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Supporting Our Fellow Equity Warriors

— Robin McClellan, Millicent Smith

We have the honor and privilege of working in districts that have achieved meaningful literacy gains in recent years (more on that below). This work inspires us daily – and it would inspire you too, if you could see it. 

Unfortunately, we’re unable to provide windows into our classrooms right now. One cost of this pandemic: the opportunity for site visits that can be invaluable to district leaders who’re making curriculum decisions.

We’ve often reflected on the importance of seeing – and showcasing – excellent ELA practice. You simply need to see this work with your own eyes to believe it.

We say so all the time, because of our firsthand experiences:

It can be hard to believe that students from different RTI tiers will be writing at the same caliber… until you see it with your K–2 students:

And with your 3–5 students:

Until you have seen kids beg their parents to come to ‘celebrations of learning’ to see their culminating projects, you won’t realize how exciting this is for the entire school community:

It can be difficult to appreciate how much the lack of curriculum costs teachers in prep time, including nights and weekends, until your teachers change curricula and quantify the time saved (10 hours per week!):

It can be hard to believe that you can move kids out of Tier 2 and 3 and into Tier 1 instruction in volumes… until you are watching it happen, in building after building:

And it’s practically unfathomable that teachers (who were once hesitant about new curricula) would make impassioned pleas to school boards to stick with a new curriculum – and then tweet their delight about curriculum adoption – until it happens:

Everyone doing this work with high quality curricula seems to echo this theme: You need to come see this work! Lauderdale County Superintendent Sean Kimble put it beautifully:

On top of all of the many disappointments this season, we’re lamenting the loss of a normal curriculum adoption season. Many Tennessee districts – and some beyond! – had planned to visit to see our work. We were excited by the idea that our #CurriculumMatters community would grow, and we could benefit from additional cross-district learning.

This blog is our attempt to give you a remote glimpse into our experience with high-quality ELA curricula – in lieu of the site visits we wish we were hosting.

Sharing Our Stories

We’ve been co-presenting about our work at Tennessee state convenings, and we’re pleased to share the presentation slides openly.

SMITH MCCLELLAN FINAL TO STATEDownload

Here are a few highlights!

In Lenoir City, Millicent’s district:

Our first full year of implementation of EL Education nearly doubled our proficiency rates: from 12.9% before the curriculum to 24.3% after.

Best of all, every quintile of students grew:

We closed equity gaps, and saw historic levels of proficiency for our English Language Learners.

In Sullivan County, Robin’s district:

We have been steadily rolling out Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) to new elementary grade levels over the past few years, and we really hit our stride last year. 

Not only did we decrease the number of students receiving Tier 2 and Tier 3 services last year, in every school (shown below, the Fall to Spring change):

Across schools and grades, we also increased the number of students performing at the highest levels (at the 75th-100th percentile, when compared to national data)… here is our change in students at that top tier from Fall to Spring: 

Please explore our slides (linked above) for more details. 

You can hear more about our district journeys in The 74, where our colleagues have recently been featured for their work. Lenoir City Principal Brandee Hoglund shared her story of implementation success after a disappointing pilot. Sullivan County Principals Alesia Dinsmore and Angie Baker captured the shifts in ELA instruction in Sullivan County.

Also, the Knowledge Matters School Tour visited our classrooms, sharing many delightful insights and videos that capture our teams’ perspectives. Here is one of many examples: 

Follow #KnowledgeMatters and #CurriculumMatters on Twitter for more of these shares!

An Important Note About Distance Learning

Let us tell you straight: Those curricula have been invaluable in our distance learning transition.

Lenoir City was able to take advantage of the free and open materials created for these curricula, including the Eureka Math on the Go lesson videos and the modEL Detroit resources created by Detroit Public Schools and EL Education; our implementation partner TNTP helped to develop stopgap lesson materials. In math, we used packets developed by ReadyMath in K-8; they developed Spanish-language materials, which was AMAZING. Our high school teachers are spending time with Illustrative Mathematics 9-12, a free, openly-licensed curriculum – in support of virtual learning to some extent, but mostly in preparation for next steps.

Sullivan County worked with our TNTP partner Kate Glover to provide high-quality literacy experiences for students at home, using the Core Knowledge curriculum. We also took advantage of free, open access to Amplify’s online products. 

Fundamentally, having curriculum as a baseline made everything easier. Our teams are having enough of a challenge translating their lessons to distance learning formats… if they were still creating the lesson content each week, we cannot fathom how much harder this would be!

Our curriculum work has also given us a true north as we think about helping all kids access grade level work… even after this pandemic. We need to think less about meeting kids where they are, and more about accelerating their skills as we keep them on track with grade level work, just as we do today (both of our districts use curricula that get all kids working with worthy, grade level texts).

As Dan Weisberg and David Steiner recently reminded us, “Giving students lower-level work to help them catch up — or, in the more extreme version, asking them to repeat an entire grade — has good intentions and a certain logic. It’s also largely ineffective.” We’re glad to be part of a national community that is talking and thinking this way.

These experiences have increased our case for the investment in curricula that raised the bar in our schools – and gave us a national community of practice in the process.

___

Robin McClellan serves as Supervisor of Elementary Curriculum and Instruction for Sullivan County Schools in Blountville, Tennessee. Millicent Smith serves as the Supervisor of Instruction for Lenoir City Schools in Lenoir City, Tennessee.

We would both be open to sharing more about our work, and you can connect with us in Twitter; Millicent is here and Robin is here.

Reading Assessments Need an Upgrade

— Jared Myracle

Most reading comprehension assessments are grounded in the belief that reading is a specialized set of skills, such as finding the main idea or identifying the author’s purpose. This may be one of the ways in which the assessment cart drives the instruction horse: on state assessments, students read a random passage they’ve never encountered before (known as a cold read) and answer questions related to main idea and purpose. Sounds simple, right? Read a passage at your grade level and answer a few questions aligned to your grade level’s standards.

In school systems, we can see that these tests have driven reading instruction for quite some time. Teachers look at samples from state assessments and do everything in their power to make sure what they teach in their classroom looks as much like the state assessment as possible. And this isn’t all bad—instruction should be aligned to the expected outcome. Unfortunately, the overt focus on skills has led to a misplaced emphasis on skills-based reading lessons in which the topics of the texts being read have taken a backseat to the skills being practiced. The problem is, the topics of the reading passages heavily impact a student’s comprehension… and many educators don’t know that this is the case.

“The Baseball Study” by Recht and Leslie (1988) should be required reading on assessment of reading comprehension. The outcomes of this study tell us that a student’s prior knowledge of a topic has a greater impact on his or her ability to comprehend a text than generalized reading ability. In other words, being a “good” reader isn’t going to help you very much if you aren’t familiar with the topic you are reading about.

We know this disproportionately impacts children from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Children from homes with higher incomes tend to be exposed to a broader array of topics and knowledge through reading, discussions with parents, and family trips to places with historical significance, varying geography, or diverse cultures. These experiences begin to build a child’s web of information—a tool they’ll use to make meaning of new information as they read in class. On the other hand, a student who isn’t afforded these opportunities has the greatest need for the knowledge-building opportunities provided by his teacher and school.

In response to this research, a growing number of schools and districts have moved to adopt knowledge-building curricula. My district (Jackson-Madison County Schools, TN) made this switch two years ago; we now use two elementary ELA curricula – CKLA and EL Education – designed around many science and social studies topics, so that students learn about key topics as part of reading and writing instruction. The goal is to ensure all students build a bank of knowledge on a variety of topics in science, history, literature, and the arts, so that the knowledge gaps created by socio-economic factors are decreased over time and replaced with a more consistent knowledge base.

Currently we’re in a distance-learning era, and I must say, knowledge-building curricula “travels well;” it’s a lot easier to help students study these knowledge-rich topics with parents than it would be to coach parents on “find the main idea.” Providers of high-quality curricula, such as CKLA (Amplify), EL Education, and Wit and Wisdom (Great Minds), have stepped up to the plate to provide teachers and parents with the option to continue knowledge-building at home. And although internet access remains a barrier for many students, a district that has aligned their efforts behind a knowledge-building curriculum stands a better chance of translating high-quality materials into paper-based assignments for use at home as well.

But how does this translate to reading tests? Does implementing a knowledge-building curriculum mean reading scores will go up this year? Or the next?

Although it is possible for implementation of a knowledge-building curriculum to lead to early gains in reading, I’m concerned that district efforts to improve reading in this way will be declared a failure if scores don’t rise quickly enough. (My district has seen positive indicators in the first two years, including much higher scores on phonemic awareness and nearly a 5% gain in 3rd grade reading proficiency… but I expect that significant gains might take time, as I’ve written previously.) As educators, we are quick to discard initiatives that don’t produce results immediately, even when we know deep down it isn’t that simple.

Also, measuring progress when implementing knowledge-based curricula is complicated by the aforementioned structure of traditional reading assessments. Reading passages on assessments are generally selected based on qualitative and quantitative complexity, but with little thought to the topics of the passages. Since most districts don’t share a common curriculum, why worry about the topics of the passages?

For assessments to truly measure the progress of students in the first few years of a knowledge-based curriculum, the texts included on tests need to be on similar topics as those that were read during the school year. For example, our 5th grade students read about biodiversity in the rainforest, Jackie Robinson and the Civil Rights Movement, and the impact of natural disasters. Despite how much a student learns on these topics, if he or she has general knowledge gaps and the test includes an anchor text on something foreign to the student, the student most likely won’t perform very well. In this event, do the test results tell us anything about how much progress the student made this year, or how good of a reader they are? Or did it just confirm that significant knowledge gaps still exist?

In an effort to better gauge student progress in a knowledge-based curriculum, Louisiana has moved down a path to assess students in reading on the topics covered in their grade’s reading curriculum. The state can do this due to the tremendous efforts put in to implementing the Louisiana Guidebooks, a statewide English/language arts curriculum rolled out in 2014. Although the initial results of this pilot are still pending, the research suggests this is a promising practice. Limiting passages on reading assessments to those topics covered within the reading curriculum controls, to some degree, for the variability in prior knowledge amongst students. This, in turn, should remove the pre-existing bias towards middle and upper income students present with most current reading assessments. Only by controlling for the impact of prior knowledge will we ever truly be able to measure the progress of students in the first few years of experiencing a knowledge-based curriculum. This will help us as a profession to resist the urge to switch tracks in a year or two when we don’t see the dramatic gains we so desire. Then, in theory, after five years or so of students matriculating through a range of topics in successive grades, the variability of scores on cold read assessments should decrease.

As a profession, our collective handwringing over reading scores has gone on for a long time. And truthfully, we know too much about how students learn to read for it to go on much longer. The question is, will we know when we are on the right track if we aren’t looking for progress in the right places?

– Jared Myracle

Curriculum Notes

If you’d like to speak with me about the specific curricula used in my district, they are:

K–2 ELA:Core Knowledge Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

3–5 ELA:EL Education Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

6-12 ELA: LearnZillion Louisiana Guidebooks (Tier 1 on Louisiana Believesin grades 6–8)

K–12 Math: Eureka Math (all green on EdReportsin grades K–5, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believesin K–12)

A Window into the Work: Our Survey of Field Needs

A year ago, three of us published an editorial in EdWeek, We Have a National Reading Crisis, which seemed to strike a chord in the midst of a growing conversation about literacy. We formed a Professional Learning Network of C&I leaders dedicated to sharing our work with high-quality curriculum, because of the positive outcomes in our schools.

Since then, we’ve been pleased to bring this conversation to new venues! Brian Kingsley discussed the ‘science of reading’ in AASA’s School Administrator magazine. Jana Beth Francis was named a Leader to Learn From by EdWeek, specifically for her curriculum work.

Jared Myracle continued to write for EdWeek, noting the need for multi-year investments in reading instruction to reap benefits and the importance of curriculum for coherent, grade level work. He also penned a recent piece on literacy for ASCD. Robin McClellan presented at the Learning Forward conference, and she’s speaking on a webinar with Student Achievement Partners tonight.

We’ve enjoyed other spotlights on curriculum. The Knowledge Matters School Tour has been visiting districts and sharing stories in social media and in The 74. Emily Hanford recently visited Jackson-Madison (watch this space!).

Yet most of our activity has happened behind the scenes. Since sharing our curriculum work, we’ve had numerous inquiries from across the country, seeking to learn more. Often, we’ve been speaking with districts evaluating new curricula. We’ve also connected with peers on the implementation journey to learn from each other’s experiences. It has been fun to see ‘Curriculum Road Trips’ in which Sumner County, a Tennessee district in its first year with Wit & Wisdom, visited Baltimore City for connections and insights.

Recently, the volume of these inquiries has grown, probably because it’s adoption season. And we can’t help but wonder… is there a better way for us to support the field than to have 1:1 conversations? Could we reach more people – and learn more ourselves – if we could organize small groups around these topics, since the same themes keep recurring?

Also, how many educators have good questions, but have been too polite to ask them directly?

We want to turn this question back to you: What would help your curriculum learning journey?

  • Webinars comparing the different curriculum options – or unpacking individual curricula?
  • Zoom chats about implementation challenges?
  • Opportunities to visit our districts, and see the work in classrooms?
  • Virtual tours (videos, webinars) of the work in our districts?
  • Investments in teacher PLNs for users of specific curricula?
  • Discussions focused on PD providers?
  • All of the above – or something else?

If we can understand the needs of our peers, we may be able to create more effective collaboration opportunities; everyone wins, including our teams, if we can foster cross-district learning. (We don’t want to overpromise… but we’ll certainly do what we can!)

We created a short survey, so that your perspectives and needs can inform our thinking.

Please take this survey if you believe that additional collaboration might allow us to better support each other in this important work. Thanks for sharing your 2 cents!

A District Leader’s Education in Early Reading

— Jared Myracle

This piece – authored by Jared Myracle – was originally published in the February 2020 edition of Educational Leadership and can be viewed online in that format. It has been reposted with permission from ASCD.

Why I decided our district needed to move in a new direction.

This past year has seen a significant uptick in discussion about reading instruction in schools. Despite reforms to standards, teacher evaluation, and a push for more technology in classrooms, reading scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress—among other worrisome literacy indicators—have declined slightly. As the national conversation grows, many school and district leaders are trying to move quickly up the learning curve on the question of how kids actually learn to read proficiently—and how best to support the process in their schools.

I was a high school history teacher, so my training and classroom experience were not grounded in helping children learn to read. My time as a middle school and high school administrator did little to further my knowledge. At the same time, those experiences gave me a powerful window into the consequences of poor early reading instruction and the challenges students face when their literacy skills are below grade level.

When I became a district chief academic officer and began looking into the research on reading, I found, to my surprise, that there was a fair amount of consensus among experts on how kids learn to read. A number of interlocking approaches are consistently recommended. While you might see debate about implementation issues, the big picture on developing proficient readers is pretty clear from the research I was seeing.

Here are the common refrains I found:

  • Daily systematic phonics instruction in early elementary grades is essential and is supported by overwhelming evidence from the National Reading Panel and subsequent studies. Experts typically recommend 30 to 60 minutes of explicit phonics instruction daily, followed by opportunities for practice and reinforcement (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).
  • Assuming basic proficiency in decoding, students’ knowledge of a topic greatly influences how well they can read and comprehend text about that topic. Recht and Leslie’s famous “Baseball Study” (1988)—finding that students’ prior knowledge of baseball significantly determined their understanding of a passage about the sport—memorably demonstrates this and reinforces the need for curricula to begin building knowledge on a variety of topics found in literature, science, and social studies in early elementary grades. E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s Why Knowledge Matters (Harvard Education Press, 2016) and Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap (Avery, 2019) are more recent illuminating reads on this topic.
  • Too much time is spent in schools trying to teach students reading “skills” such as “finding the main idea” or “determining the author’s purpose,” under the faulty assumption that there are discrete, learnable skills that will bolster comprehension. While there is value in focusing on vocabulary, other aspects of language, and some broad comprehension strategies (such as summarization), research shows that training in isolated textual-analysis skills (which proficient readers do with a high degree of automaticity) has little effect on students’ understanding of a reading passage (Shanahan, 2016; Steiner et al., 2019). The surest way to improve students’ comprehension is to increase their reading of knowledge-based texts and their writing about such texts (Steiner et al., 2019).
  • Meanwhile, there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of one of the most pervasive English language arts approaches—grouping students based on reading level for Tier-1 reading instruction (Shanahan, 2017; Sparks, 2018). Such practices can in fact reinforce achievement gaps, and they derive from a flawed basis for differentiation, since a student’s reading “level” can fluctuate dramatically, depending on the topic being read, and often doesn’t tell us much about what he or she needs to grow as a reader. Instead of grouping students by reading levels, some experts believe that challenging all students with grade-level texts, with scaffolding as necessary, best serves reading outcomes (Shanahan, 2017).

Light-Bulb Moments

I mentioned that the level of consensus on these findings was surprising to me. Part of the reason for this was that I hadn’t seen much evidence of practices reflecting them in classrooms. Prior to assuming my current role as chief academic officer of Jackson-Madison County Schools in Tennessee, I had spent the better part of two years working for Instruction Partners, a consulting organization that partners with districts to improve core academics. As I moved from school to school and room to room, I saw a whole host of reading-instruction practices but very little consistency—and very little that matched up with what I eventually learned about the research on the science of reading. Reflecting on this disconnect was an “aha” moment for me.

An even bigger light-bulb moment for me was when I fully considered the significance of Recht and Leslie’s “Baseball Study” and the importance of background knowledge to reading proficiency. As I reflected on this finding, it seemed to me that, as a chief academic officer, I had a moral obligation to ensure our students had the opportunity to systematically build knowledge by spending significant time going deep into specific topics, rather than jumping from story to story (or skills activity to skills activity) on a day-to-day basis.

And I should clarify that the fragmented curricular approach we often see in schools is not the fault of teachers. As leaders, we have not placed enough emphasis on providing our teachers with the cohesive instructional materials they need—we have spent far too long assuming they can simply create everything they teach. This is not working. If we want improvements in students’ reading abilities, it is incumbent upon us to place a laser-like focus on getting teachers the resources and knowledge they need to develop proficient readers.

Curriculum Matters

When I started in my current role a little over two years ago, our teachers had little to go by in terms of teaching reading. There were remnants of a previous reading curriculum in some classrooms, but one glance at the reviews on EdReports.org or Louisiana Believes—free online resources that publish detailed reviews of curricula—revealed major deficits in the program’s phonics and knowledge-building components. From what I’d learned already about improving early literacy, I knew we had to make a change.

After I did some additional research and set up a period of review and feedback for teachers, our district selected two new language arts curricula. One is for grades K–2 and centers on knowledge-building read-alouds and a structured phonics strand. The other, for grades 3–5, continues the knowledge-building process and provides students opportunities to read multiple authentic texts in each of the four modules that make up a grade level.

While neither of these curricula are perfect, they both check the big boxes indicated by the research: systematic phonics instruction, knowledge-building opportunities in fiction and non-fiction texts, and access to grade-level texts for all children.

Nine months after we decided to make a switch, these new curricula were implemented in every K–5 classroom in our district. Teacher training was an important part of the transition, and multiple curriculum-specific professional development opportunities were offered within the first few months. After one semester of implementation, more than twice as many of our kindergarten students scored above average on a phonemic awareness screener than ever before. Although gains in this area would be expected after explicit instruction on it, the pace of those gains was highly encouraging.

But even more important than the initial quantitative gains we’ve seen is the level of engagement our students are demonstrating as they build knowledge on a variety of reading topics. It’s impressive and encouraging to listen to 1st grade students talk about the purpose of the body’s skeletal system or to hear a 2nd grader explain why the Yellow River is yellow and how it sustains the surrounding farmland. We’ve also seen dramatic improvements in our 3rd–5th graders’ writing as a result of their knowledge-rich reading and class discussions.

My favorite moments come when students make connections between the foundational skills they are acquiring through systematic phonics instruction and the knowledge they are developing through their read-alouds. Recently, for example, I observed a kindergarten teacher conclude a lesson by asking for examples of words that start with the /l/ sound. One student promptly responded with “leaf,” and then added an explanation of the difference between the leaves on evergreen and deciduous trees (and yes, the student used the words evergreen and deciduous, both learned in our new curriculum’s domain on plants). I knew we were on the right track.

“Don’t Overcomplicate It”

For school leaders, one major challenge of making significant instructional changes, such as implementing new reading curricula, is the tendency to get hung up on the many factors involved and options available and to suffer from “paralysis by analysis” in decision making. This is compounded if you are a district leader who, like me, has little formal training in the science of reading. My advice to you is simple: Don’t overcomplicate it. The research indicates a clear path forward for a majority of students to learn to read proficiently, and there are a number of strong curricula available that can jump-start this process in your district.

In discussions around adopting a new reading curriculum, a number of administrator and faculty voices will raise questions about specific points of reading instruction. Do you teach letter names after letter sounds, or simultaneously? Who gets to choose what books and topics students will read about? Where does grammar fit in? In every district, there will also be teachers who harbor doubts about “off-the-shelf” curriculum and about having to change their practices.

Such issues are worthy of discussion, but they are not worthy of holding up an informed and necessary plan for curriculum adoption. Perfection is truly the enemy of progress if debates about the finer points of reading instruction delay action on the major components that are already agreed upon by the research. Improving outcomes at scale begins by painting with broad strokes. Maximizing impact locally, particularly at the school and classroom level, involves a finer brush and can be done as a school adapts to a curriculum. Acknowledging that both these processes are needed is not disingenuous; it is the reality of change.

School leaders must be willing to acknowledge that most teachers are not trained to write curriculum, despite the responsibilities we’ve often foisted on them. They are largely trained in pedagogy, which helps them tailor instruction to meet the needs of individual students. It is the pairing of coherent curriculum with pedagogical skill that translates into the art and science of teaching and truly drives learning.

The good news for leaders is that available curriculum options, particularly in early literacy, have become dramatically better in recent years, and the best new options are truly aligned to the research on reading development. They are “educative” curricula that empower professional learning about reading practice. Further, there are now reputable curriculum-review services, such as EdReports and Louisiana Believes, that can help educators evaluate available options. Knowledge is power, of course, and in the area of early literacy especially, school leaders must be willing to use it.

Leading for Reading

I am not aware of a school or district that is completely satisfied with the reading capabilities of its students. Year after year, we lament reading scores on state assessments and national assessments and the prevalence of students who are below-level readers. Yet, despite these shared concerns, an overwhelming number of schools and districts still allow for fragmentary and uneven curricula and instruction in early reading. If we are ready to address our national reading crisis at scale, we must stop assuming that teachers have what they need and that what we’re already doing will somehow work out. Instead, we need to lead thoughtful processes to adopt and implement strong curricula supported by the science of reading.

Jared can be reached via email at jamyracle@gmail.com or on Twitter, @JaredMyracle.

References

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: Reports of the subgroups. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16–20.

Shanahan, T. (2016. January 19). Teaching reading comprehension and comprehension strategies. [Blog post]. Shanahan on Literacy. Retrieved from https://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/teaching-reading-comprehension-and-comprehension-strategies

Shanahan, T. (2017, February 7). The instructional level concept revisited: Teaching with complex text. [Blog post]. Shanahan on Literacy. Retrieved from https://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/the-instructional-level-concept-revisited-teaching-with-complex-text

Sparks, S. (2018, August 26.) Are classroom reading groups the best way to teach reading? Maybe not. Education Week.

Steiner, D., Magee, J., Jensen, B., & Button, J. (2019). The problem with “finding the main idea.” Learning First, Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.

The Hidden Mistake School Leaders Should Avoid This Year

— Jared Myracle

This piece — authored by Jared Myracle — was originally published by Education Week on September 2, 2019.

A better way to think about curricula

I can vividly remember my first few days as a new school administrator. I remember getting in a routine of greeting students as they exited buses and cars and entered the building. I remember the strange feeling when that first bell rang to start school, and I didn’t have a classroom full of students to teach. I remember peeking in classrooms and feeling the satisfaction of seeing students listening to their teachers and working diligently on the tasks assigned to them. What I don’t remember is ever considering that the work students were doing might be misaligned with their grade level.

Over the past few years, I have visited many schools in both my previous role as the director of instructional support at a professional development and curricular support organization and my current position as the chief academic officer of Jackson-Madison County public schools in Tennessee. When approaching these school visits with alignment to grade-level standards as the primary consideration, I have observed that the most common assumption school leaders make is one that doesn’t even occur to many as a topic that merits consideration. It’s an assumption so deeply ingrained in the day-to-day functions of school life that it can be hard to step back far enough to get a clear picture: that teachers have received enough training and resources to craft a full school year’s worth of aligned curriculum for their students.”The prevalence of misaligned materials is not the fault of teachers.”

What’s the problem with that assumption, you ask? Unfortunately, most teachers aren’t provided training in curriculum design during their teacher education programs. At least not to the level required to be able to design comprehensive curricula in multiple subjects that coherently articulate concepts, knowledge, and skills from one grade level to the next.

Recent research by TNTP indicates that students spend a shocking amount of time on assignments that do not address grade-level standards. I have seen similar evidence with my own eyes in classrooms. In one district I visited, I saw the same piece of literature being read in a 4th grade class and an 11th grade class.

The prevalence of misaligned materials is not the fault of teachers. They simply aren’t provided the type of training in curriculum design needed to prevent these missteps.

Why does a blind spot this big exist in the field of education? My guess is that it’s because we’ve never known any other way. However, the curricula-review organization EdReports.org provides plenty of reputable information on strong materials.

Most of us who attended traditional teacher education programs were required to prepare quite a few lessons to teach for the purposes of evaluation, but never an entire year’s worth that makes connections from the previous grade and leads to the next. If we were lucky, the schools in which we were placed had an aligned curriculum to guide our efforts. However, most of us were on our own. We stayed up night after night planning lesson after lesson to the best of our abilities.

If teachers are working independently in silos, they can hardly achieve the type of vertical coherence across grades needed to develop mathematical concepts, for example. The same is most likely true for the knowledge building required to bridge reading comprehension gaps.

Another unfortunate aspect of this fractured lesson planning is the lack of efficiency it places on already overworked educators. If a district with 100 3rd grade math teachers doesn’t provide an aligned curriculum, then 100 teachers are left to fend for themselves. There will be 100 3rd grade math teachers planning 100 different variations of 3rd grade math for students in the same schools and in the same district.

What happens if a student moves from one school to the next? What if teachers use different vocabulary to describe math concepts? Just imagine the opportunities for collaboration that could occur if those 100 teachers were working from the same playbook. When you consider this at scale, across districts and states, it is no longer a surprise that our national achievement rates are relatively stagnant.

Raising achievement should at least begin with making sure our students are being taught content that represents the expectations of their grade. Take a look in classrooms at your school. If teachers are being asked to pull everything together on their own, there is likely significant room for improvement when it comes to having greater alignment to your state’s academic standards.

Could teachers plan a demanding, aligned, and coherent curriculum? They certainly can with enough time, training, and resources. However, is it the best use of time for teachers to develop what they are going to teach, or should they spend more time tailoring an already planned and aligned curriculum to their individual students?

One option forces teachers to spend the lion’s share of their time on creating content; the other releases them to think about content in the context of their individual students. I believe that district leadership should provide teachers with strong resources and allow them to utilize their skills and abilities to focus on teaching students, not creating curriculum.

Curriculum adoption isn’t the answer to all of the challenges in education. However, it is a vital part of an equation that can’t be solved without it. One of my colleagues uses an interesting analogy about houses to explain the importance of curriculum in creating an aligned system: You wouldn’t construct a house on an insecure foundation, nor should we try to build our education system without stopping to make sure the footings of aligned content are in place.

Once teachers have a sound curriculum, they can move on to the more challenging components of building their capacity as educators. But it all starts with an honest assessment of the ground on which we are currently standing.

Jared can be reached via email at jamyracle@gmail.com or on Twitter.

Curriculum Notes

If you’d like to speak with me about the specific curricula used in my district, they are:

K–2 ELA:Core Knowledge Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

3–5 ELA:EL Education Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

6-12 ELA: LearnZillion Louisiana Guidebooks (Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes in grades 6–8)

K–12 Math: Eureka Math (all green on EdReports in grades K–5, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes in K–12)

Curriculum Is Misunderstood. Let’s Overcome That, in Service of Equity.

— Nakia Hardy

I have always been passionate about equity. And the longer I have been in K–12 education, the more I appreciate curriculum as a powerful equalizer, ensuring strong teaching and learning in every classroom.

This first became clear to me when I became a principal in 2005. Our school was highly impacted with a high-needs population. It was apparent to me that the experience and talents of individual teachers determined the experience of my students. So naturally, I wanted resources that could help my newer and my less strong teachers to catch up with the top teachers. Curriculum was the best arrow in my quiver, and I saw teachers elevate their instruction when they had the support of better materials.

When I became a district leader, the effect became even more pronounced. I served in a rural district (Rockingham County Schools), an urban district (Baltimore City), and a district with a mix of urban, suburban, and rural (Guilford County), and my insight was the same across systems: curriculum – paired with aligned professional development (a must!) – was the best lever I had for improving instruction.

I absolutely know the classroom teacher matters. I know the school leader matters. But the tools we give those teachers and leaders also truly matter. Anyone that wants to impact instruction at scale needs to know that curriculum MATTERS.

Curriculum is becoming even more important as the years pass, for it’s getting more difficult to rely on an experienced and trained teaching pool. In North Carolina, we have been struggling with dwindling applicant pools. Across the state, districts are hiring folks transitioning from other careers. For those non-traditional teachers, the resources we give them for year one in the classroom matter even more.

I’ve been fortunate to be in systems that supported curriculum-plus-PD as a catalyst and an equalizer. It has been my top priority in every district I have served. Honestly, it has been such valuable work that I struggle to understand why curriculum-centric ELA and math work isn’t the top priority in every district. It’s the hardest work to do, but also the most important.

Why doesn’t every district make this work top priority? I can only guess that misconceptions are obstacles, at least in some cases. So, let’s have straight talk about curriculum-related misconceptions.

Misconception 1: Curriculum is a script.

Some folks – including some strong teachers – will talk about curriculum being “a script” that they are expected to follow, with fear that they’ll lose their creative flair in the process.  

Central Office leaders may bear some responsibility for that perception. We sometimes create experiences for teachers that make them feel like we want them to be Fidelity Robots. We need to design fidelity checks that honor the professionalism of our teachers, and make clear what the instructional Must-Wins are, while also actively pointing out the places where teachers can bring their personalities into the lessons.

In the end, district leaders should give teachers materials that ensure standards- and research-aligned practices across classrooms and that provide structure and content as a springboard. Nationally, teachers spend 7 hours a week seeking and creating materials. This poor use of time is simply an injustice to teachers!

Then, teachers can bring personal flair to making the instructional experience soar for students. They bring personality, creativity, and imagination to lesson delivery. I really like this blog by teacher Morgan Stipe, addressing how teachers bring themselves to the use of strong curriculum.

Misconception 2: Curriculum is ‘just content.’

Funny enough, the second misconception is almost the opposite of the one above. It’s the misconception that curriculum is “just content” almost like it’s just a pile of texts and questions, with little thought to how those materials get delivered.

Good curriculum is designed for the instructional approaches we seek! If we long for more paired reading by students, it builds in more paired reading for students. When we want more student discourse and collaboration, we should seek a curriculum that incorporates materials, routines, and protocols that make it so, such as the Socratic circles that are prevalent in top ELA curricula.

With excellent curriculum, we don’t just prepare kids to be successful on assessments, but also in life: as communicators, synthesizers, critical consumers of content, and more. Demand curricula that are designed for these objectives. Ask to see where the materials tee these practices up for teachers.

Seek out curriculum that incorporates support for differentiation and for meeting the needs of all learners. Great curriculum empowers teachers with formative assessment resources that  help teachers understand where students are, leading teachers to target skill gaps. Materials can be tailored to each skill gap. That, too, goes well beyond ‘just content.’

Misconception 3: Most curriculum that schools can buy is decent.

You only need to spend 5 minutes on EdReports or the Louisiana Believes educator review websites to see that there’s still bad curriculum out there. A lot of it. And guess what? Those vendors are still selling those curricula to schools even after faring horribly in educator reviews.  

Because we don’t train teachers and building leaders on the  principles of instructional materials design, it’s too easy for principals and teacher leaders to get bamboozled by vendors. I have been in schools that selected curricula because of the “shiny things” that were built in and I’ve had to explain that the materials weren’t aligned to literacy and math research. In one district, we had schools that spent thousands of dollars on resources that were “all-red” on EdReports. The principals who bought the curricula had no clue that EdReports existed. They were well-intentioned, but not well-informed consumers.

District curriculum leaders need to own the responsibility to ensure every classroom has aligned materials. We need to find the weak curricula in our districts and have the authentic conversations with the educators who’d like to keep using them. And we need to resource the new materials and the right levels of PD. Which brings me to…

Misconception 4: You can succeed without a big PD investment.

Professional development to accompany curriculum implementation is a must, a must, a must!

And I don’t mean the ‘spray and pray’ PD that notoriously came with some curricula from less pedagocially-oriented providers. One day of PD that runs through the table of contents and shows teachers where to find the scope and sequence won’t cut it. You want PD that gets into the instructional weeds.

Again – good curriculum is designed for an instructional approach! Teachers need to know HOW the materials are designed to be used, and critically, Why they should make any necessary practice shifts. You want teachers to know that you are giving them resources that align their work with research, standards, and best practice. PD is how to really invest in the pedagogical knowledge of your teachers, and it’s the key to buy-in by your team.

Don’t forget to bring your building leaders into the PD, so that they are evaluating for the right instructional virtues.

Curriculum directors and Boards can get frustrated because they adopt materials and don’t see gains. If you adopted a quality curriculum and your kids aren’t moving, you probably suffer from an underinvestment in professional learning.

As a CAO, you need your superintendent and school board to know that 2-3% of your district budget should go to professional learning. The professional learning will often cost more than the resources, and it should. This can surprise some district teams.  It’s your job to explain how this investment in your staff returns dividends with your kids.

Misconception 5: Teachers can just create curriculum.

Friends, teacher prep does not guide teachers in how to be curriculum designers!

I was a North Carolina teaching fellow. As a part of that program, I spent four years doing bigger-picture work around instruction: unpacking standards, and reviewing scope and sequence implications. Conversely, most teacher prep programs spend little time on these matters. I spent 4 years learning how to do that work and I consider that work to be complex, challenging, and nuanced. How can we as teachers that didn’t have similar preparation go create materials for the year? How can we even gauge the quality of the things they find on Pinterest?

Also, let’s say you have a building of highly skilled teachers who had my training. Do we give teachers enough time to do curriculum development work? Can teachers really write scope and sequence docs during their prep? And do we want them to – or do we want them focusing on student work, on differentiation opportunities for struggling learners, on family engagement, and on bringing their most creative selves to instructional delivery?

Let’s Debunk Misconceptions Together

I am excited about a national PLN for curriculum because it will let us discuss these misconceptions in a powerful way across districts. I want to learn from leaders solving problems of practice, and I want to share what I am learning with my peers.

I also believe it is important to note that all content areas deserve high quality curriculum resources and professional learning.  This is important for all areas beyond English, Science, Social Studies and Mathematics; Arts, CTE, and World Language deserve strong curricula and professional learning as well.

Please join our PLN, and consider co-piloting this work! There is great strength in numbers.

Nakia Hardy is the Deputy Superintendent of Academic Services at Durham Public Schools in North Carolina.

Curriculum Notes

If you’d like to speak with me about the specific curricula used in my district, I should note that I recently joined Durham Public Schools, and we have been engaged in a collaborative process for adopting both Literacy and Math curricula in our schools.

We recently selected Study Sync (all-green on EdReports) for use in grades 6–12 beginning in the 2019-20 school year.

I can also speak to the experience I have with high quality curricula used in Guilford County Schools, my former district:

K–2 ELA: Core Knowledge Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

3–9 ELA: ARC Core (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

K–5 Math: Eureka Math (all green on EdReports in grades K–5, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes in K–12)6–8 Math: Open Up Resources (all green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes in K–12)

The Hard Part About Reading Instruction

— Jared Myracle

This piece was originally published by Education Week on May 28, 2019.

We actually know quite a bit about how to teach reading. So why don’t we do it right?

Spoiler alert: The hard part about reading instruction is not figuring out how to teach reading. We actually know quite a bit about that. There has been renewed interest in discussing the findings of the 2000 National Reading Panel report on the importance of phonics-based instruction in the early grades. The popularity of Emily Hanford’s radio documentary “Hard Words” and Susan Pimentel’s Education Week Commentary “Why Doesn’t Every Teacher Know the Research on Reading Instruction?”—and the conversations both stirred—underscore that how we teach reading is far from settled, even 20 years after the publication of the panel’s report. Earlier this year, I co-authored a Commentary in this publication on the challenges we district leaders face when it comes to the research-based findings on reading instruction. We all have unfinished learning, but the research is clear. Reading isn’t just about decoding words.

Another critical element here is the central role that background knowledge plays in reading comprehension, which was demonstrated as early as 1988 by Lauren Leslie and Donna R. Recht’s seminal baseball study: If we want students to actually understand the words they are decoding, they must build a critical mass of background knowledge in order to provide context and meaning to what they are reading.

The hard part about reading instruction isn’t even deciding how to take action. Putting the research about reading instruction into practice has been simplified in recent years by the abundance of research-aligned curricula. Finding a suitable curriculum is now as easy as scrolling through EdReports.org and reading summaries of the “all green” options that signify positive standards alignment, usability, and quality. In my school district in Tennessee, we provided teachers with a few curricula options from this list, gathered feedback during a pilot period, and made a decision about what to use.

The hard part is not about the funding required to make these changes, either. On average, my district spent approximately $50 per student to replace all of our English/language arts curricula in every grade, kindergarten through 12th.

For school and district leaders, the hard part about reading instruction is leading a highly effective implementation and sticking to the plan long enough for the work to have a meaningful impact. Putting a new curriculum in a teacher’s hand won’t get the job done. He or she needs support in order to teach it well. Teachers also need time to learn how to communicate the material effectively to students, and students need time to develop academically while learning it. But “time” is not a welcomed word in education.

The good news is that students respond quickly when teachers deliver systematic phonics instruction. Students in the early grades can more readily recognize letters and letter sounds, segmenting, and blending if they are receiving systematic phonics instruction. (David Liben’s “Why a Structured Phonics Program is Effective” is a great summary on this topic.)“Putting a new curriculum in a teacher’s hand won’t get the job done.”

In my district’s first year of implementation with our chosen curriculum (Core Knowledge’s Skills Strand), we doubled the number of kindergarten students who scored above average on a phonics screener. This progress was mirrored by significant gains in the oral reading fluency of our 1st graders. Great instruction with strong materials can close skills gaps for our youngest students in a relatively short amount of time.

While students are making strides with their decoding skills, they must also be building the background knowledge on a wide array of topics needed to understand what they read. Instead of learning to read and then reading to learn, students can and should do both at the same time.

Many of the best curriculum options are structured this way. Embedding important historical figures and events, science concepts, exposure to a diverse array of cultures, and well-known fables and folktales in a coherent sequence within individual grades and across grade levels allows students to gradually connect meaning to otherwise unfamiliar topics as they read. But the key word here is “gradually.”

Vocabulary is like a tiny snowball at the top of a hill. If you can guide it down the right path, it will gradually grow bigger on its own. It just takes a plan and patience.

As a leader, developing this kind of vision for reading instruction requires the constant switching between a long-term and a short-term view. Seeing gains in foundational reading skills happens early and often. On the other hand, navigating a multi-year process of building students’ background knowledge is a more demanding journey. But the sooner we can all agree that there isn’t a bright and shiny program that will save us tomorrow, the sooner we can do right by our students by focusing on what will have the biggest impact in the long run.

If you pursue this course of action, your 3rd grade reading scores will be great, right? Maybe. It is possible to see signs of progress. After a year, the state of Tennessee defined the growth of our district’s 3rd grade students as “above expectations.” But deeper reading proficiency improves at a slow pace.

The knowledge-building required to turn proficient decoders into proficient readers is a long haul, especially for students living in poverty. Comprehension is dependent on understanding the vocabulary involved in any given reading topic, but the topics on high-stakes reading assessments rarely align with the exact topics that students read about in the classroom.

So how do we fix it? We rely on the research about systematic phonics instruction, and we keep students reading books, articles, and literature embedded in a coherent path of topics designed to build their background knowledge. It can be frustrating that there is no way to fast track knowledge-building. You just have to trust the process, and take it day by day.

The education field is notorious for giving up when the results aren’t immediate. But we should stick it out on this one and listen to the research on reading instruction. The rewards will come.

Jared can be reached via email at jamyracle@gmail.com or on Twitter.

Curriculum Notes

If you’d like to speak with me about the specific curricula used in my district, they are:

K–2 ELA:Core Knowledge Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

3–5 ELA:EL Education Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)

6-12 ELA: LearnZillion Louisiana Guidebooks (Tier 1 on Louisiana Believesin grades 6–8)

K–12 Math: Eureka Math (all green on EdReportsin grades K–5, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believesin K–12)

#CurriculumMatters: Let’s Bring Tangibility and Team to Essential Work via Social Media

We believe we’re witnessing a movement that is beginning to elevate literacy and math instruction. And we’d like to talk about the role of social media, and specifically a hashtag – #CurriculumMatters – in that work. (At first blush, that might seem silly. Please stay with us!)

We use social media in a lot of rewarding ways:

  • Sharing stories of our work with high-quality curriculum – because these positive stories deserve telling.
  • Elevating the work of our teachers, many of whom are having incredible success with their students right now.
  • Connecting with others who are using high-quality curricula – the ones we use, and the ones with similar characteristics. We just saw a fun exchange about equity between Robin and a Baltimore teacher which shows how much learning is happening in this growing community – even when we are using different high-quality curricula.
  • Keeping up with the news and evolutions in the fast-changing curriculum space.
  • Professional learning generally: conversations about curriculum are often connected to conversations about research and evidence-based practice. We can’t get enough of that.

We know we are a part of a growing community of schools and districts across the country who are using curriculum with similar goals… and similar positive stories. If you’re working with “all-green” curriculum, we want to be connecting with you, following you, learning from you! We see a lot of power in a Professional Learning Network around this work, as we’ve shared.

Here’s the challenge: it isn’t always easy to spot each other in the Twitterverse, which is where a lot of K–12 conversation happens.

Why is it hard to spot people who’re sharing about work with curriculum? Because tweets about curriculum can often look like tweets that are simply about engaged students… or great student work… or beloved texts… or productive student discourse… unless the Tweeter is intentional about connecting the tweet to work with curriculum.

We’d like to change that, and it’s where the #CurriculumMatters hashtag comes in.

Exemplars help, so we’ll take a few recent examples from the social airwaves.

Beth Gonzalez, the Chief Academic Officer in Detroit Public Schools, has been leading the implementation of new ELA and math curriculum. Recently, she tweeted this inspiring set of photos:

Heart Eyes.

Now, if you saw only the above Tweet, you might not know that this rich text study and ‘electricity’ was connected to curriculum work. So, Beth’s next tweet gives us that context:

NOW we understand what we are seeing! Beth is helping us see quality curriculum in action, and it’s the EL Education curriculum. (That detail helps… how many times has someone talked about their work with a new resource – whether a curriculum, rubric, or app – and your first question is: “What are you using??”)

Another example was this teacher’s Tweet:

This could be a history lesson we’re glimpsing. Jared Myracle helps connect it to the district’s work with the Core Knowledge curriculum, which is built around history and science topics, by using the hashtag and noting the materials:

One more example illustrates the ambiguity that we’d like to overcome. The teacher in the tweet below is sharing her students’ work with the ARC Core curriculum. We can tell because she tagged American Reading Company, the curriculum author. But… we have a hunch that most educators don’t realize that American Reading Company developed a curriculum in recent years, and it earned all-green reviews on EdReports. If this tweet said “curriculum” in it, or included #CurriculumMatters (or better yet, added the #ARCCore hashtag), we’d know.

Our Twitter Pro Tips

  • If you’re talking about curriculum work in Twitter, help us know it… and find you! Use #CurriculumMatters, please. Our Tweeters are likely to find and retweet you.
  • Help us know which curriculum we’re seeing. We hear that some educators are especially interested in connecting folks using the same materials, so those provider tags/hashtags are great for finding your tribe.

Fast Facebook Facts

We don’t mean to leave out Facebook… in fact, some incredible things are happening in Facebook Groups for the individual curricula! This really deserves its own blog (we’ll try to write more soon), but let us just say… if you are using one of the “all-green” curricula, chances are you can find a community for that curriculum in Facebook, and sometimes at the individual grade level.

You can also join our facebook group. So far, that facebook group has been less quiet than the Twitter community, but we’re looking to change that. So, get in there and help us! #BeTheChange

Be Sweet And Tweet

We hope to connect with many more of you in Twitter as we start raising our voices about how and why #CurriculumMatters.

Research into Practice: Building Background Knowledge to Support Reading Comprehension

This year, a national conversation about how we teach reading has led to numerous discussions about important research. Jared, Robin, and Brian wrote about it in an Education Week editorial, We Have a National Reading Crisis.

One of its “essential insights” is the role of content knowledge in reading success:

“Students’ background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension. Curricula should help students build content knowledge in history and science, in order to empower reading success.”

This topic deserves a lot more attention. Lately, the sharing in the Twitterverse suggests that it’s on everyone’s mind! When you read across the tweets, a powerful picture emerges.

First, The Why

Let’s start with the research. The excitement about students’ content knowledge only makes sense when you know why it matters. If this research is new to you:

Start by watching this 4-minute video that explains the famous Baseball Study. It’s the perfect primer – proven to generate ‘aha’ moments.

This blog goes a layer deeper, and our Resources page contains additional professional learning materials.

Curriculum = The How

When you get your head around this research, you pretty quickly realize two things:

  1. You need curriculum that builds content knowledge for students, especially students from less privileged backgrounds, whose early years may not have included travel and museum visits to foster exposure to academic subjects.
  2. It would be extremely challenging to build a knowledge-rich curriculum yourself. And it’d be unwise assume that teachers could easily do it themselves.

Fortunately, there are now multiple “knowledge-rich” English Language Arts curricula, which have been designed to build content knowledge during Tier 1 instruction. All of the curricula that earn “all-green” reviews on EdReports meet this criteria, and across our ‘squad,’ we have used four of them in our classrooms.

The Proof is in the Practice

The stories that we’ve been sharing provide an excellent window into HOW curriculum aligns practice with the research… and also how students respond.

Robin has been talking about her students’ responses to knowledge-rich curricula in Sullivan County, where they use the Core Knowledge (aka CKLA) curriculum:

Students are engaging with rich topics from kindergarten:

Jared has been talking about work with Core Knowledge in Jackson-Madison, too:

Starla Scott, a 3rd grade teacher in Jackson-Madison, has been writing about her work with EL Education’s Language Arts curriculum:

Her students recently finished a unit about frogs. Student writing shone there, too:

The science topics are intentionally and thoughtfully translated into student writing projects:

Kids are fascinated by these topics:

By design, they work collaboratively, so they’re building their social skills in the process:

The curriculum incorporates routines and protocols that get students talking about their learning:

There is excitement about the student work across Jackson-Madison school district:

We also see these stories coming out of districts using the ARC Core curriculum:

Engagement and joy are evident!

We see these stories coming out of districts using the Wit & Wisdom curriculum:

Engagement is a theme:

And these are far from the only stories! In fact, a recent School Tour visited classrooms using knowledge-rich curricula, and these firsthandclassroom accounts provide additional glimpses into this work.

It’s the student work, student voices, student outcomes, and visible student engagement that leave us convinced that we are doing the right work. Hopefully this window into our classrooms helps explain our passion – and lends tangibility to the work of bringing critical research into practice.

Photo credit: Starla Scott’s adorable Frog Festival Publishing Party photo graces the header of this blog. That picture is Joy of Knowledge Personified. Thank you to Starla for sharing her work with us each week!

Literacy Is the Innovation Opportunity of 2019

— Brian Kingsley

The most exciting and actionable innovation opportunity before us is the potential to improve reading instruction at scale. That’s the conversation we need to be having in every district office.

Right now, you may be hearing more about reading concerns. And honestly, those issues are very real. I was proud to co-author a recent Education Week editorial, We Have a National Reading Crisis, which talks about the other side of the coin: numerous pervasive issues with reading instruction.

I have seen consistent misunderstandings about reading in three districts where I have served as a district leader. I hope you’ll take time to read the editorial, as I can’t summarize the concerns any better than Jared Myracle, Robin McClellan, and I captured them for EdWeek!

A friend saw the “national reading crisis” headline and said, “That makes it sound like this is a new issue, when it isn’t.” It’s a fair point. Much of the research we’re discussing was established by the National Reading Panel twenty years ago, or by previous research. Also, as a country, we have seen little growth in reading outcomes in 20 years. That IS a crisis– and it should compel our attention.

Jared, Robin, and I don’t just name issues… we talk about the solutions that are working in our districts. That’s why I feel inspired by this moment: Every sizable problem is an equally sizable opportunity.  

Vastly improved reading outcomes are actually within reach, and that motivates me.

Here’s my evidence:

The Curriculum Renaissance:

Districts finally have many choices for high-quality curriculum that’s aligned to research, aligned to standards, and built for the pedagogy we want.

I’ve had the pleasure to serve two of the largest school systems in North Carolina. Currently I’m working on my second ELA curriculum adoption in three years, and I am awed at how rapidly the options have improved, even in that short period.

The strongest new curricula improve on the previous generation in ways that might surprise you:

  • Most are designed to promote discourse and even social-emotional learning in Tier 1 English Language Arts.
  • Some are natural springboards for Project Based Learning.
  • Many are built around beloved trade books and culturally diverse texts.
  • Some are Open Educational Resources (OER) – which means they are free to use, and also that educators are given clear permission to edit/enhance the materials.
  • Many have been co-developed in classrooms.
  • I could say a great deal about the strong support for reading and writing instruction – and that’s probably its own blog. What stands out most is a frequent emphasis on helping students become good communicators, in writing and speech. Inspirational student writing and speaking experiences can be norms in our classrooms.

I could go on. I’d suggest checking out the materials that are “all-green” in EdReports reviews, as they each have their own virtues.

Our standards call for instructional shifts, and curriculum makes them tangible and achievable. It’s the power tool we need.

The Professional Learning Angle:

The stronger curricula support more rigorous teaching and learning, which is a key part of their appeal. They are research-aligned, which makes curriculum implementation a natural, powerful opportunity for job-embedded learning on reading research. In addition, many of the curricula are designed to be “educative,” and contain professional learning resources within the teacher materials, sometimes in the lesson plans.

For all of these reasons, I have seen curriculum implementation offer the most effective job-embedded professional learning.

While this yields better teaching, it’s not easy teaching. And practice shifts can be daunting for any of us. Fortunately, this generation of providers “gets it,” and each offers genuinely excellent support for implementation. That’s the good news. The straight talk is: you must budget and plan for that substantive PD as part of your implementation plan. I promise that it pays real dividends.

If you bring in truly excellent materials, and then support your teachers in understanding the Why and the How of those materials, you will be shocked at the instructional gain.

The No Shame Zone:

As we talk of “national reading crisis,” and generations of educators who don’t know key research, this is my favorite theme:

“Educators urgently need a national movement for professional learning about reading. We should declare a No Shame Zone for this work—to make it safe for all educators to say, “I have unfinished learning around literacy.”

I’m all in on the No Shame Zone. And I hope that the reality of a national reading crisis gives us safe space to have authentic, humble conversations and grow together.

May that spirit of openness and continuous improvement set a course for us to bring the long-established reading research into practice.

Right now, I know I am not the only leader prioritizing ELA improvement, and I sense a shift in the national conversation about innovation in K–12 education. Nowhere is this better reflected than in the Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools. Four years ago, ed tech felt like its clear focus. Then last year, during a workshop, I geeked out about curriculum with Dr. Clayton Wilcox – who would become my new boss in September (who would have thought?) – and a group of educators; together we created this fishbone diagram:

Our Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools fishbone diagram. Notice that we used the largest font to write “PD.”

Still, literacy and math instruction felt like secondary themes at that convening.

But today, after revising its areas of focus, the League of Innovative Schools have Math and ELA in column 1:

And that feels very right.

Can we accelerate this cultural shift? Improving reading outcomes, and empowering teachers to understand and implement reading research, should be talked about as innovation of the highest order. Making impactful, inspiring, systemic changes to instruction IS innovation. Let’s use that language.

In addition, the curriculum renaissance and improved PD represent innovation by many providers. Let’s applaud it.  

With only a third of our students showing reading proficiency, is there any better focus for our innovative energies? Developing literacy skills is about so much more than reading comprehension… it’s a means to help students make meaning of the world and of themselves through the art of expression, reading, and learning. As I see it, the national reading crisis  presents us with both an urgent priority and a genuine opportunity to better serve children.

Brian Kingsley is the Chief Academic Officer at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which serves 136,000 students in Mecklenburg County, NC.

Curriculum Notes

If you’d like to speak with me about the specific curricula used in my district, I should note that I joined Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in September, and we are currently evaluating the curricula used in our schools.

That initiative is a team effort. It takes a village to raise reading outcomes – something I plan to write more about in my next blog. (If I’m being honest, I have struggled a bit with this aspect of advocacy work. I don’t mind putting myself out there, and raising my voice in support of better reading instruction, alongside my remarkable peers in other districts. But I can’t emphasize enough that systemic change is about the people across that system, and the way they hundreds of people come together to pull for kids together. Look for more on this soon.)

I am so proud of our team for its work in this process, as I have been sharing in social media:

I can speak to the experience I had with high quality-curricula used in my former district, Wake County Public School System. Previously, I shared the story of Wake County’s curriculum selection and implementation process in this Education Week piece: How Systems Can Support High-Quality Curricula.

Wake County’s team selected the following high-quality curricula:

K–6 ELA: EL Education Language Arts (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes), provided by Open Up Resources

6–8 Math: Open Up Resources 6–8 Math (all-green on EdReports, Tier 1 on Louisiana Believes)