Here's what's happening in curriculum adoption across America, and nobody seems bothered by it: schools are increasingly rewarding textbook publishers and curriculum vendors who deliver "engaging" math instruction that systematically removes cognitive friction from learning.
The incentive structure is perverse, and it benefits everyone except students who actually need to think.
Consider the economics. A district superintendent faces pressure to show engagement metrics. Publishers know this. So they build curricula with immediate gratification loops, frequent wins, and carefully scaffolded problems that rarely frustrate. Teachers adopt these materials because they're easier to implement. Parents see smiling faces on Zoom calls. Test scores tick up slightly. Everyone celebrates.
But here's the catch: we've essentially paid for curriculum that trains students to expect frictionless learning while systematically avoiding the cognitive discomfort that precedes understanding.
This isn't theoretical handwringing. Recent educational discourse has highlighted how STEM lessons sometimes become too easy, causing students to disengage entirely. We know oracy matters for multilingual learners, yet curriculum materials often skip the messy verbal reasoning stages that build language and thought simultaneously. We have evidence about what improves math instruction across classrooms, yet adoption decisions often favor flashier, easier-to-teach alternatives.
The problem is that our incentive alignment is broken. Publishers profit from adoption. Districts win political capital from engagement. Teachers reduce workload. Students get short-term satisfaction. But nobody's incentives align with the harder work of building genuine mathematical thinking.
What gets lost? The productive struggle. The moment when a student sits with a genuinely difficult problem long enough to build a conceptual bridge. The classroom conversation where imprecise thinking gets challenged and refined. These moments are uncomfortable. They're also irreplaceable.
Consider who benefits from this arrangement. Large curriculum publishers with distribution power can afford to invest in slick presentation and engagement features. Smaller educational innovators with evidence-based but demanding approaches struggle for market share. Teachers who want to teach conceptually have fewer off-the-shelf resources supporting that work. Students from higher-income backgrounds whose families provide supplemental challenge at home maintain advantages, while others depend on school to provide intellectual struggle.
The column that emerges is clear: we've built a system that rewards ease of adoption, not depth of learning. And it's working exactly as designed.
What would better incentives look like? Districts could weight curriculum decisions on evidence of sustained student thinking, not engagement dashboards. Procurement could favor publishers willing to invest in teacher preparation, not just slick interfaces. Professional development budgets could shift from compliance training toward building teachers' capacity to facilitate productive struggle. Performance metrics could measure whether students can reason through unfamiliar problems, not whether they smile while learning.
None of this means making math miserable or refusing to support students. Scaffold thoughtfully, yes. Build confidence, absolutely. But scaffolding isn't the same as removing challenge. Support isn't the same as ease.
The deeper issue is that we've created a market that rewards the appearance of student engagement while punishing the actual engagement of a student's intellect. We pay for materials that make teaching easier while potentially making learning shallower.
Until districts, publishers, and schools align incentives around genuine cognitive engagement rather than frictionless consumption, expect more of the same. Expect curricula designed for easy adoption by teachers, easy completion by students, and easy marketing by publishers. Expect metrics that look good. Expect learning that may not go as deep as it should.
The question for educators and administrators isn't whether students seem happy with their curriculum. It's whether the curriculum is rewarding the kind of thinking that matters.