This year, the Detroit Public School District plans to spend one to three million dollars on a curriculum overhaul.The district serves over 50,000 students grades K-12. Each year, most students take Michigan’s state-wide exam to determine factors such as resource allocation and school closings. An audit of the district’s materials performed last year revealed that schools were using materials from as late as 2007, before common core standards were developed. The English curriculum gained only three out of 21 points while the math curriculum earned zero. This means that for years, students have been impacted by the results of standardized tests that contained material to which they had never been exposed. The district was ensuring that their students were less prepared than other students in Michigan due to their improper choice of curriculum materials, not only impacting the quality student’s education but also the well-being of their individual schools.

The origin of Detroit’s issues is clear. The Michigan Department of Education has a hands-off policy towards their schools. “The MDE doesn’t dictate or track local curricula, or alignment with our state standards,” explains department spokesman William DiSessa. “This is a local education state and we’re not charged with doing so.”  The district is given the responsibility to choose materials and design curriculum that coincides with state standards. The disparities between schools that serve lower and higher income students is partially due to the misallocation of responsibilities. Though Detroit is attempting to correct their curriculum and make it more equitable, this district is only an example of the issues created under the education system, and not all districts are attempting to make a change.

In recent years, there has been a large shift in how many school districts create their curriculum. In 2012,  the ICCS, Implementing the Common Core Standards Collaborative, had been in development for two years with contributions from 30 different states. That year, state teams met in Seattle, Washington to discuss strategies that had proven to be effective in previous years and collaborate on issues such as instructional material quality and creating state standards while following those made by the federal government. This meeting demonstrated the benefit of intrastate collaboration in working towards implementing federal standards for a common educational experience and outcome for children across the nation.

In 2015, before the strategies shared in the ICCS had time to be effective, the Every Students Succeeds Act, or ESSA, was signed into law, shifting the responsibility of determining educational policy from the federal government to individual states. This allowed every state to create its own guidelines that needed to be approved by the U.S. Department of Education. Because Common Core is a state led effort, there are few federal guidelines for curriculum writing. Instead,  a large number of individual guidelines have been implemented by state governments. This, in turn, led many states to allow districts to choose their own course materials.

The concepts of budgeting and socioeconomic inequality between districts are often mentioned as the main cause of educational disparities. While these contribute to the problem, they are not the only issues. State governments are individually contributing to educational disparity by turning a blind-eye to the curriculum problems in their districts. When every district has individual standards, but all students in the state are compared to each other, there are going to be large achievement gaps. The problems in education are multi-faceted, long-standing issues that are not easily solved but blaming pervasive social issues for problems in public schooling will not generate solutions. Ensuring that all students are at least held to the state-approved standards is an important start. The weak and unenforced guidelines that are currently present only serve to ensure that those in privileged districts will receive the education that has been approved and deemed substantial while those in districts without proper funding will continue to use outdated resources, pushing their students farther and farther behind.