Not for use with special education students!

It is all-around terrible. The book is okay, aside from the fact that it misses major pieces of the stories, and the multiple-choice questions are usually fundamentally flawed. The real issue is with the Studysync assessments. They have subjective questions with only one correct answer, questions that can be interpreted multiple ways, multiple correct answers for questions with only one being marked as correct, and grammatical questions with multiple correct answers (These are the most objective questions possible, and they mess these up?!) These StudySync assessments genuinely make me wonder if the author of them read the texts the test is being given based on. This curriculum is why most students hate school.

While it has been bad enough for ELA, trying to use it for ELD has proved to be worse. There are only TWO dedicated lessons per unit for designated ELD. While this may be enough support for integrated (it's not, but let's just say it is) it is an absolute disaster if your district was sold that it was an ELD curriculum. This is misleading at best, deceptive at worse. It is designed like an English support curriculum, which is in no way helpful for my students to pass the ELPAC. Honestly, if I had all the hours I have spent going down rabbit holes trying to find things on this maze of a platform, I would be able to add a whole week to this year.

I am going to emphasize things teachers were promised in the sales pitch that do not exist. 1) Audio support for texts. This is haphazard and unpredictable. A core text in a unit will have no audio support but optional, independent reads will. 2) Diverse voices and opinions. In the entire 12th grade core curriculum, students are never, not once, asked to conduct a close reading of a text by an African-American or Latino author. All close readings are centered on texts written more than 20 years ago and predominantly by white authors. StudySync tries to look like a modern and diverse text set by providing lots of extra texts in the library and in optional reads, but the actual core curriculum that students read repeatedly and write in detail about contains very little not written by a white man prior to the 21st century. 3) On- and off-line flexibility. In a poor district with frequent laptop and connectivity issues, this was key for me. StudySync reps reiterated that everything available online was also supported in the workbooks and that it was easy for teachers to print off materials from the site. This is simply and entirely a lie. Most of my colleagues and I are spending hours every day screenshotting or otherwise manipulating materials to try and render them printable for students whose IEPs require physical texts. Rubrics especially are impossible to print. And speaking of diverse learners... 4) StudySync trumpets its "scaffolds" and supports. These "scaffolds" consist of absolutely nothing for ELL students except a picture glossary of key language, a summary of texts and repetitive, meaningless "discussion stems." Scaffolds for students with IEPs or otherwise below grade level are even rarer and more surface-level. Supposed extensions for students above grade level are slightly better. 5) Interesting and engaging material and activities. Students do the exact same thing with every single text, from sixth to twelfth grade, with the exact same language and repeated videos across grade levels. It is abundantly clear that a large part of "writing" this curriculum was copying-and-pasting. This is a disaster of a curriculum, deceptively sold to districts desperate for a resource for new or overworked teachers, that seems deliberately designed to drain any interest in literature from all students but especially students of color or those reading below grade level.