Teachers often spend many hours at night or on weekends searching the internet for good instructional materials – or just good ideas about how to meld online learning into their classrooms. Sometimes, they consult curation sites that have evaluated these materials; sometimes they just consult other teachers on what they use.

The need for reliable evaluation has become more urgent with the flood of new, often free, online materials. These OER – open educational resources – may be good, bad or indifferent. How can school districts or teachers know?

“There’s more bad OER out there than good; that’s a fact,” said Rebecca Kockler, assistant superintendent of academic instruction for the state of Louisiana, at the annual SXSWedu conference last week in Austin, Texas. “We need to find the quality stuff and elevate it, for everyone.”

Along with quality classroom materials, there’s an urgent need for quality curricula, Kockler said. The idea of teachers searching the web for individual units of study, or even individual lessons, strikes her as a huge waste of time. When it happens, she said, “we try to weed that out of our districts.”

Instead, Louisiana’s Department of Education promotes an integrated curriculum and makes all parts of it available on the department’s website. When they have a whole curriculum, aligned to the state’s common core standards and flexible enough to be adapted for the schools’ own particular students’ needs, she said, teachers can spend the bulk of their time teaching. But she said professional development and support are essential, too. And they’re lacking.

There are few high-quality purveyors of whole curricula to begin with, she said, and “most curriculum developers don’t embed professional development and support” in their programs. Even fewer provide resources for teaching special education students or English language learners.

She and her fellow panelists mentioned a few OER sources that do provide teacher support (aka professional development) in their offerings. Among them: UnboundEd, a nonprofit created to continue the work of the Engage NY curriculum developers; Open Up Resources, a nonprofit whose K-5 English Language Arts curriculum and middle-school math curriculum have both received top ratings from EdReports, an evaluator; Great Minds, which makes the highly popular Eureka Math curriculum, and IBM Watson’s Teacher Advisor, which offers content recommendations and individualized help with lesson-planning for K-5 math teachers.

And on Tuesday, The Learning Accelerator and Yet Analytics announced the Learning Commons, a new, free website that will gather curated professional development resources for those who are working to implement blended or personalized learning in their classrooms.

Related: Open Educational Resources haven’t upended the way that K-12 schools get course materials – yet

The SXSWedu conference featured dozens of panels with variations on the theme of how to find accurate assessments of the quality of different course and curriculum options (at the college level as well as in K-12, and not just OER). Some speakers said the rush to embrace new technological tools, apps and other learning materials often sweeps aside high-quality evaluation – which by definition cannot be rushed.

MaryEllen Elia, the New York State commissioner of education, told one panel’s audience, “We need to slow down and give our teachers the time to implement [new technology], and to use it for long enough to see if it works well or not.”

Both the federal Department of Education and ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) also offer information about quality resources on their respective websites.

“Technology is an accelerator,” said Richard Culatta, a former federal education technology official who now heads ISTE. “If you apply it to bad teaching practices, you’ll get faster bad teaching practices; if you apply it to high-quality teaching practices, you’ll get faster high-quality teaching practices.”

In Louisiana, at least, the integrated approach to sharing best practices and best curricula, while supporting teachers with clear and frequent professional development help, seems to be paying dividends in students’ learning. According to a RAND study released in January 2017, the state has seen record growth in the number of students taking Advanced Placement courses, as well as in its high school graduation rate and its rate of college attendance. Louisiana’s fourth graders also had the highest learning gains in the nation in the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test.

Using open educational resources has become a key part of this progress, even if it wasn’t the starting point.

“Using OER wasn’t our goal,” Kockler said. “Quality was our goal.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

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In her acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia Thursday night, Hillary Clinton pledged to create new economic opportunities for all Americans by generating more and better jobs; expanding affordable childcare and preschool programs, and making higher education “debt-free for all.”

Like other convention speakers, she spoke mostly about the bookend age groups of the education spectrum – very young children at one end, young adults at the other.

“Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt-free for all,” she said. But she also said, “Here’s something we don’t say enough: college is crucial, but a four-year degree should not be the only path to a good job. We’re going to help more people learn a skill or practice a trade and make a good living doing it.”

In striking contrast to the Republican convention, where education got cursory mention, the Democrats talked about it every night – although mostly in platitudes. Give all children a fair start with free preschool? Check. Help struggling learners stay in class and out of jail? Check. Crack down on crooked for-profit universities? Make college tuition free for most families, and reduce crushing college-loan burdens? Check, check.

Absent were specific policy proposals about the K-12 education system. Almost no speaker, including Clinton, addressed such contentious issues as charter schools, excessive testing, the achievement gap, the technology-access gap, Common Core standards and the current racial segregation in so many of the nation’s schools.

“This is an event that is designed to bring the party together, and there are these sharp divisions between the education reform folks and traditional education people, so it makes sense that they would avoid talking about them beyond generalities,” said Michael  Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank.

School choice and charter schools tend to be the divisive issues in the Democratic Party. Many unions – traditional bulwarks of Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts – support teachers and other educators in opposing charters because most charters employ non-union teachers. But many parents and even some union educators believe that certain charter schools merit support, for their efforts to find innovative teaching methods and to boost the learning success of children from historically disadvantaged populations.

The Democratic platform states that charter schools should be authorized if they do not “replace and destabilize” existing public schools, a tough standard to meet.

And when Clinton mentioned moderate support for some school-choice plans at a National Education Association union gathering earlier this month, she was booed.

One of the featured speakers Tuesday night in Philadelphia was David Banks, the principal of Eagle Academy, a small alternative school whose creation Clinton supported when she was a senator. It has built a model for successfully educating low-income black and Latino male students; mimicking many charters, it requires students to wear uniforms, attend school until 5 p.m. and receive test prep and academic help on Saturdays.

The Eagle Academies (there are now six) are not charters — they are regular public schools. They emphasize music, art and athletics, not just academic subjects and test scores. But like a growing number of small-school networks, the Eagle Academies depend to some extent on private money to augment the funds they get from public budgets. The Eagle Academy Foundation raised $2.2 million in 2013 and 2014, according to the latest records.

Related: How one innovative school district has closed the gaps on harder Common Core tests

Although racial tension in the streets and with police forces were major topics at the convention, racial segregation in the nation’s schools was not – except for speeches highlighting Clinton’s past work to fight school segregation. Interestingly, the wife of Clinton’s running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, actually lived through the process in Virginia, as he noted in his speech.

Anne Holton, who stepped down as Virginia’s education secretary on Tuesday to join her husband on the campaign trail, was 11 years old when her father, Linwood Holton, became governor in 1970 and enrolled his children in previously all-black public schools in Richmond, in support of desegregation. That same year, Virginia stopped giving state tuition aid to white parents to send their children to “segregation academies.”

As a young lawyer, Clinton exposed some of these academies’ whites-only policies. She posed as a newcomer to an Alabama town asking to enroll her children in such schools. Hundreds of these schools had opened across the country in the 20 years after the Brown v. Board decision, particularly in southern states like Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Virgina.

More than four decades later, many still exist, particularly in the Mississippi Delta area.

Related: Mississippi town still fighting desegregation

Convention commentary on higher education ranged from Senator Al Franken’s comedy routine, where he mocked being ripped off as a Trump University student, to Jill Biden’s praise of community colleges as the nation’s “best kept secret,” to Bernie Sanders highlighting the way he and his supporters had pushed Clinton to adopt a more expansive free-college plank.

“During the primary campaign, Secretary Clinton and I both focused on this issue but with somewhat different approaches,” he said. “Recently, however, we have come together on a proposal that will revolutionize higher education in America. It will guarantee that the children of any family in this country with an annual income of $125,000 a year or less, 83 percent of our population, will be able to go to a public college or university tuition free.”

One who did speak about K-12 issues was Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, who said:

“Let’s be honest, right now in this country we have two education systems. Not public and private, but rich and poor,” the former with laptops for all, the latter with metal detectors at school entrances.

“That,” he added, “is not educating every child equally,” although like other speakers, he made no policy suggestions. His state includes the largest school system in the country, New York City’s, which is also one of the most segregated and unequal in the terms he used.

Rep. Xavier Becerra of California praised Clinton for her past advocacy for children, and was among many who mentioned support for teachers. He said Clinton would “rebuild our crumbling schools. She’ll give our teachers the support and tools they need, and the pay they deserve.”

Several teachers gave speeches during the convention. Dustin Parsons, a fifth-grade teacher in Bauxite, Arkansas, spoke Tuesday night. In an interview afterward, he said, “I want to keep hearing her vision for the future. What is her vision? How are we going to help keep education, schools moving into the right direction and not looking back? We went back and forth so many times, and now we’ve got to keep going forward.”

Additional reporting was contributed by Matthew Bruderle and Emmanuel Felton.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Higher Education.

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The President’s remarks about education were brief, largely promises to build on existing success. He highlighted five areas of concern: expanding early childhood education for all, improving high school graduation rates, attracting more American students into studying the sciences, recruiting and supporting more teachers, and making college more affordable.

The Hechinger Report took a closer look at those goals, delving into our own recent coverage of each.

Obama:  “ … together, we’ve increased early childhood education, lifted high school graduation rates to new highs, and boosted graduates in fields like engineering. In the coming years, we should build on that progress, by providing Pre-K for all, offering every student the hands-on computer science and math classes that make them job-ready on day one, and we should recruit and support more great teachers for our kids.”

Expanding early childhood education is popular; it’s the cost that raises hackles. Kris Perry, executive director of the First Five Years Fund, told The Hechinger Report last month that giving every 4-year-old a free public education would cost more than $30 billion. There’d be scant political backing for that level of spending, so advocates promote “universal access,” in which the government pays for preschool for poor and some middle-class kids, while wealthier families pay their own way. The White House’s own plan proposes exactly that, while also encouraging the states to fund additional seats for 4-year-olds from middle-class families.

As for high school graduation rates, only recently has there been a uniform way of counting them, mandated by the federal government in 2011 and beginning that year. Since then, the national rate has risen to 81 percent from 79 percent in 2013 (the last year with complete numbers tallied). It ranges from 69 percent in Oregon to nearly 90 percent in Iowa. Last summer, the Hechinger Report compiled a map showing high school graduation rates by school district for every state.

Efforts to improve science, math and technology education have been uneven among the states. One major concern the President didn’t address was the vast gender and racial disparity in these fields. Girls make up 56 percent of all students taking Advanced Placement tests in high school, but just 18 percent of those taking computer science tests, according Richard Culatta, the just-departed head of the Education Department’s Technology Office — and in 12 states, zero students of color took the computer science Advanced Placement exam. “That’s an incredible problem that we need to solve,” Culatta said, as reported in Hechinger’s Blended Learning newsletter.

Teacher training is addressed in the Every Student Succeeds Act just passed by Congress and signed into law by Mr. Obama. It has provisions allowing states to set up new degree-granting academies for teachers, outside the traditional higher education systems, and encouraging the creation of residency programs, in which teacher recruits would be paired with veterans for a year of in-classroom training. Some experts worry that these state academies might in fact lower the standards for new teachers. Meanwhile, salaries continue to be an obstacle in the quest to recruit better teachers.

Obama:  “And we have to make college affordable for every American …  We’ve already reduced student loan payments to ten percent of a borrower’s income.  Now, we’ve got to actually cut the cost of college.  Providing two years of community college at no cost for every responsible student is one of the best ways to do that, and I’m going to keep fighting to get that started this year.”

The administration’s income-driven repayment plan (often called “pay as you earn”), in which students can pay back college loans as a fixed percentage of their future income, has proved popular, and has helped reduce the number of Americans who default on their loans. As for making community college free, federal Pell grants already pay much of the cost of community college for most students (up to $5,730 a year); some states supplement that. Less publicized are the many reasons students fail to take advantage of these grants, ranging from confusing application forms to ignorance of the rules or availability of grants to the part-time or in-school-then-out-awhile pace at which many low-income students attend community college. Technically, part-timers can get Pell grants, pro-rated by the number of classes they take, but in practice, it is hard for such students to get the financing they need. Cutting the actual cost of college is a far more ambitious and complicated undertaking — easy to call for, difficult to achieve.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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