Maya McFadden Photo
NHPS Supervisor of Literacy Lynn Brantley presents plan at City Hall hearing.
Committee alders welcomed the New Haven Public Schools’ (NHPS) new math and literacy plan — which officials claimed may shift towards a more phonics-based “structured” reading program — while questions arose about whether the draft proposal is complete enough to effect significant needed change.
School district leaders presented that drafted “enhanced” math and reading plan to the Board of Alders Education Committee Wednesday evening to get feedback and suggestions for improvements. The meeting took place in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall.
The new reading plan, which purportedly leans more towards a so-called “structured” literacy approach through increased phonics instruction, proposes amped-up professional development and training for all school staff, a shift to a single district-wide reading program, and regularly scheduled educator collaboration time.
In particular, NHPS Supervisor of Literacy Lynn Brantley told the alders that the enhanced reading plan will see the district focus classroom instruction and retraining on oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, and comprehension this year through the reading program Wilson Fundations. Brantley added that special education teachers and select literacy and multilingual coaches and staffers will be trained in the structured literacy teaching approach.
Click here to read more about the drafted plan and the district’s recent presentation to the Board of Education.
The district’s shift is due in part to NHPS’ preliminary reading and math assessment data from last school year that showed that 84 percent of third-graders were reading below grade level.
The Board of Education, alders, clergy, and other community members dubbed the scores a “crisis,” and demanded new plans to address the “emergency.” At the center of that debate has been a larger controversy about how NHPS teaches students to read. Claiming that the old way of teaching doesn’t need to be overhauled, officials, including the superintendent and several board members, have previously pushed back against a new state requirement that all schools move from“balanced” to more phonics-based“structured” literacy in the face of new brain research on how kids learn to read.
The district is also revising its plans as a part of the state’s “Right To Read” legislation that passed in June 2021, which systematized a statewide response to the national reading crisis and now requires Connecticut school districts to base their reading curriculum on scientifically-based research known as the Science of Reading.
The state’s Center for Literacy Research and Reading Success has yet to release its list of approved evidence-based reading curriculum models and programs that school districts will be required to implement for grades PreK‑3 by July 2023.
Brantley told the alders that the state should be releasing that program list by Friday.
She also said that the district will pilot at least three of the state’s recommended programs throughout various schools to gather data and make an informed decision about which to adopt by the spring. Currently, Brantley is working on creating the rubric for the pilot program to track the programs’ impacts.
NHPS Superintendent Iline Tracey added on Wednesday night that New Haven will not seek a waiver for approval to implement a program not on the state’s list.
Education Committee Chair and Downtown/East Rock Alder Sabin expressed concerns about the timeframe of the pilot and said he is hopeful that the district will have enough time to do thorough pilot research of the programs to pick the best fit for the district.
Wednesday's aldermanic committee meeting.
Tracey, Brantley, and Assistant Superintendent for Instructional Leadership Keisha Redd-Hannans took the lead Wednesday on presenting the enhanced reading and math plan to the Education Committee at City Hall.
The committee is made up of Alders Sabin, Honda Smith, Devin Avshalom-Smith, Sarah Miller, and Sal Punzo.
The school leaders told the committee alders about their process of creating the plan, which involved visiting classrooms and listening to educators about the current curriculum’s gaps.
In addition to the alders and the Board of Education, the district has engaged 400 current educators about the draft plan and is working on organizing community meetings to also hear suggestions for improvement from the public.
For the math plan, Redd-Hannans highlighted new community efforts that will be introduced to help students’ guardians engage in academics at home. In partnership with the district’s Office of Youth, Family & Community, the math plan includes hosting workshops for families to not only get academic resources but also have conversations with the district’s experts about how to bring math discourse into students everyday lives outside of school.
"A Lot Of Training Needed"
In response to the presentation and drafted plan alders expressed optimism for the district’s willingness to gather feedback from the community.
Committee Chair Sabin and Fair Haven Alder Miller said they look forward to seeing the plan further develop as the district gets feedback from the community. They each raised concerns about the amount of time that will be dedicated to professional development and training with the Fundations program.
“It seems like the level of training needed is vastly more than what’s in the plan,” Miller said.
The district has been using Fundations since 2016. Miller said she believes the program is a good choice. She added that she believes the district’s training on the program with teachers in the past “wasn’t as effective as it could’ve been” and fears that may occur again.
During the Wednesday presentation, Tracey continued to assert that the district won’t just use one reading approach because “one size does not fit all.”
Barnard School literacy specialist Sarah Levine argued that a structured literacy approach takes into account the way youth learn to read through brain research and therefore does in fact help teach all students to read.
Alder Avshalom-Smith asked school officials if the drafted plan has taken into account the nationwide staff shortage among teachers.
Tracey said the district plan was made optimistically. The increased professional development will offer trainings to refresh all staff and offer “para pointer” sessions. She added that training is difficult because of the continuing staff shortage that will cause the district to invest in training or re-training for educators who may leave the district soon after.
Increased Teacher "Collaboration Time" Essential
Punzo: Teachers need more collaboration time.
Retired NHPS educator of 49 years Sal Punzo said “the real support is in the building.” He said training will not happen just from professional development, but also from teachers teaching each other during grade-level meetings and collaboration time.
“I used to call it sacred time,” Punzo said. “The collaboration time was off limits. Teachers had to meet. I don’t care if I had to teach a class. My AP (assistant principal) has to teach a class.”
More regular offerings of collaboration time between educators is part of the district’s enhanced plan.
After the meeting, Alders Sabin and Miller said that they recently spoke with Hartford Public Schools officials, who shared with them their reading plan shift that is focused on structured literacy. “When we talked with folks from Hartford about the training they’re doing with LETRS, it seemed like a much larger, broader effort around structured literacy, and just professional development generally related to literacy,” Sabin said. “They were investing a lot of time and money in it. And it seems like so far we have not chosen to make that same investment.”
During the presentation Miller asked school leaders: “I’m wondering if you can you point to the things in the plan that are really based on evidence or theory of change that you think is going to really move us forward?”
Redd-Hannans said the plan’s increased investment in professional development trainings is an evidence-based decision for “ensuring that we are supporting our teachers with proven teaching and learning in the classroom.”
Brantley added that the plan’s investment in progress monitoring is also a key component, as it will help the district to track the impact of the shifting instruction.
“The movement will happen when teachers are able to sit and look at student work and talk about what we don’t know,” Brantley said. “Progress monitoring in these plans will lift students if we match it with training and we are on it all the time.”
Sabin asked officials how they decided on Fundations as the sole elementary reading program for the district.
Brantley said Fundations was selected because in 2016 the district recognized it had a hole in its reading curriculum that lacked the teaching of foundational skills in the classroom. Fundations was selected from a series of options to fill that gap. Brantley said with more training in the program for educators she believes that gap can finally be closed.
“What is really helpful is having a plan that we can really believe in. That we know is going to get our kids ready to go. I see some of it here. I think there’s a ways to go to make it stronger,” Miller said.
Thank you to my old 3rd grade teacher Mrs Orr and my 4th grade teacher Mrs Maze of Beecher Elementary school in New Haven who taught English with phonics instruction so that their students would learn how to read and write.
Almost every morning Mrs Orr would take a few minutes to review the alphabet, and use a pointer to draw attention to each letter of the alphabet on a wallpaper border around the top of her classroom walls, with each letter represented in upper case and lower case, and say the letter, and say each of the sounds that each letter could make in the English language, so when we saw a letter, we would know all the sounds it could make.
And Mrs Maze would tell us to sound out a word when we read and we were unfamiliar with a word, and she would ask us to try out loud each of the sounds a letter made to figure out which sound made sense for that word.
Phonics instructions as simple as that, (instead of asking students to guess what the words are and the sentences is by looking at the illustrations on a page,) is invaluable to students learning to read, and very useful for English as a second language learners, and for students with reading disabilities. It’s not rocket science to teach teachers how to incorporate phonics into their classrooms every day, instead of asking students to guess instead of read.