Published
June 16, 2026
Tags
SUMMARY:
What does it take to guarantee that every student in every classroom receives the same level of rigorous instruction and care? For Guilford County Schools in North Carolina—and many others—the answer is a shared curriculum and a district-wide infrastructure of support for teachers and schools.
This story is adapted from Bright Spots, a mini-series within the Good Things podcast. Produced in partnership with Lemonada Media, the series features bite-sized stories of community impact that leave listeners feeling inspired and hopeful about what is possible. In a moment when so much feels uncertain, each story shines a light on the people who are making a difference in their communities right now, and the solutions that can make a difference in other communities, too. To explore more of the mini-series, check out Good Things.
In 2017, nearly half of all students in the Guilford County school district were reading below grade level.
As in many places, teachers in Guilford—which is centered in Greensboro and serves nearly 70,000 students across suburban, urban and rural communities—were operating in isolation, each translating state standards into lesson plans as best they could. This meant that instruction and materials varied drastically from class to class. Some classrooms struggled while others excelled, based simply on the strengths and efforts of individual teachers.
Dr. Whitney Oakley, Superintendent, Chief Academic Officer, parent and school system alumnus of Guilford County Schools, saw discrepancies between scores by classroom and other alarming metrics as a wakeup call. She began leading the charge for a new curriculum in 2018.
“You don’t come out of your teacher training program knowing exactly which text to use in fourth-grade literature. It’s nobody’s fault, but we have to do something about it,” explains Dr. Oakley on Lemonada Media’s Good Things podcast. “You could walk into one classroom and see Don Quixote and walk into another and see Dr. Seuss. These are not the same and it’s not fair.”
You could walk into one classroom and see Don Quixote and walk into another and see Dr. Seuss. These are not the same and it’s not fair.
Guilford County leadership began working with teachers to ensure they could deliver grade-level instruction every day to every kid. They did this by giving every educator access to the same high-quality, research-backed curriculum. They also invested in training, shoulder-to-shoulder coaching and community outreach to ensure teachers across the district could put the new materials into action.
As a result, in the last five years, Guilford County schools, with a student population that is 42% Black, 26% white, 19% Hispanic and 7% Asian, have measured steady increases in English and math across all student groups. Often, academic gains appear as pockets of success. But in Guilford, Black students gained 7 percentage points in English, Hispanic students gained 4 points, multilingual learners gained 5 points and economically disadvantaged students gained 8 points.Researchers at Columbia University’s Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) see Guilford County’s growth as replicable. CPRL recently conducted case studies of 11 school districts across the country that were seeing significant improvements in student outcomes. And they found that all were using a similar framework for success.
“There's a playbook out for what a school district might do to improve,” says Liz Chu, Executive Director of CPRL and Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer of Law at Columbia Law School. “There are concrete steps that districts can take to make a difference for kids in their schools and classrooms.”
There's a playbook out for what a school district might do to improve. There are concrete steps that districts can take to make a difference for kids in their schools and classrooms.
CPRL is focused on helping public institutions work effectively for children, families and their communities. The center’s goal is to effect widescale change and uncover winning strategies that city, state and national leaders can replicate according to their circumstances.
As detailed in the latest report Reach Higher, Together, successful schools were using what CPRL calls the REACH approach to improving student outcomes: resource, equip, assess and adjust, cohere and hardwire.
What makes the REACH method powerful is that it treats a shared curriculum not as an endpoint, but as a building block of a much larger implementation strategy. Shared tools are important, but so are continuous learning, feedback loops and alignment. When implementation is an ongoing process, teachers and schools get to learn and adapt together.
The approach also emphasizes coherence, setting the goal that high-quality materials and instruction should be consistent across classrooms, grade levels and schools. It allows school districts to shift from relying on exceptional individuals to meet its goals to relying on the systems themselves and their ability to further effective practices.
Chu finds Guilford’s story refreshing. She is often inundated with stories of all the things that are broken in the education system. She hopes that by bringing attention to what is working, more districts will be inspired to adopt the REACH approach, and more parents and communities will know to advocate for it.
“The question is, how do we deliver on the promise of public institutions? If you can do it in a district with almost 70,000 kids, you can do it in so many places across the country,” she says.
Hear more about Guilford County schools and the promises made to each student in the full Bright Spots episode, out now wherever you get your podcasts. To explore other case studies, visit https://www.itsallsystemsgo.org.
Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies welcomes the expression of personal thoughts and reflections in Toward, our digital magazine. Each post reflects the opinion of its author and does not necessarily represent the views of our organization or our partners.
