Superintendent of Wilton Public Schools Kevin Smith told the Board of Education last Thursday, April 25, that the district fought vehemently in tandem with its legal counsel to earn a waiver from the state’s “Right to Read” legislation but to no avail. Now, Wilton Public Schools will yield to the Connecticut State Department of Education‘s (CSDE) mandate to begin implementing a more skills-driven teaching program for K-3 English Language Arts (ELA).
The “Right to Read” legislation requires Connecticut public school districts to adopt one of the state’s pre-approved reading programs.
Wilton school officials had argued with the CSDE that the district was netting better results through its current “comprehensive literacy” approach than any of the state-mandated packaged reading programs would provide.
In a Jan. 12 BOE meeting, Kevin Smith said, “The intent of the legislation was to address the foundational reading skills for all kids … The changes we’ve made to our curriculum are in fact addressing very discreetly those foundational skills and we’re seeing lots of success.”
Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Chuck Smith followed by saying, “I would just add to that, we’re not confident in those recommended programs, that they will do any better, and may in fact do worse than what we’re already doing.”
However, while Wilton continues to achieve success for general education students in many categories in grades K-3, large disparities exist for students receiving special services, including a 44% gap in achievement for first graders, and a 48% gap in achievement for second-grade students receiving special services, compared with general education students.
At Thursday’s BOE meeting, Karen Brenneke, the district’s K-8 humanities curriculum coordinator, gave the Board of Education a presentation on the work of choosing a new state pre-approved reading program by the 21-person ELA curriculum committee, which began meeting on Feb. 7 and has continued to meet over the past several months.
“One of the biggest concerns shared across stakeholders serving on this committee is potential impacts on engagement, authenticity and students’ passion for reading,” Brenneke said. “The committee did acknowledge, though, that there’s a section of our student population for whom our current practices are not productive, leading to high intervention and special education referral rates.
“Dr. Smith communicated his and my shared belief that to reach those learners, it feels like it’s time to try something new,” she said. “It is always our aim that all of our learners are proficient readers and writers.”
Choosing a New Program
Following site visits by Brenneke and Wilton ELA coaches to area schools that were using the approved programs, the choices were narrowed from three to two, with the full committee then asked to choose between the two finalist programs.
Ultimately the 21-person committee, which included a range of teachers and administrators, was deadlocked between the two options, so Chuck Smith stepped in and “guided the committee,” Brenneke said, as a “fall-back” decision-making process.
“That fallback was that Dr. Chuck Smith would aid, pretty heavily, in guiding the committee to a recommendation,” Brenneke said. He selected the program made by Imagine Learning, LLC.
“There was another program that they probably all would have wanted more, but financially … it was just a total reach,” said BOE member Pamela Ely, who attended two of the meetings, referring to American Reading Company’s program.
“That program maintained many of the components of comprehensive literacy,” Chuck Smith said. “That’s why they liked it.”
“And it was very shiny and pretty,” Ely added.
Brenneke said that the committee utilized a “SWOT analysis” technique — a strategic management acronym that stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats — to evaluate the pros and cons of the new programs as well as the district’s current approach to ELA in Wilton for K-2.
She said strengths identified included overall improved K-2 data since 2019, with kindergarten intervention students showing “great growth” and Grade 1 “closing the gap in all areas in 2023, except with students receiving special services.”
“Some internal factors that were identified as weaknesses included Grade 3’s SBA (Smarter Balanced Assessment) performances lagging pre-Covid Grade 3’s performance by about 10%,” Brenneke said. “Grade 1 students receiving special services demonstrated a 44% gap in achievement as compared to general education students. Our Grade 2 students receiving special services demonstrated a 48% gap in achievement as compared to general education students. And too few 3rd Grade students are achieving at Level 3, which is At Grade Level, or a Level 4, which is Above Grade Level, on SBA.”
Brenneke reminded the BOE of some external “threats” to the town’s approach to teaching ELA — in particular, she said, “misinformation in the media and from the state Department of Education about both reading research and our current K-2 programming.”
Other “threats” included the legislation itself, as well as budget cuts and inflation.”
“Opportunities” found by committee members regarding this new ELA program included the introduction of “systematic explicit vocabulary instruction, systematic knowledge building and an opportunity to evaluate true cognitive engagement in independent reading.”
Significant Shift
Asked how much of a departure the new program would be from the current ELA program, Chuck Smith called it “a pretty significant shift in how to deliver reading instruction.”
“What the state is pushing for … is a much more explicit, direct, structured way of teaching,” he said, “and much more whole-class. What we do now is that we place kids in leveled books and provide them with ample opportunities to engage with those texts independently, because there has been some research that if students read widely at their independent level, that will help them grow.
“The state is rejecting that view and I think for some of our students that may be true,” Smith said, “so what you’re going to see in a classroom is a much more teacher-directed classroom.”
He called it “a big shift” in which Wilton was “letting go of some of our beliefs in balanced literacy.”
“Our teachers will embrace this and make it work but I don’t want to underestimate the learning curve that we will be facing, especially the first couple of years for our teachers, because it is a big shift,” he said.
Smith said it was unclear what the results will be, but if the pilot program didn’t prove successful it was possible the district would then need to go to another pre-approved program instead.
“I’m hoping that we collect enough information that we can make an informed decision,” he said, with full state compliance not required by the district until the 2025-26 school year.
“I’m really confident that this is gonna work, but if for some chance it doesn’t, we might have to have a conversation about needing some grace in terms of landing on a different program,” he said.
Details on the scope of next year’s pilot program are still undecided said Brenneke, who is meeting with a consultant to plan specifics to be discussed at another full committee meeting scheduled for May 29.
Ironically, also at Thursday’s meeting, the BOE approved Superintendent Smith’s recommendation to cut money from staff wages for summertime curriculum work in next year’s budget by 25%, though he emphasized that the ELA curriculum committee would still get funding for more work this summer as they moved forward implementing a pilot program.
Brenneke also made note of a professional learning community (PLC) group that is currently meeting made up of representatives from other Connecticut districts that are also implementing the Imagine Learning program, though it was unclear if this was a no-cost option for Wilton.
Good. I’m sorry it had to happen like this – imposed by the state, rather than the district moving on voluntarily as has happened in a lot of other places that abandoned Calkins (NYC, e.g.) – but I think this will be a great change for the schools long-term.
I do also think that the harm done by the old curriculum on higher-achieving kids – who are nevertheless stuck reading books at level P or whatever because that’s what their teacher assigned them after a 10-minute assessment where they stumbled on a few words – is being understated here. The fact that like 40% of Wilton elementary schoolers are getting Level 4 SBA/MAP scores doesn’t necessarily mean that those kids are being well-served by the current curriculum; it could simply mean that they’re good at taking tests, and/or that they’re coming into this with a lot of advantages that have nothing to do with what’s happening at school.
(and of course Wilton picks the cheaper of the two finalists because that’s what we do here, in a town where even leading Democrats praise the BOE/BOF for years of punishing lean budgets)
It’s about time we abandoned this widely debunked theory of reading!
“Reading readiness” is a concept worth remembering for 5-8 yo children. Not all children are ready or able to acquire reading skills at the same age or in the same manner. Of important note is the physiology of the auditory nerve (related to phonics) which is one of the last to mature in the body at about age 8-9 yo. Historically, the first ranked elementary education system, Finland,** begins teaching
phonics when child is 9 yo. (“Special” needs can often mean a child can not yet distinguish /uh/ from/ah/ or /eh/ from /ih/. Tried and proven programs such as Lindamood-Bell and Orton or Slingerland-type are wholistic: multi-sensory (something to see, to hear, and to do), structured, and sequential, and help the child to develop skills and strategies to “Explode the Code” for reading success.
In addition to auditory readiness, visual readiness is often not examined sufficiently. The pediatric ophthalmologist (MD) examines the physical eye/vision system
(strabismis, amblyopia),
Additionally, children need to be assessed for reading processes:
*figure ground discrimination ( some worksheets/pages can be very busy and confusing visually),
*tracking lines of type,
*eye-teaming,
* near/ far point copying,
*Meares-Irlen (scotopic) syndrome,
*headaches ( lighting can trigger).
These evaluations / programs require special training and can be expensive. But they work and isn’t that the goal for our children?
When it comes to learning, it is essential to have a large variety of tools because one size never fits all.
To support her theory, Calkins cited two scholars associated with “Reader Response:” Stanley Fish and Louise Rosenblatt. Fish has repeated numerous times that he has no interest in the “personal responses” of readers, so Calkins was stretching too far when she relied on him. In contrast, Louise Rosenblatt’s work half-supports Calkins whose approach does have some advantages for younger readers, but Calkins and her followers ignore how Rosenblatt uses and repeats the word “public” to indicate the arguments and the grasp of conventions deployed by mature readers that one might hope younger readers start to practice. Applying Calkins approach to older students often produces uncritical readers unready to consider fully the views of others or to move from personal narrative to the types of writing challenges customary in college. However, her work has proven all too helpful for elementary and middle school teachers who become administrators, especially those who believe persuasive arguments and evidentiary procedures are excessively “elitist” or sophisticated for students in middle school, or perhaps inconvenient for themselves.