Curriculum as Covenant

We don’t have a curriculum problem—we have a trust problem. Teachers don’t teach what they’re told; they teach what they believe.

Curriculum as a Covenant. © 2025 forwardED LLC

In Detroit, a teacher—let’s call her Ms. Jenkins—stood at the front of her class, holding a new curriculum in one hand and a worn textbook in the other. She glanced around the room—her students, mostly Black and Latinx, were half-asleep, half-distracted, disengaged from the day’s lesson on the American Revolution. The textbook mentioned Crispus Attucks, but barely. It detailed Boston, Bunker Hill, and the Founding Fathers but said nothing of how enslaved people, immigrants, or women contributed to or were shaped by the birth of this nation.

That afternoon, after school, she opened the new curriculum. The first lesson began not with George Washington but with the Ossian Sweet trial—the second with the 1967 Detroit uprising. The curriculum asked students to consider: “Whose freedom was imagined in 1776? Whose was deferred?” For the first time in years, Ms. Jenkins felt something stir—not just relevance, but responsibility. She thought of her grandfather, who’d marched in ‘67. She thought of her students. And she whispered to herself, “Finally.” Most teachers, like Ms. Jenkins, are not waiting for permission to teach—they’re waiting for a reason. What would happen if we offered them something worth believing in?

In education, there is no greater illusion than the belief that a well-written curriculum is enough. Districts across the country invest millions in developing new materials, introducing reforms, and retraining teachers, yet many of these efforts falter not in design but in delivery. The reason is simple: curriculum reform rarely succeeds unless teachers believe in it. And belief is not mandated—it’s earned.

In the Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD)—a district I have had the rare privilege of working in for the past three years— we gave teachers a new curriculum and called it reform. They gave it a side-eye and kept teaching what they knew. Now—after finally listening to them—we are witnessing a profound rethinking of what it means to earn teacher buy-in, recasting it not as compliance but as covenant, not as policy but as pedagogy.

Teacher Buy-In as the Keystone of Curriculum Reform

Curriculum, as Paulo Freire reminds us, is never neutral—it either functions to domesticate or liberate (Freire, 1970). DPSCD’s recent curriculum revisions in social studies and history sought the latter. They were not just an update to content but a wholesale reimagining of who gets to speak, whose knowledge counts, and why we teach history in the first place. The guides featured locally developed units, local history guides and an elective, and dignity-driven frameworks inspired by Gholnecsar Muhammad’s five pursuits: identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy (Muhammad, 2020).

These reforms responded to alarming data: that in 2023, only 11.3 percent of eighth graders in DPSCD demonstrated proficiency in social studies (Michigan Department of Education, 2023). But the crisis was deeper than performance. The real issue was disconnection—between students and curriculum, between teachers and the systems imposing change, between our past and our present. A curriculum divorced from cultural context is not merely ineffective but unjust. As Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) has long asserted, “success in school must not come at the expense of a child’s cultural identity” (p. 475).

Traditional models define teacher buy-in as a willingness to implement change, measured through participation or compliance (Penuel et al., 2007). But what if buy-in isn’t about behavior but belief? What if it’s not something to be secured but something to be shared?

In DPSCD, buy-in is being cultivated by engaging teachers not as implementers but as authors of the curriculum. Teacher think tanks and community advisory councils have invited educators across the city to co-create content with students, families, and local historians. This practice enacts what I call relational pedagogy—a model that prioritizes belonging, co-authorship, and epistemic trust. When curriculum emerges from the voices of those who will teach and learn it, it becomes more than a guide; it becomes a shared promise because “teachers implement what they trust. They trust what they help build. And they help build what sees them fully—not only as professionals but as people called to teach the truth in love” (Kirkland, 2024). In this way, we can’t mandate belief. But we can build a curriculum worth believing in.

Buy-In Across Three Dimensions: Epistemological, Ethical, Relational

Our attempts to reform curriculum keep failing—not because they are bad, but because few of us have asked teachers if they are in. That is, we can write the best curriculum in the world, and it won’t matter if the people teaching it don’t believe a word of it. Belief, it turns out, is not a byproduct of reform—it is its precondition. And when belief is absent, implementation becomes mechanical, disconnected from the deeper moral and intellectual commitments that animate real teaching.

From my work in Detroit, a three-dimensional theory of teacher buy-in has emerged:

1. Epistemological Buy-In—Do teachers believe in the truth of the knowledge being taught? Do they see it as legitimate? When curriculum centers voices and histories previously erased—such as the contributions of Detroit’s Black and Latinx communities—it challenges dominant narratives. Teachers must be supported in shifting their own frameworks to internalize these truths. As Sleeter (2012) argues, this dignity-driven curriculum “requires teachers to critically examine and reframe their own knowledge systems” (p. 570).

2. Ethical Buy-In—Do teachers consider the work morally aligned with their purpose? bell hooks (1994) called this engaged pedagogy, the belief that teaching is a spiritual act rooted in love and liberation. Teachers must see curriculum not as a set of standards to meet but as an ethical stance to inhabit.

3. Relational Buy-In—Do teachers trust the process and people behind the curriculum? As decades of failed reform have shown, trust cannot be commanded; it must be cultivated through dialogue, transparency, and shared power (Fine, 1991; Lipman, 2011).

My Detroit work foregrounds all three of these areas of “buy-in.” The model is not perfect, but it is honest—and that honesty allows it to thrive.

Much of today’s education research, however, focuses on “fidelity of implementation,” as though the success of curriculum reform can be measured by adherence to pacing guides. But such metrics miss the point. Implementation without conviction is mechanical. True reform is not about whether teachers follow a script but whether they find themselves in the story.

As Greene (1973) wrote, teaching must be a form of wide-awakeness, a commitment to living and teaching with moral imagination. Curriculum should not be something done to teachers but something done with them. When that happens, the classroom becomes what Giroux (1988) envisioned: a space of cultural work where knowledge is contested, created, and made meaningful.

Of course, curriculum alone cannot carry this weight. It must be part of a more significant systemic shift that repositions teachers as intellectuals, students as historians of their own lives, and communities as co-authors of educational futures. As research from Khalifa, Gooden, and Davis (2016) shows, there is a kind of “culturally responsive leadership”—rooted in equity and community engagement—that is required to sustain reforms and build institutional trust.

Our view of professional learning must evolve to support conviction rather than compliance. Rather than “training” teachers on how to “use” the curriculum, districts should create spaces for reflection, dialogue, and co-learning. Schools must become places where “belonging is the precondition to learning” and where reform is measured not by the speed of rollout but by the speed of trust.

The Curriculum We Keep: From Compliance to Conviction

Ms. Jenkins didn’t need a new script. She needed a curriculum she could trust and one that trusted her and allowed her to teach what mattered. The difference wasn’t in the pages of the guide but in the posture of the system that produced it—a system that finally asked: What does it mean to teach truthfully? To teach with love? To teach in a way that honors who students are and who teachers are becoming?

When she taught the Detroit uprising, her students’ passions ignited. They brought stories from their families, challenged dominant narratives, and asked the kinds of questions that only come from seeing oneself in the curriculum and being fully seen by all who sat in front of them. They didn’t just learn about history; they started to write it.

That’s what teacher buy-in looks like when it’s real. Not agreement. Not compliance. But belief—the kind of belief that can only emerge from co-authorship, from conviction, from trust. And belief, once cultivated, becomes purpose. Purpose becomes practice. Practice becomes change.

This is the promise—and the peril—of curriculum reform. If we treat curriculum as a product to be delivered, we will continue to lose the people who make it come alive. But if we treat it as a cultural covenant—crafted with communities, authored by teachers, rooted in justice—then we open the door to something deeper than reform. We open the door to transformation.

My ongoing work in Detroit is showing me the way. It reminds me that curriculum is not just about what we teach—it is about what we’re willing to stand for. And in classrooms like Ms. Jenkins’, where a textbook once erased and a guide now reveals, we find the fragile beginnings of a promise kept.

In the end, the curriculum is not what we give to teachers.

It’s what we give with them.

It’s not the change we implement.

It’s the future we imagine—together.

References

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Herder and Herder.

Gay, G. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice (3rd ed.). Teachers College Press.

Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Bergin & Garvey.

Greene, M. (1973). Teacher as stranger: Educational philosophy for the modern age. Wadsworth Publishing.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Khalifa, M., Gooden, M. A., & Davis, J. E. (2016). Culturally responsive school leadership: A synthesis of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 1272–1311. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654316630383

Kirkland, D. E. (2021). Culturally responsive-sustaining education. Impact on Instructional Improvement, 45(1), 9–14.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312032003465

Lipman, P. (2011). The new political economy of urban education: Neoliberalism, race, and the right to the city. Routledge.

Michigan Department of Education. (2023). M-STEP student performance data: Social studies proficiency in Michigan school districts. https://www.michigan.gov/mde/services/reports/m-step

Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Scholastic.

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.

Penuel, W. R., Fishman, B. J., Yamaguchi, R., & Gallagher, D. J. (2007). What makes professional development effective? Strategies that foster curriculum implementation. American Educational Research Journal, 44(4), 921–958. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831207308221

Sleeter, C. E. (2012). Confronting the marginalization of culturally responsive pedagogy. Urban Education, 47(3), 562–584. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085911431472

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Suggested citation: Kirkland, D.E. (2025). Curriculum as Covenant. In forwardED Perspectives, https://www.forward-ed.com/post/curriculum-as-covenant.

David E. Kirkland, PhD, is the founder and CEO of forwardED. He is a nationally renowned scholar and leading expert on education equity. He can be reached at david@forward-ed.com.