Maya McFadden photo
NHPS Supervisor Of Literacy Lynn Brantley and Assistant Superintendent Keisha Redd-Hannans at recent reading expo.
City public school district leaders have selected two new K‑3 literacy programs to use as part of a 12-school pilot process that is set to begin later this month — all as New Haven embarks on a state-mandated shift in teaching young students how to read by focusing on sounding out words instead of looking for other clues.
New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) Assistant Superintendent for Instructional Leadership Keisha Redd-Hannans announced that reading-program selection during a recent public meeting with city education leaders, state legislators, and the state’s top education official.
She said that NHPS has chosen Savvas Learning Company’s myView Literacy and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Into Reading curricula to use in a pilot program that will begin in mid January.
The Savvas program will be piloted at Bishop Woods, Conte West Hills, Truman, Nathan Hale, John C. Daniels, and Lincoln Bassett Schools. The Houghton Mifflin Harcourt program will be piloted at L. W. Beecher, John Martinez, Clinton Avenue, Troup, Worthington Hooker, and Barnard Schools.
Reached by comment via email after the public meeting, Redd-Hannans told the Independent that the new instructional materials should arrive at the schools upon the return from the district’s holiday break.
Teachers will be given eight days to wrap up their present classroom units and then will have to bridge to the pilot unit instruction in all classrooms during the week of Jan. 17.
NHPS’s selection of Savvas’s and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s reading programs for its soon-to-start literacy pilot comes roughly a month after district leaders hosted a reading expo at Betsy Ross school’s parish hall on Kimberly Avenue. That expo presented teachers, parents, and other school district “stakeholders” with five choices for which state-sanctioned program NHPS should adopt as it builds out an enhanced K‑3 literacy plan that is required to follow the “science of reading.”
In the wake of the state legislature’s passage of a Right to Read law, New Haven and all other public school districts in Connecticut are required to implement a “science”-based reading curriculum for kindergarten through third grade to improve student reading scores by the 2022 – 2023 school year. That refers to a curriculum that is based more on phonics than ones used in New Haven before, and less on“cueing” techniques that have been shown to either fail to teach kids to read or even make it harder, like guessing words based on pictures or story context.
Barnard literacy educators Sarah Levine and Kelley Dearborne look over the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt teacher manual at November reading expo.
At the recent meeting with state legislators and Connecticut’s education commissioner, which mostly focused on the state’s concerns around chronic absenteeism in New Haven, Redd-Hannans described New Haven as at a “critical crossroads” because of low reading and math scores. She said her team’s literacy and math enhancement plans intend to address those very concerns.
She said the district chose the two curricula for its new pilot program after gathering feedback from the over 400 people who work within NHPS and attended NHPS’s reading expo.
“We have also laid out a ‘quality indicators of teaching and learning’ document. This document is important because it level-sets what good instruction looks like in the classroom,” Redd-Hannans said. “This is about norming the district about classroom instructional practices. It is critically important.”
Redd-Hannans said the district selected Savvas and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for its pilot because staff members’ collected feedback identified Savvas and HMH as the programs that best meet the needs of diverse learners by prioritizing the seven components of reading. She said these programs also have broad multicultural representation and engaging stories and texts with rich vocabulary.
For the past month, the district has been amping up its professional development opportunities for subjects beyond literacy and math in order to “shore up our practices in order to help and assist our students as well as our families,” Redd-Hannans said.
Teachers participating in the pilot have already received professional development training from one of the two companies, Redd-Hannans said.
“I am excited to enter the next phase of the selection of a comprehensive reading program,” Redd-Hannans told the Independent by email. “It is critically important that we select the best program to meet the needs of our students because we owe it to them, our families, and our community to improve academic outcomes in our District.”
Intrigued, as a 63 year old, after following the links to the two vendors, at how much computer technology is required by these approaches. Was it smaller class sizes at Edgewood School 50 years ago that enabled the teaching of reading? (Books in the home?) Are there approaches to reading today less reliant on, presumably, costly vendor subscriptions and computers, in which the funding could allow more staff and/or smaller class sizes?