Maya McFadden Photo
Teacher/parent Sarah Levine pitches a shift in reading strategy.
The job description has grown. The pay and support haven’t.
Meanwhile, not enough kids are learning to read — in part because of the method they’re being taught.
So New Haven Public School (NHPS) teachers informed city alders at a once-a-year chance to check in and have their voices heard.
In the process, they offered lawmakers some possible solutions along with insight into why many fellow teachers are leaving their field or moving to higher-paid suburban jobs.
The check-in took place at a Board of Alders Education Committee community forum held at Hillhouse High School this past Thursday evening to discuss how the district can “strengthen our schools.”
Asking questions, listening in, then participating in break-out sessions with educators and parents were Alders Sarah Miller, Sal Punzo, Eli Sabin, Kampton Singh, and Honda Smith.
Superintendent Iline Tracey and her executive team presented on the district’s updated district strategies for academics, equity, social emotional learning, restorative practices, youth and family engagement, recruitment and retention, educator development, and facility studies.
Iline Tracey, Ivelise Velazquez, Viviana Conner, Keisha Hannans, and Paul Whyte.
Click here, here, and here to read more about some of these district’s plans mentioned during the presentation. View the Thursday presentation here.
Tracey’s team highlighted the district’s improvements this past year: bringing care coordinators into schools, conducting multiple measures for student assessments, offering alternative routes for teacher certification, increasing student access to technology, updating maintenance of HVAC systems, and providing all schools with individual ARP ESSR budgets (pandemic relief money).
Tracey said the district’s main challenges are staff shortages, increased student disrespect, aging HVAC systems, extended learning gaps due to the pandemic, and underpaid educators.
After the district presentation Alder Smith asked where the increased student disrespect is stemming from. The team responded that students have had a lack of academic and social structure for the past two years and have lost coping and interpersonal skills.
Then participants broke into small groups to discuss their experiences in schools and ideas for improvements.
At one table, four educators shared their experiences with Alders Smith and Punzo, who is a retired former NHPS principal and teacher who worked in the district for 49 years.
When asked what makes their schools great, Barnard literacy specialist Sarah Levine, Bishop Woods science teacher Tim Gersck, Common Ground Schoolyards Program Manager Robyn Stewart, and Wexler Grant Grade 5 English teacher Ashley Stockton talked about their colleagues and students.
Punzo, at left, talks with educators.
“I like going to work everyday and didn’t always feel that way,” Levine said.
“Why do you think teachers leave the district?” Punzo asked the group.
“There are some students and some classes that are just heavy with these students who come in ready to battle everything,” Gersck, who has taught for eight years, said while agreeing that student disrespect has increased.
“Money and dealing with the behaviors,” Levine said.
“If there was anything to ever push me out other than the money, it’s that I have to spend so much of the time doing things that I’m not trained to do,” Gersck said while discussing the difficultly of teaching social-emotional learning (SEL) for 35 minutes a day separate from his subject area of science.
Stockton, who has been teaching for 20 years, said she thinks teachers are leaving because “the job description has changed exponentially and the compensation has not.”
When Stockton started teaching, she said, she was not responsible for collecting and entering every student’s data biweekly then analyzing it to then compose it into a report. Now she is.
“I think that that’s an important practice but it is a separate job,” she said. “So I’m not given a data scientist or an administrative assistant or another person to do that.”
“I’ve been told to absorb it and be paid the same,” Stockton said.
Additionally, she said teachers are not being compensated for the extra preparation and planning for SEL lessons and are being expected to keep up with a “24-hour turnaround expectation” for emails and other forms of communications.
“If I’m reading all my emails all day, I’m not teaching,” she said.
Ashley Stockton testifies Thursday.
When Stockton began teaching two decades ago, she was in a New York district that required her to do “60 percent of what my current job is” with the same pay, she said.
The teachers said they get one 45-minute period a day for preparation, which usually ends up being only 25 minutes, because included in that time is bringing the students to and from the classroom.
Levine added that the district requires educators to “create curriculum as they go.”
“Not only are you preparing for all your meetings. Not only are you trying to do all of this with 25 kids in your classroom all at different levels. You’re on the computer trying to figure out what the heck to teach them, because you don’t have all the material that you need and all of the resources,” Levine said.
She added that the common core curriculum can limit creativity in the classroom at times.
The group agreed that the additional responsibilities limit their teaching time and feel like an “information and media overload”.
“A lot of it we wouldn’t mind doing. But we need to be given time to do it, and resources,” Levine said.
Stockton said she would benefit greatly from an administrative assistant. “I have as much administrative work as I do teaching,” she said.
While the district is not able to use its Covid relief funds to hire full-time staff, it can use the funding for part-time staff.
Levine noted that the district is in a reading crisis. (Click here to read more about that.)
“Covid may have exacerbated these low scores, but they existed long before Covid,” she said.
Levine advocated for the district to deemphasize its current balanced literacy model in favor of the structured literacy model.
A balanced literacy model teaches students to learn to read by reading and engaging in reading activities without direct instruction of phonics and comprehension, Levine said.
“I learned that the balanced literacy lessons I was teaching actually teach my students the strategies of poor readers, like looking at the pictures and the first letter of the word and guessing the word instead of looking at all the letters and sounding out the word,” she said.
By contrast, she said, structured literacy aims to teach students through direct instruction of how to read through systematic and sequential instruction.
“The brain science in how people learn to read is not congruent with the balanced literacy approach,” she argued.
Levine also shared that as a parent of a public-schooler, she had to put up a legal fight to get her second-grade daughter, who has dyslexia, instruction that worked for her. Since learning with a structured literacy model, her daughter has thrived this year, she said.
Stockton said she also fought to get her son with dyslexia to be switched to a new model and was denied. “We have been paying out of pocket for seven years for him to have structured literacy from a reading specialist,” she said.
Stockton and Levine both agreed they previously advocated for the balanced literacy model until doing personal research that helped them to determine that the model is outdated and lacks current research.
Lynn Brantley.
Supervisor of Literacy Lynn Brantley addressed the district’s different reading approaches during testimony before the alders.
The district’s literacy framework has core practices that include: interactive read-aloud and literature discussion, independent reading, shared and performance reading, writing about reading, conventions of grammar and usage, phonics, spelling and word study, guided/small group, oral and visual communication, and technological communication.
In 2019 the district trained 25 interventionists in structured literacy, Brantley said, and it has since recognized the need for “a systematic and sequential approach to phonics.”
Brantley said the structured literacy model is being added to the district’s “arsenal of teaching” but not for all grades or all students.
Other community speakers suggested the district create a policy that allows for schools to make spending decisions, implement a bicycle rider training program in schools, increase special education staffing, boost science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teaching, increase teacher pay, offer incentives to substitutes to become certified teachers, increase paraprofessional pay, allocate more PILOT (state payments-in-lieu-of-taxes) money to education, train staff in restorative justice practices, decrease classes sizes for other grade levels beyond elementary classes, and seek out student voices more often.
Teachers union President Leslie Blatteau said the district should be more creative with its Covid-relief funding to offer retention bonuses and tuition reimbursements for those seeking teacher certification.
Every time (and over the course of many years) I read an article concerning NHPS teaching instruction, curriculum, educational philosophy, and instructional materials, I get the sense there is eventually and inevitably something of a general (mis)understanding (amongst teachers, administration, and parents) that the historical lack of overall student achievement is because "Somehow we've been teaching and doing it all wrong." I know that Covid has thrown the proverbial wrench into the works, but c'mon now, how long has NHPS been in the business of Public Education? One would think that after so many, many years they would have figured it out by now.