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While city education officials have made reforming teacher quality their first priority, others argue that by improving curriculum they could do more with less.

In the GothamSchools community section, former president of the Community Education Council for District 2 Matthew Levey writes that creating a citywide curriculum would not only help new and struggling teachers, it would be more efficient than having schools write their own.

Levey writes:

Curriculum reform must play an equal role in our efforts. A recent Brookings Institution report noted curriculum’s strong impact on student outcomes. Importantly, in a system as large as ours, curriculum can be developed centrally and replicated at almost no marginal cost, earning a far greater return on investment than merit bonuses for every qualifying teacher or hiring 10,000 high-quality teachers. In short, teacher quality is a long, expensive, politically difficult fix. Curriculum is comparatively fast, cheap, and also effective.