Educators for Excellence-Los Angeles Celebrates Culturally Relevant Education Curriculum in LAUSD

July 2024 (Los Angeles) – Educators for Excellence–Los Angeles (E4E-LA), a teacher-led organization, is celebrating the adoption of a rubric to assess cultural relevance in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) schools curricula.

Last month, E4E-LA received confirmation that, after more than three years of organizing, mobilizing, advocating, and meeting with LAUSD chief academic officer Dr. Francis Baez, a culturally relevant education rubric will be adopted and implemented in the district textbook adoption process. This win will help LAUSD create a more culturally relevant curriculum for students attending schools in the district, fostering greater connectivity between students’ identities and the instruction they’re receiving.

“We know that creating an ideal learning environment means ensuring students feel safe and recognized, but this cannot be done without curriculum and texts that reflect and mirror their experiences,” said Megan Bart, Deputy Director, Campaigns, E4E-LA. “We are thrilled LAUSD is adding a rubric to the textbook adoption process that will assess the cultural relevance of texts before they are adopted by the district. We are grateful to the district for listening to our teacher-members’ recommendation and making this improvement for educators and students.”

The adopted rubric was designed by the NYU Steinhardt School and formats a scoring system to analyze curriculum materials to see how they fit culturally in the classroom. Only 26% of educators nationally believe their classroom curriculum is culturally relevant for their student population. With the support of E4E-LA, Teacher Leaders advocated for the creation of more inclusive learning environments. They garnered the support of over 250 teachers across the district, calling for a more robust process to evaluate cultural relevancy in the textbook purchasing process.

“Students seeing themselves represented in their textbooks will be an immeasurable asset to our district,” said Antoine Taylor, who was involved in presenting the findings to LAUSD.  “It will allow us to relate more to students and to help them connect to lessons in the classroom. This work will have an impact on students for years to come.”