Part 4 – The future of ELA at SPS: We can do better

by Julie Letchner

This is Part 4 of a four-part series on middle school English instruction at Seattle Public Schools.

SPS is currently closing out year two of our nine-year contract with Inquiry by Design. If we don’t change course, our students face another seven years of IBD. Children who aren’t yet in kindergarten will be taught via IBD in sixth grade.

It’s also possible that today’s onesie-clad infants, and babies who exist as yet only as twinkles in their parents’ eyes, could be using IBD too, if we do nothing. 

Curriculum refreshes are supposed to be regular and ongoing, but this is not the case at SPS. 

The 2024 adoption of Inquiry by Design was the first district-wide 6-8 ELA adoption since 1998. Despite a lofty speech from the Board’s then-President Liza Rankin, the district has not yet put a curriculum refresh schedule in place. The only major adoption since IBD has been the new K-5 ELA curriculum in March 2026. The curriculum adoptions page shows no in-process adoptions, a middle school math curriculum approaching a decade of use, and high school ELA materials last updated in 2010.

It’s time to do two things:

First: The district needs to allow teachers more (some?) flexibility in the deployment of IBD. 

This change is free, from a monetary perspective, but it does require cultural change. What better time to drive that change than at the beginning of Superintendent Shuldiner’s tenure?

To do this, SPS leadership would need to unwind whatever incentives are driving the compliance-focused behaviors of central district staff. I can’t say what those incentives might be, because none of the district staff I contacted returned my messages. That includes Kathleen Vasquez, Caleb Perkins, Assistant Superintendent of Academics Mike Starosky, Hamilton Assistant Principal and Eighth Grade Administrator Guadalupe Duran, and the SPS procurement office.

The flexibility that teachers are looking for includes the freedom to teach 1-2 full texts per year; to substitute contemporary, relevant texts in place of unrelatable IBD ones; and to openly teach students the skills that IBD fails to address, all without reprisal. Hearteningly—or heartbreakingly, depending on one’s perspective—these changes are the very things most likely to improve student outcomes.

Second: SPS needs to replace Inquiry by Design. Yes, it’s that bad. 

The good news is that there is plenty of wiggle room to do this! Here’s what makes me hopeful:

1. The payment schedule of the IBD contract is evenly split across all nine years. If SPS changes course, we get to redeploy most of the $3.84 million we’ve earmarked for IBD.*
2. There are no other curriculum adoptions underway right now, at least according to the SPS website. Presumably some of the district staff in charge of curricula are available to run a new 6-8 ELA adoption process.
3. The staff and board ran a more rigorous and detailed ELA curriculum adoption process in 2026 for K-5. They can carry these improvements forward to a new 6-8 search now. Improvements included: A longer timeline for field tests; a much larger adoption committee with full regional representation; quantitative, public reporting on the evaluation scores of candidate curricula at various stages of the process; and detailed written examples showing the specific benefits of the chosen curriculum, presented publicly.
4. Both the board and Seattle parents are growing increasingly skeptical of tech-first educational tools. I believe there is now sufficient support to explore non-digital ELA curricula, which were excluded from the 2024 search.

So, what might the search for a better curriculum look like?

This time, the adoption process must be executed transparently and without arbitrary hard-line constraints on technology components and budget.

At a minimum, the tradeoff between format, cost, and quality should be made at the superintendent or board level. That is not a decision that a program director or a committee of instructional experts has the context to make. Likewise, an RFP should not limit submissions to specific formats, such as digital-only solutions.

On this go-round, the cultural sensitivity criteria must go beyond the superficial. In 2026, in Seattle, I can’t believe that I have to write out that it’s insufficient for marginalized populations to simply be present in texts. They must be represented authentically, wholly, joyfully…and in their own words. 

If currency (in the sense of modern relevance) is important to SPS, as they’ve stated that it is, then the evaluation should also include criteria that reflect that. 

Finally, field tests must reflect realistic classroom conditions. That means training field testers in the way that curriculum developers intended, and in the way that the cost of adoption of each curriculum would support via professional development.

Thinking a little more outside the box, SPS should consider adopting one of the free curricula out there, and allow staff to tailor it. CommonLit 360 is a widely used and well-liked example of such a thing. I’m not an educator, and I’d never advocate for the adoption of a curriculum outside the legally mandated committee process. But why shouldn’t an SPS committee at least consider free options among the others?

If SPS wanted to get truly wild, the board could adopt a curriculum selection policy that requires presentation of two finalist options. This would give board members a real choice, instead of a false choice between a rubber-stamp approval or continued use of outdated materials while the committee begins its year-long process again from scratch. The scores, surveys, evaluations, and opinions of all finalist curricula are all available at the end of the committee’s process. Why not put them to use?

Critics will argue that deciding on a curriculum is too low-level of a task for the board, but so long as SPS policies require board approval of curriculum adoptions—as they do today—I believe that that approval should carry significance.

If you’ve reached this part of the article, congratulations! You’ve read more text today than some SPS middle schoolers will read all semester.

We must do better by them. We can do better.

I started asking questions about the middle school curriculum simply because I want a high-quality ELA education for Seattle’s students. I want them to be reading books in school. I want them to learn the pleasure of texts that are joyful and relevant, not boring and scoldy.

I want all of the kids in our city–kids who will grow into our neighbors, our colleagues (or bosses!), our fellow citizens—to be able to engage with complex texts and the ideas within them. This takes practice and coaching. That’s what ELA classes are supposed to provide.

The foundations of deep reading have to be laid in the middle grades to cultivate high schoolers with the stamina and fluency to grapple with what they’ll encounter in life. We owe our students this core skill: for their work, or for higher education, or for lifelong learning about our changing world, or—gasp—just for the joy of losing themselves in transporting stories.

If you’re interested in seeing full books in SPS middle schools and a curriculum that truly engages our students and teachers, drop me a line at hello@julieletchner.com. 

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*Public documents don’t show what penalties SPS might incur for breaking the IBD contract early, and it would be standard for a contract to include such penalties. That said, if the penalties are prohibitive, I will have follow-up questions about the competence of the contract negotiation team. The atypical nine-year length of the IBD contract already hints that they weren’t fully effective at representing the interests of the district (curriculum contracts nationwide are typically 6-8 years long).