Retiring Literacy Director Charts Reading Progress

As Lynn Brantley bid farewell to the district she’s served for the past three decades, the soon-to-retire New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) literacy director offered a glass-half-full perspective on students’ small but mighty reading strides since last fall. 

Brantley and NHPS Assistant Supt. Keisha Redd-Hannans presented that end-of-year data for public school elementary students at the latest bimonthly full Board of Education meeting on June 12. The hybrid meeting took place in person at the Barack Obama School on Farnham Drive and online via Zoom.

The presentation followed district data from last year that showed that 84 percent of third-graders were reading below grade level.

Rather than present on the district’s proficiency numbers at this most recent school board meeting, Brantley and Redd-Hannans provided the board with data on student growth from fall to spring. They described that growth in the context of several acronym-laden ways of measuring student reading abilities. 

One is the DIBELS assessments known as Phonemic Segmentation Fluency (PSF), which ​“assesses a student’s ability to segment three and four phoneme words into their individual sounds fluently” in a minute. Another is Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) which ​“assesses advanced phonics and word attack skills, accurate and fluent reading of connected text by collecting a student’s number of words read correctly in a minute on a grade level passage.”

The DIBELS growth data showed that the district’s kindergartners and first graders exceeded the ten percent growth target from fall to spring, Brantly said

In the fall, 17 percent of kindergarteners were able to complete the PSF in a minute whereas in the spring that number grew to 40 percent of kindergartens completing the assessment in a minute.

Second and third grade data also showed improvements, through not as significant. Brantley said this is partly due to many second and third graders having reading skills sets at least a grade level behind.

“We’re looking at that. We know,” she said.

This is why NHPS adopted the HMH program for K‑5 rather than just the required K‑3 shift mandated by the state.

Multilingual and students with disabilities assessment data followed a similar trend, with second and third graders seeing less growth from their fall and spring assessments.

In the year to year comparison data K‑3 students showed proficiency growth over the last three school years. Kindergarten grew from 33 percent in 2020 – 21 to 40 percent this spring . First grade grew from 33 percent to 39 percent over the past three years. Second grade grew from 34 percent to 36 percent and third grade from 33 percent to 35 percent for the end of year Spring DIBLES assessment.

Brantley attributed the more slight increases or dips to last year’s focus on not only academics but a also a heightened focus on safety and social emotional learning (SEL) after the Covid pandemic.

For grades third through eighth, Brantley presented proficiency data for the Reading Inventory assessment which focuses on tracking student readability and text complexity skills. From fall to spring all grade levels but fourth have seen increases in student proficiency.

Brantley added that over the past eight years of working with the literacy department’s data, she’s observed that ​“the longer students stay with us the better they will get in terms of proficiency.”

The data shows that 21 percent of third graders, 18 percent of fourth graders, 36 percent of fifth and sixth graders, 38 percent of seventh graders and 45 percent of eighth graders reached proficiency in their grade level for the reading inventory assessment.

As a result of what district leaders dubbed a ​“reading crisis” after the release of last year’s data, NHPS has followed state guidance to shift its K‑3 literacy curriculum to a state-approved reading program that is based on ​“the science of reading,” including a phonics-based approach that prioritizes sounding out words instead of guessing at their meaning based on context.

This May the city’s school district picked Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s (HMH) Into Reading and ¡Arriba la Lectura! programs to anchor a new approach to teaching literacy for kindergarten through fifth grade students.

The selection came at the end of a three-month, 12-school​“science of reading”-based pilot designed to improve literacy levels among New Haven’s youngest public school students. The final decision was based on student work with the program and teacher feedback. The pilot marked a turn toward a new approach to teaching reading in New Haven.

Click here to view Monday’s literacy presentation in full.

The district has focused on increasing its professional learning for staff in the science of reading and has scheduled a Language Essentials for Teaching of Reading and Spelling, or ​“LETRS,” training to support the newly adopted reading program. 

“There’s power in the professional development that we chose,” Brantley said. 

It’s also working on a goal of building school level literacy teams at six school sites including Bishop Woods School, Barack Obama Magnet School, Conte West, Benjamin Jepson, John Martinez, and Worthington Hooker. 

Brantley said that professional development opportunities staff have included focuses in oral language, phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, and phonics. The next trainings will be offered in vocabulary, Brantley said.

The June 12 presentation also included year-to-year companion data by schools for the PSF assessments. 

Brantley highlighted several schools success in continuous growth each year. 

“We know that’s not the same students, we are looking at our work in training skills, in training teachers, in training adult actions. That that movement should be happening because you will get better at your craft and you will move children no matter who’s in front of you,” Brantley said. 

Brantley also reported on growth goals which she argued is equally important data for the district to track and analyze. 

“We need to move children to their growth goal to ensure the trajectory, and if you continue to do that inevitably it will translate to being able to deal with other testing,” Brantley said. 

Redd-Hannans added that each student’s growth goal is different due to their skill levels. The growth goals data tracks how many students met their end-of-year goals set for them in the fall. 

“It’s critically important because that’s how you individualize goals,” Redd-Hannans said. ​“We can talk about proficiency and above but proficiency and above is stagnant for students no matter what level I come in on or enter a teacher’s classroom, the proficiency and above numbers are stagnant but the growth goal adapts to the children.” 

Growth goals are also a measure the district uses for evaluating its educators and supervisors, Redd-Hannans said. 

The growth goal data showed that more than half of the district’s firth through eighth graders met their reading growth goals. 

In the school by school data, some schools saw nearly 75 percent of its third through eighth graders meet or exceed their growth goals for the year. 

The final report in the presentation included a status report for the department’s year-end goals. The report showed that all but two goals were completed and the remaining are still in progress through the summer. 

“This is a multi-year process. It is not going to happen over night,” Redd-Hannans said. 

She added that goals like offering professional development in the science of reading to staff have been completed but are not one-shot efforts and will continue to be offered in the future. 

Redd-Hannans reported that the district has already started the transition process to its new HMH reading program for K‑5. She described HMH as more rigorous and relevant to students and will hopefully help to ​“close that equity gap by the level of rigor being equalized across all of our classrooms.” 

Before Brantley retires she has worked with her department to create a three year action plan to implement the comprehensive reading program with ongoing professional development, convening curriculum writing teams for K‑5 and 9 – 12 this summer, and establishing district and school based literacy leadership teams. 

“This is critically important because as we continue our focus on literacy our literacy leadership teams in our schools will conduct observations [in] real time of what is occurring in the actual classroom and then we’ll sit as team and debrief and provide feedback to teachers but also think about how can we improve in instruction and what are our PD [professional development] needs as well,” Redd-Hannans said. 

The board members and superintendent thanked Brantley for her decades of dedication to the district. Her work was described by Board secretary Ed Joyner as ​“masterful” and having ​“relentless commitment” to the district’s students. 

Board member Darnell Goldson also responded to the presentation saying that reports should continue to include proficiency data to continue to address the district’s reading crisis with urgency as well as growth goal data. 

Redd-Hannans noted that many of the district’s students can complete the assessments but not in the allocated time frame for example in one minute for the elementary DIBELS assessment. 

“As we talk about the outcomes on assessments we have to keep in mind those nuances that we know exist for our students,” she said. 

The districts three-year goal remains that all its third graders will be reading on grade level by then. 

To conclude the Board report and her 37th year in NHPS, Brantley shared a final perspective about literacy and the current state of education. 

“We have written the narrative of our children. We continue to write it in ways when we put out numbers and they are not our children. So what I didn’t tell you in the beginning is in first grade, second grade, and third grade 98 percent of the children grew on DIBELS, they just didn’t hit that mark,” she said.