. Where was the follow-up from the board? Why didn’t they insist on concrete answers to their questions? They were asking the right questions! 

Second, as we now know, EdReports had not reviewed Inquiry by Design at this point in time. The EdReports reference made by Perkins is misleading. 

Third, it’s truly unfortunate, and also a violation of board policy, that Perkins and his team didn’t consult with similar or nearby school districts.

If they had, they’d have learned that Portland Public Schools (PPS; our Oregon neighbors) adopted Inquiry by Design’s 6-12 ELA curriculum in 2016. This info was on Inquiry By Design’s blog in 2021, along with a list of other nearby schools that have adopted IBD: Renton, Highline, and Federal Way. This was readily available for Perkins’s team to find. Seems promising!

Alas. If they’d asked, Perkins and his team would also have learned that, in 2022, PPS replaced Inquiry by Design with Into Literature by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of the other finalists in the SPS process. Renton, who adopted IBD in 2021, has since moved to a different curriculum as well.

A slide from Portland describes a PPS student speaking about his experience learning with Inquiry by Design: “He told the coordinators that materials like [hard copy texts] are necessary here in order for students to have any kind of structure or exposure to actual work. He told them that he hasn’t read anything this year in his English class.”

This Portland student’s experience with IBD echoes that of my own seventh grader here at SPS. The only difference is that my son’s teacher found a way to wedge a book into the gaps of the IBD curriculum (without getting caught and stopped like the teachers at Hamilton).

The slides from Portland also talk about the advantage of the move away from Inquiry by Design: “Teachers are able to focus on instruction…rather than spending time searching for instructional materials from various books and websites.” This echoes the feedback of SPS teachers, who are frustrated with the holes and gaps that they must fill themselves to make the IBD curriculum workable.

The lack of peer benchmarking and consultation of reviews by Perkins’s team in 2024 is a violation of SPS board policy 2015. This policy governs curriculum adoptions. It lists a set of requirements for adopted materials that includes: 

9. [Materials] are based on best practices and research including benchmarking and efficacy from similar districts, schools that have used the materials, and other sources;

Clearly, there were many problems in the adoption process that led to the selection of IBD, including a budget focus that excluded non-digital options, and an overall lack of scrutiny of the curriculum itself. 

So, what’s to be done? Is SPS stuck with IBD for the remaining seven years of our contract?

I don’t think so. I think SPS is at a unique moment where we can turn middle school English Language education around. The timing is right, both for a cancellation of the IBD contract, and also for the cultural change required to do better with the next adoption. 

Join me in Part 4 to find out how!

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*At this time (2024), SPS did not have a district-wide ELA curriculum, the most recent district-wide ELA adoption having been in 1998. In the time since, some SPS middle schools had individually adopted specific curricula—none of which included Inquiry by Design—while others had simply developed their own curricula. The BAR includes a more detailed history.