Key dates
M1 - Testable Prototype for Early Partner Discussions
M2 - Validate the prototype
Close the five open district confirmations and put the Grade 4 Q1 guide in front of the teachers who would run it.
Confirm CKLA unit order by quarter, Ready Math pacing, and whether Mystery Science unit order is actually flexible.
Confirm arts specialist involvement and whether collaborative planning time exists.
Name the pilot grade and teacher team for the coming year.
Write the definition of done for an arc — the rubric that later becomes the automated validator set.
Exit criteria
A teacher team walks the Q1 arc unaided and says they could run it, plus a written arc rubric.
M3 - Turn the framework into a schema
The single highest-leverage step. Convert the prose design principles into a machine-readable model so that generating an arc becomes filling a structure, not writing a document.
Define the arc data model — district, program, pacing week, standard, concept, subject thread, touchpoint, alignment record, culminating product.
Build the two output templates as renders of that model: leadership overview and teacher implementation guide.
Encode the rubric from Phase 0 as executable validators.
Exit criteria The Q2 prototype is re-expressed as structured data and re-rendered from it with no loss of quality.
M4 - Scale inside one district
Build all of K–5 for Jefferson County — roughly 24 arcs — with human experts on the schema and light tooling. Instrument the work from arc #1 so the automation targets are measured, not guessed.
Track hours per arc, edits per arc, and which steps consume the time (standards reading, overlap hunting, asset search, or writing).
Harvest reusable pieces: standards overlap maps, per-program pacing normalizations, the culminating product menu.
Ship arcs continuously to the pilot so instructional feedback arrives during the build, not after.
Exit criteria
Median build time per arc down 60%+ from arc #1 to arc #24, with a time breakdown that names the bottleneck.
M5 - Automate the alignment
Build the engine that does the mechanical work: reading pacing guides and standards, detecting genuine overlap, and attaching the right DE assets to the right week. Detailed in the next section.
Exit criteria
≥85% of proposed alignments accepted with no edit; expert review under two hours per arc.
M6 - Make it district- and program-agnostic
Everything district-specific becomes configuration data. Nothing about Alabama or Mystery Science is hard-coded anywhere.
Curriculum program library: each publisher’s scope and sequence normalized once, versioned, and reused by every district that licenses it. Onboarding district #2 with the same programs costs nothing.
Standards crosswalk: every state’s standard set resolved to the same canonical concept layer, so overlap detection works in any state without pairwise mapping.
Proof: a second state with a different publisher stack, built with no code changes.
Exit criteriaA new district is live in ≤2 weeks with zero engineering involvement.
M7 - Productize
Turn the internal pipeline into a surface other people can drive.
Authoring workbench opened to district curriculum staff, not just DE experts.
Teacher delivery experience inside DE — the arc as a live, dated plan rather than a PDF.
A library of published arcs, filterable by state, publisher stack, and grade.
Usage telemetry and teacher edits feeding back into alignment scoring.
Exit criteria
A district authors a usable arc without DE in the room.