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I find these dispatches from education reform think tank world instructive because they reveal what I think is a significant disconnect between "schooling" and "learning." edexcellence.net/articles/evide…
All of these "evidence-based" curriculums are judged against their linkage to increased student scores on state assessments. Assessments which @DanKoretz showed in The Testing Charade to be somewhere between useless and counterproductive. Who cares if they validate against that? 
The criteria by which this curricula is rated, at least when it comes to writing are pretty much meaningless. The process of how texts are engaged with and what students are asked to do and the conditions under which they do it is far more important than the lexile level for ex.
My approach to teaching writing is not rooted in the texts students read, but in the activities they do and what kinds of thinking is privileged through writing. The Writer's Practice can't be measured by the criteria these groups use to assess curriculum. amazon.com/Writers-Practi…
The other problem is they've decided that so-called "experimental design studies" must be the coin of the realm on curriculum. This is a problem because to control for variables that can be tested will distort the curriculum itself. There is no one method that works in a class.
The best curriculum for writing, IMO, is inherently flexible and may work different ways for different students. I'm pretty rigorous about collecting data on my students experiences, but no two students find the same path through the curriculum even if they both have success.
That flexibility is a feature, not a bug, but if I'm trying to design an experiment that will validate, I couldn't employ the curriculum that I know works based on the qualitative research I've been doing with my students for a decade. That's not good enough for think tanks.
This article also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between curriculum and practices. They are not the same thing. The analogy to doctors changing the drugs they prescribe is not a good one and misunderstands teaching.
I think teachers need good curriculum and good resources, but this can't be the ne plus ultra. The conclusion posits we've never had high quality curriculum. If that was true, no one would've successfully learned anything.
Judging curricula by how well it conforms to CCSS, itself an unvalidated approach, or by how students perform on standardized assessments is doubling down on the failures that school reformers have finally been starting to wake up to. Seems like they're lulling us back to sleep.
