New Haven Weighs Whether To Shift Reading Strategy

According to one side, the issue is settled: ​“Balanced literacy” has failed, and cities like New Haven must change how they teach reading or continue to worsen the achievement gap and hold back another generation.

According to another side, the jury’s still out.

This debate over how to teach kids to read is playing out across the country.

It’s playing out in New Haven, too. It will be on display Wednesday evening at a public hearing at City Hall over how best to teach reading — and tackle what has become a reading crisis in town.

The 6 p.m. hearing, hosted by the Board of Alders Education Committee, is billed as ​“a workshop with New Haven public schools and literary experts on best practices for teaching reading and addressing disparities in literacy outcomes.”

The hearing comes on the heels of a recent report that just 43 percent of New Haven’s kindergarteners, 32 percent of first-graders, 38 percent of second-graders, and 37 percent of third-graders are reading at grade level. 

It also comes at a time when a sea change has occurred in national discussions of how best to teach reading. The debate pits ​“balanced literacy” — teaching reading through a focus on stories, theme, figuring out words multiple ways from associating them with photos to sounding them out — against ​“structured literacy,” which returns more of the focus to phonics (sounding out letters and words) and then grammar and syntax.

New Haven’s schools, like tens of thousands of other districts across the country, embraced the former approach. It’s based on the idea that different kids learn reading in very different ways.

A new generation of advocates and researchers has concluded that ​“balanced literacy” has been a failure — and that the overwhelming preponderance of brain science studies proves it. The founder of the ​“balanced curriculum” used by over 67,000 elementary schools — Lucy Calkins — is among those who have changed their minds. (Click here to read a Sunday New York Times story about Calkins’ shift and the brain research.)

Connecticut has officially changed its mind, too, passing a measure requiring school districts to switch to structured literacy curricula by July 1, 2023. The state reports a 35.9 percentage-point gap in reading proficiency between white fourth-graders and Black and brown fourth-graders.

New Haven’s school district is not convinced. Schools spokesperson Justin Harmon told the Independent Tuesday that the school district hasn’t decided yet whether to seek a waiver from the new state rule. The district is beginning a six to ten-month ​“inquiry about what comes next in reading” kicking off with a June 8 and 9 online symposium with ​“reading professionals.”

“Whether we seek a waiver has not been determined,” Harmon stated. ​“We will vet programs that will be on the official state list, so it’s just as likely that we will not seek a waiver. The process will determine that.”

Two of the schoolteachers who have been vocal in advocating a switchover to structural literacy are married New Haven public-school teachers Sarah Levine and Timothy Gersch. Levine, who has been a teacher for 21 years and currently works as a K‑4 reading specialist at Barnard School, said she used to subscribe to the ​“balanced literacy” approach until noticing that students weren’t learning to read by trying to associate individual words with pictures. Gersch, a science teacher at Bishop Woods School, changed his mind while earning his PhD in cognitive psychology and then following studies showing how the brain is and isn’t wired to learn how to recognize and figure out words.

“We now know better. We should be doing better,” Gersch said during a joint appearance with Levine Tuesday on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

Levine said she has seen a switch to structural literacy make a big difference during an experiment this year at Barnard. With the help of federal pandemic-relief dollars, the school was able to break students in grades 1 – 3 into three smaller classrooms, rather than two. Levine and another reading interventionist worked with targeted groups on phonics and small-group reading based on a structural literacy approach. A year earlier, only 10 percent of kindergarteners were proficient on a ​“phoneme segmentation fluency” assessment, she said. This year 89 percent of that same group of students, now first-graders, are proficient, thanks to the program. This year 51 percent of kindergarteners are proficient, she said.

“That’s just from the small shifts we are making,” Levine said.

Meanwhile, Levine was disheartened to see the district just order new ​“Scholastic Leveled Libraries” for schools citywide based on the old ​“balanced literacy” method and mandate all K‑5 teachers to train in teaching it two weeks ago.

“I know [this] is harming our children,” Levine said.

She said she would like to see the schools train all K‑5 teachers ​“intensively” over the course of the next academic year in advance of a curriculum shift a year later.

“New Haven Public Schools serves a diverse population of students that are not always represented in the research studies that tout success of one program or another,” responded schools spokesperson Harmon. ​“We know that there is no silver bullet and that our reading plan that will go to the state sometime after January of 2023 but before July 1, 2023, will be multi-faceted. We will consider the assets that students bring to school and ensure that our plan capitalizes on those rather than take a deficit approach. We know that one size does not fit all.”