Achieving High Reliability School (HRS) certification is a significant milestone for any district striving for excellence. But for many schools, the path to Level 3—Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum—is where hidden challenges arise.
Even with dedicated curriculum teams and years of instructional improvement, gaps can remain invisible until they disrupt your progress toward certification.
In this post, we’ll explore:
- What curriculum gaps mean in the context of HRS
- Why these gaps jeopardize Level 3 certification
- How you can proactively find and fix them using Atlas
What Are Curriculum Gaps in High Reliability Schools?
In the HRS framework, Level 3 focuses on ensuring that every student has access to a guaranteed and viable curriculum. This means:
- All essential content is taught consistently across classrooms and grade levels.
- Curriculum aligns with state or national standards.
- The scope and sequence are realistic and achievable.
A curriculum gap occurs when:
- Standards are not addressed in certain courses or grade levels.
- Redundancies waste instructional time.
- Vertical alignment (between grade levels) breaks down.
- Teachers create their own versions of curriculum maps or unit plans with inconsistent structures.
These gaps can lead to unequal learning opportunities, missed standards, and ultimately, falling short of HRS Level 3 requirements.
Why Curriculum Gaps Threaten HRS Level 3 Certification
The HRS model emphasizes continuous improvement and evidence-based practices. For Level 3, that means:
- Providing proof of alignment to state and district standards.
- Ensuring your curriculum is viable (teachable in the allotted time).
- Guaranteeing consistent content across classrooms.
- Highlighting priority standards to focus instruction.
- Using data to guide improvement and collaboration.
- Ensuring curriculum visibility to close gaps early.
Without visibility into curriculum gaps, schools risk:
- Failing to get ahead of lagging indicators (proof of effectiveness).
- Struggling to maintain instructional equity.
- Lacking the data to support school improvement initiatives.
In short: what you can’t see, you can’t fix—and HRS certification depends on your ability to see and act on these gaps.
How to Identify Hidden Curriculum Gaps with Atlas
This is where Atlas, a curriculum planning and reporting platform, becomes essential.
1. Visualize Curriculum Maps Across Grades and Subjects
Atlas gives administrators a real-time, centralized view of curriculum maps across the entire school or district. You can easily spot:
- Courses missing essential content
- Redundancies across grade levels
- Inconsistencies in unit structure
This demonstrates a guaranteed curriculum with cross-grade and subject visibility to spot and close gaps before they affect students.
This Atlas Scope and Sequence Report (Filtered by skills), shows articulation of skills across grade levels, easily identifying gaps and skills. This report can be run on anything in your curriculum from standards to interventions.
2. Run Standards Alignment Reports
With hundreds of pre-loaded state and national standards, Atlas lets you map your curriculum directly to standards. Powerful reports—like the Standards Analysis Report —shows curriculum alignment to standards, to easily view which standards have yet to be addressed in the curriculum. Ensuring consistency in what standards have been targeted and assessed across the district
Define your Priority (Focus) and Supporting standards, then flag those standards within your Unit Plan. This helps teachers focus on critical content within available instructional time.
3. Ensure Vertical and Horizontal Alignment
Atlas simplifies collaboration between teachers and departments, using sequence and scope reports, ensuring that curriculum builds logically from one grade to the next and remains consistent across classrooms.
This example of a Standards Overview Report shows us that there are many focus standards in second grade (right column) that are not being taught as focused standards in 1st grade (left column), a gap in vertical alignment.
4. Track Curriculum Health Over Time
Regular reporting and dashboards help schools monitor curriculum updates, teacher engagement, and alignment progress—key evidence for HRS lagging indicators.
- Atlas reports allow you to come to planning meetings with insights to prompt impactful conversations.
The Atlas Advantage for HRS Schools
For schools pursuing or maintaining High Reliability School certification, Atlas provides:
- The visibility to uncover hidden curriculum gaps
- The alignment tools to ensure consistency and equity
- The reporting power to demonstrate progress and impact
By making curriculum transparent, actionable, and aligned, Atlas supports schools in achieving and sustaining HRS Level 3 certification with confidence. Learn more about how Atlas supports High Reliability School Certification.
Ready to See Your Curriculum Gaps?
Discover how Atlas can help your school visualize, align, and improve curriculum with ease.
