Originally developed in Red Bank, New Jersey, a school district serving a majority of poor and minority children, this evolving model increased student achievement from below to above grade level on standardized tests with concurrent improvement on state tests over 6 years (Burns & Squires, 1987). The trend continued from 1979 through 1993.

In 1979, Red Bank had adopted a Mastery Learning instructional design. Units, usually 2 to 4 weeks in length with 3 to 5 objectives for each unit, provided the curriculum structure. Within that structure, an instructional model of teach, formative test, reteach, mastery test, was followed (Abrams, 1981; Squires & Burns, 1987). Following the principles of Benjamin Bloom (1973, p. 22), which assert that entry characteristics of students need not determine instructional outcomes if the instruction is aligned to the assessments. In a school district dealing mainly with poor and minority students, this assertion had great appeal among school board members.

As a new curriculum director, I did not want to produce curriculum that were only aligned to the test; good curriculum should take into account the needs of the learner and the structure of the discipline as well. Our model involved units that were aligned to the important tests and to the staff’s understanding of what made a good curriculum in a particular subject area, which we termed a “Curriculum Rationale” and is similar to standard statements of today (Squires, 1985, 1986, 1987). Such definitions of a good curriculum predated the current emphasis on national standards and state frameworks.

A study (Wishnick, 1989) conducted in Red Bank on 4th-grade reading and language arts reinforced this perception. Wishnick’s results suggest that an aligned curriculum can overcome the usual predictors of student success (socioeconomic class, gender, teacher assignment). Wishnick concluded that:

When students were taught well enough to perform well on the unit tests, and the unit tests were aligned with the standardized test item clusters . . . not only did SES and gender, but teacher differences had little to no effect on their performance. (p. 168)

The study provides evidence that an aligned curriculum can overcome students’ unearned disadvantages while refining and reinforcing Bloom’s (1976) ideas. The table below shows Red Bank’s test scores in grade equivalents from 1978 to 1992.

Red Bank Test Scores in Grade Equivalents 1978-1992