School Brass Skips Reading Hearing

New Haven got advice about addressing failing reading scores from three cities that are succeeding at the task — at a public hearing skipped by New Haven school officials responsible for tackling the crisis. 

The advice came at a hearing held by the Board of Alders Education Committee Wednesday night at City Hall. It was the third public meeting the committee has held in response to requests from the community, New Haven teachers, and Board of Education officials to explore how to reverse the city’s declining reading scores. (Click here and here to read about previous hearings.)

At the Wednesday meeting the committee heard from school district officials from Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Brownsville, Texas, all of which have majority student populations of Black and brown students. 

Three formative benchmark assessment system (BAS) assessments for K‑3 students this year showed that less than half of New Haven’s K‑3 students are reading at their grade level. 

Supervisor of Literacy Lynn Brantley reported that 43 percent of kindergartners, 32 percent of first graders, 38 percent of second graders, and 37 percent of third graders are reading at grade level. 

The aldermanic committee organized the Wednesday meeting in response to a request from the superintendent who ​“suggested that it would be helpful to hear from districts that are similar to ours,” Education Committee Chair and Downtown/East Rock Alder Eli Sabin said at the start of the workshop. ​“We wanted to hear from some of them about what they’re doing, what’s working and not working there and maybe there are some lessons that we can take.” 

But NHPS Superintendent Iline Tracey and members of the city school district’s executive team did not take up the invitations to attend or participate in Wednesday’s hearing. Board of Education (BOE) Vice President Matt Wilcox did attend in-person and BOE member OrLando Yarborough III watched the meeting remotely on YouTube while thanking the school districts in the online chat. 

“Why wasn’t a representative sent here to address this board about such a crucial topic?” Upper Westville Alder Darryl Brackeen Jr. asked at the hearing. 

After hearing from the reading experts from other school districts, Brackeen asked the absent New Haven school officials, who attended the previous two workshops, a series of additional questions, the first related to the superintendent’s team’s own recent symposium on the reading crisis and how to teach moving forward: 

“Why was the literacy symposium closed off to members of the press in order to inform members of the public of what’s happening behind closed doors, to inform us around such a crucial topic?” (Click here to read more about the symposium barring a reporter.)

“Why hasn’t there been direct input, feedback, and collaboration from our reading coaches, literacy coaches, and folks that haven been on the ground doing the work involved in terms of creating framework of literacy, a comprehensive literacy plan for the school district?” 

“Why has the school district refused to follow the letter of research, science, and proven data concerning the use of phonics at earlier grade levels?” 

“If literacy is a priority in terms of closing the achievement gap and the opportunity gap in this district why have we not utilized the resources of the emergency funding to address an emerging issue?”

“Why has the emergency funding not been utilized to improve training opportunities to provide teachers, educators an opportunity to travel the country to go to districts, such as [those that have] presented today, and to come back, present, implement, and execute the great work that’s already been established?” 

“When are we actually going to have a moment to have a real effective conversation first, coupled with action?” 

Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller seconded Brackeen’s questions and reminded the community and school district that the reading crisis is not ​“intractable.”

“It’s not a magic bullet. It’s creativity, ingenuity, and leadership. But we know that it can be done,” Miller said. 

“They’ve been through what we’re trying to achieve,” Brackeen said of the presenting school districts. 

The tensions emerged against the backdrop of a debate over how to teach reading. Following a national trend based on brain research studies, the state has mandated that all school systems move from a ​“balanced literacy” reading curriculum to a more phonics-centered ​“structured literacy” curriculum. Superintendent Tracey stated at the recent symposium that New Haven will not be pushed into switching from teaching balanced literacy, which she insisted has succeeded in teaching a diverse New Haven student body how to read. The alder committee has presented information backing the switch — including from the visiting experts testifying Wednesday night.

Asked for a comment as to why the school district’s leaders turned down the invitation to participate in Wednesday’s aldermanic committee hearing, NHPS spokesperson Justin Harmon sent over the following comment: ​“The New Haven Public Schools are in the midst of working with the Connecticut State Department of Education on recent legislation regarding literacy instruction. We are planning a robust training schedule for teachers on the teaching of reading in the coming year to ensure they are prepared to deliver the instruction that each child needs based on all the research. We are looking at our own data, as well as informing ourselves about best practices elsewhere. We recently convened a symposium whose purpose was to engage reading experts and teachers in this process. We appreciate the Alders’ effort to frame the question of approaches for the public, and we participated in a recent forum in order to explain our own process and its reasoning.

“We believe it is important to reiterate that the teaching of reading is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. We work with individual learners in a community that is very diverse. Our goal is to provide teachers with a set of tools they can use according to the needs of the student they are teaching. Phonics is an essential tool in that toolbox.”

Asked for a more direct response to the question of why NHPS top brass skipped Wednesday’s meeting, Harmon replied, ​“We have our own process for developing this policy, and we have to be clear about that. We have tried to be transparent about our approach and responsive to the questions raised by the community. While a forum may be helpful to the community in illuminating some of the issues and highlighting certain best practices, we do not want to risk giving the misimpression that policy will be decided there. This is not intended as a criticism but rather to clarify that these have to be school district decisions and we will be accountable for them.”

Paradigm Shift

Presentations were given at Wednesday night’s hearing by Brownsville Independent School District leaders Mario Gonzalez, an early childhood educator, and Dolores Cisneros-Emerson, an Elementary Curriculum and Instruction Administrator; by Heather Bules, the coordinator of early literacy at Baltimore City Public Schools, and Jacqueline Elfert, an instructional support teacher at Baltimore City Public Schools; and by Kermit Burks, principal at Noyes Elementary School, which is a part of the District of Columbia Public Schools. 

Despite Brownsville being one of the country’s poorest cities, its school leaders have seen a dramatic increase in reading scores by changing its approach to one that focuses on the ​“science of reading,” or structured literacy leaning more heavily on sounding out words..

Ninety eight percent of Brownsville students are Hispanic. Gonzalez and Cisneros-Emerson reported that the district’s reading shift started in 1996 with its ​“Brownsville READS” initiative. The literacy plan included increased K‑3 teacher training, middle and high school teachers received training in reading, writing, and spelling readiness, a five year strategic plan, and ​“beefing up dyslexia teachers.”

Brownsville, like other communities nationwide, saw reading scores drop during the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. Third grade passing readings scores dropped from 79 percent to 53 percent. 

“Even though the Covid slide happened to us, we are on an upward trend that we expect to be an A district again this year,” Cisneros-Emerson said. 

The district introduced accelerated learning for failing students with a mandated 30 hours of instruction, offered targeted and supplementary instruction for extended hours that went until 5 or 6 p.m., and offered ​“a lot of professional development (PD).” This year one district department offered 179 professional development trainings. 

This summer federal pandemic-relief ​“ESSER” (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) dollars and additional grants will help the district to train all of its 2 – 5th grade teachers in language enrichment PD. 

“We have invested in training that aligns with the best practices,” Gonzalez said. 

For the past 10 years the district has offered pre‑K for all and continues to expanded its three-year-old programming to all of its 34 school sites to ​“beef up the enrollment and work on that foundation of early childhood.” 

“Whatever’s working in Brownsville with our population is worthy of replication,” Gonzalez said. 

In response to a question from committee member and alder Sal Punzo about the importance of PD, the Brownville leaders said training and progress monitoring are key to student improvement. She said school administrators are required to do at least 10 walk throughs of classrooms a week.

“They’re supposed to have those courageous conversations with the teachers and say ​‘it’s not an I got you,’ so the principal has to have that rapport with the staff in order to say this needs to be done better,” Cisneros-Emerson said. ​“It’s a growth mindset.” 

Reading starts with ​“phonological awareness” Gonzalez said and that foundation must begin in pre‑k.

“Without reading you’re impacting all of the other core areas,” Gonzalez said. 

During a brief public participation portion of the meeting local reading tutor Kat Calhoun who founded Able to Learn, shared that she was practically forced to shift from being a math tutor to being a reading tutor because her students couldn’t read math word problems. 

Calhoun emphasized to the committee the importance of teaching phonics in a reading model and suggested the district’s first steps to improvement be reading interventions for third and fourth graders. 

“By handling that third and fourth grade level it will short circuit a lot of the problems with attendance, discipline, with drop outs, drugs,” Calhoun said.

She recalled once tutoring an eighth grade student in California who read at a first grade reading level. She said as she tutored the eighth grader to a second grade reading level then ultimately a fourth grade level his confidence grew. Reaching a fourth grade reading level also helped the student to play sports in high school with at least a C average and graduate. 

Calhoun added that without a shifted reading foundation in phonics more students will become functionally illiterate. She said she has not only encountered functionally illiterate middle school students but also encountered college graduates and engineers during her 15 year tutoring journey. 

The other two cities also reported steadily making progress in reading over the years since transitioning to a model that focuses on the science of reading. 

Additional tips from the districts included 45 minute to hour long reading time blocks, programs like Reading Readiness, Language Enrichment, Multi-sensory Grammar, and Heggerty Phonemic Awareness, process monitoring, intervention efforts, and parent training in literacy. 

The three school districts have each embraced the nationwide move to structured literacy, a move Connecticut has embraced but New Haven school officials are resisting. 

At the symposium event Tracey said teachers had put decades of work in the school district into designing a balanced-literacy curriculum and regimen that was customized for various forms of learning. She also argued that the district’s current regimen is effective at teaching students how to read during the symposium. 

“We need to get off this bandwagon and focus on what our students need, focus on what our teachers need to train our teachers in all these different things so that they can best work with the students who are in front of them,” said Superintendent Iline Tracey at the reading symposium earlier this month. 

Heather Bules of Baltimore City Public Schools presented data on two small student populations Wednesday that have seen an increase in reading scores after two classroom teachers received structured literacy coaching weekly this year. 

Both of the teachers started the year off with the majority of their students reading below the reading benchmark. One teacher who assessed 22 of their students, many of which were English language learners, saw the 8 percent of their students reading at benchmark before coaching improve to 45 percent of students reading at benchmark afterwards. Similarly, the second teacher saw an increase from 0 percent of their students reading at benchmark improve to 36 percent at benchmark by the end of the year. 

Bules said the Baltimore district has also begun using targeted assistance plans to aid teachers in implementing small group intervention.

“We really have to push this with our teacher and getting them to understand the science of reading, which they didn’t get in college,” said Jacqueline Elfert, who has been an educator for 38 years. 

Principal Burks of the District of Columbia Public Schools said he recently discovered that the district’s curriculum and training didn’t align with the science of reading.

The shift was hard because it required teachers to take an assessment that ultimately concluded the norm was not effective. ​“Balanced literacy like a lot of places was the norm here, but it just wasn’t moving all of the students and not enough students,” Burks said. 

He said it was a hard pill for the district to swallow that it had invested in materials that didn’t align with the science of reading. 

After coming to terms with the failure of the balanced literacy model, Burks said his school began focusing on process monitoring, after school reading clinics in partnership with American University, PD for instructional aids, and coaching for educators for the long-term benefit of their students.