Latest news with #AmplifyCoreKnowledgeLanguageArts
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Pierce County school district passes on controversial K-5 reading curriculum
The Peninsula School District board voted to adopt a new elementary school language-arts curriculum called Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) at its May 6 meeting, passing over a second program, Wit & Wisdom, that drew opposition at a school board meeting last summer and has generated controversy in other districts across the country. The new curriculum will roll out in K-5 classrooms this fall, replacing the Reading Wonders curriculum used in the district since 2015, according to the district curriculum adoption webpage. The change is part of the district's efforts in recent years to close student literacy gaps by changing how their teachers teach reading. Here's what to know about the new curriculum, Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) 3rd Edition, and how it won out over its alternative. After a screening process led by a curriculum adoption committee of K-5 teachers and staff, the district landed on CKLA and Wit & Wisdom, paired with Really Great Reading, to pilot in 37 K-5 classrooms during the 2024-2025 school year, according to the district website and a staff presentation to the school board. Wit & Wisdom and Really Great Reading were paired together because they teach different skills. While Wit & Wisdom 'builds language comprehension and reading and writing skills,' Really Great Reading 'focuses on foundational skills, such as phonemic awareness, decoding, encoding, spelling, handwriting, and vocabulary,' the Great Minds curriculum company website says. The News Tribune reported that several parents, including members of a local Moms for Liberty group, opposed Wit & Wisdom at a school board meeting last June. Seven people spoke out against the Peninsula School District's potential use of the Wit & Wisdom curriculum at the June 18 board meeting, according to The News Tribune's reporting. One speaker, a parent of a part-time homeschooler in the district and of another child who formerly attended a school in the district, expressed concern that the curriculum taught kindergarteners about the Great Depression and race-based discrimination during the Harlem Renaissance. A special education teacher in a nearby district who was not a Moms for Liberty member said that the content in Wit & Wisdom texts was triggering to some of her middle school students, making it difficult for them to read and learn, The News Tribune reported. Moms for Liberty is a national nonprofit that generally opposes diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and LGBTQ+ initiatives in public schools, and describes itself as 'dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government,' according to the group's website. Moms for Liberty has been labeled an antigovernment organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy nonprofit that advocates for civil rights and racial justice. Wit & Wisdom has also sparked controversies in states such as Tennessee and Kentucky, with some arguing that it teaches critical race theory or introduces content that isn't age-appropriate, according to reporting from The Tennessean and The Lexington Herald-Leader. Critical race theory originated in the 1970s in academia and is based on the premise that racial bias is embedded in U.S. policies and institutions, according to an explainer from Reuters. The Great Minds website says that the Wit & Wisdom 'curriculum complies with the laws of every state in which we operate and does not teach critical race theory (CRT).' Natalie Boyle, the district's director of elementary teaching and learning, told the school board at the April 22 meeting that the adoption committee's recommendation for CKLA 3rd Edition was unanimous — something she said has never happened in all of the curriculum adoptions she has worked on. The adoption committee had 23 members, according to the presentation. It 'was very evident that our teachers felt strongly about this,' she said. Boyle and other staff presenters didn't speak in-depth to the differences in content between Wit & Wisdom/Really Great Reading and CKLA, but second-grade Discovery Elementary teacher Ashley Trinh said that one factor in CKLA's favor was the fact that it teaches all necessary reading skills in one curriculum. 'Wit and Wisdom and Really Great Reading were just so different, it was hard to pair them in a cohesive way,' Trinh said to the board at the April 22 meeting. CKLA would also be cheaper to implement than Wit & Wisdom, Boyle told the board. The estimated cost of purchasing all teacher and student materials for Wit & Wisdom paired with Really Great Reading over a three-year period would be about $1.3 million, compared to about $840,000 for CKLA. Those costs wouldn't include professional development costs to train teachers to use the new curriculum, Boyle said. The 'Core Knowledge' in CKLA refers to the knowledge that students build in literature, the arts, science and social studies via the curriculum, said Kelly Pruitt, the district's elementary instructional facilitator, at the board meeting. A graphic included in the staff presentation showed the progression of topics students learn about in each grade, from taking care of the planet and Native American cultures in kindergarten to global architecture and oceans in fifth grade. The curriculum also teaches foundational skills of reading, beginning with skills like letter recognition and understanding the features of a sentence, and progressing to skills like word recognition and grammar, according to the CKLA website. Teachers praised the CKLA curriculum at the meeting and said they received a lot of positive feedback from students and parents. 'The first thing I would say as a classroom teacher is that my students were really engaged in a new way that I hadn't seen for the last few years, with the content with CKLA,' Trinh, the second-grade teacher at Discovery Elementary, told the board. 'They were excited to hear the next story, asking me if they could read ahead, (saying) 'I really want to find out what happens next,' and they just were really excited each day for the new knowledge lessons.' Her students were 'obsessed' with the Greek myths unit, and she saw them making a lot of real-world connections to what they were reading, she added. Marci Cummings-Cohoe, a first-grade teacher at Swift Water Elementary, told the board families were reporting 'pretty in-depth' conversations at home. Students were talking about the Mayans and the Aztecs at the dinner table, she reported hearing from families. The district kept 'the science of reading' front-and-center during the process of choosing a new K-5 English Language Arts curriculum, staff told the board. The 'science of reading' is a term that describes a large body of research from areas including cognitive psychology, education, linguistics, neuroscience and other fields into how people become proficient in reading and writing, why some face challenges and how these skills can be taught most effectively, according to The Reading League. The Reading League is a national nonprofit that supports 'the awareness, understanding, and use of evidence-aligned reading instruction, their website says. In years past, parents have spoken to the school board about their concerns that the district was failing to adequately support students with dyslexia. In June 2023, a literacy task force convened by Superintendent Krestin Bahr presented its findings to the board about how the district could implement systems to ensure all third grade students are reading at or above grade level, and introduced a professional development course that the district was beginning to roll out for teachers to learn more about the science of reading. The four district staff members designated as facilitators for this course, Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), helped screen potential elementary school reading curricula, Kelly Pruitt, the district's elementary instructional facilitator, said at the board meeting on April 22. They reviewed each program based on an array of criteria from sources like The Reading League and the Institute of Education Sciences, an independent and non-partisan research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, according to the rubrics posted on the district's curriculum adoption website.
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
‘Science of reading' curriculum will soon be offered to all Tri-City K-5 students
A new 'science of reading' core literacy curriculum piloted in Kennewick elementary schools is likely to set a better foundation for students to read, write and learn. The Kennewick School Board on Wednesday unanimously approved the adoption of Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) at the recommendation of district staff and a materials committee. In September, with the start of the 2025-26 school year, all K-5 classes will use Amplify CKLA. This comes after the district piloted it in 25 classrooms across seven elementary schools. STAR test scores between fall and winter showed 18 classes had the equivalent academic growth of more than a year. It's the same curriculum adopted last year by the Richland School District. Pasco School District in 2022-23 adopted the American Reading Company's Core, which is 'informed' by science of reading research. That means all 18,000 elementary students in the Tri-Cities region will soon be learning through a science of reading curriculum. Science of reading is a broad term that refers to a comprehensive body of empirical research spanning several decades detailing what matters and what works in the field of holistic literacy instruction. It narrows in on two component skills: decoding and linguistic comprehension. And it highlights five 'pillars' of reading proficiency that students need: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Its approach in the classroom is known as 'structured literacy.' It's different from the 'balanced literacy' method that's been popular in classrooms for decades, which promotes a 'well-rounded and comprehensive education in reading and writing.' Teachers in recent years have also moved away from 'three-cueing' in favor of more scientifically sound and specific strategies to help students with reading roadblocks. That strategy, also known as MSV (meaning, syntax, visual), entails students drawing from context clues, visuals or sentence structure to guess at a word's meaning. Jilian Alfaro, a 4th grade teacher at Sage Crest Elementary, says it enhanced her students' curiosity and comprehension of complex concepts. 'Every child has the right to a rigorous and meaningful learning experience in which they can naturally grow, inquire, discover their passions and succeed,' she told parents at a community preview event. Early childhood literacy education is important because students begin to use reading and writing as a primary medium to learn other concepts by the time they're in the third-grade. It can be a crucial indicator of a student's future success in high school, college and the workforce. Kennewick will purchase eight years of digital access and five years of print from Amplify, totaling $2 million — a good price for K-5 reading curriculum. Since 2016 it's used Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Journeys, but district staff moved up curriculum adoption earlier because the publisher is sunsetting the curriculum. Alyssa St. Hilaire, Kennewick's assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, says the standout is that kids are 'excited and curious' to learn with Amplify CKLA. 'We also feel it's one of the best materials out there that's grounded in science of reading, and just really helping teach those skills in a systematic approach,' she said. 'Just hearing the kids be excited about learning about history and science is kind of the Velcro that helps all of that reading stick,' St. Hilaire said. Students learn through shorter excerpts of learning with Journeys, while Amplify uses units to draw 'deeper learning' of concepts. For example, science class might have a through line that goes from animals and habitats to eventually studying the plant cycle. Past curricula taught skills in isolation, St. Hilaire says. But CKLA allows students to develop skills holistically through subject background knowledge. Scarborough's Reading Rope shows what's going on in student brains as they build reading comprehension, St. Hilaire said. Two 'strands' — language comprehension and word recognition — are foundational for students to build skilled reading. But those strands are composed of several skills making up the strand's 'fibers.' For language comprehension, students need knowledge, vocabulary, sentence structure, reasoning and a mental model. For word recognition, they need to know sounds, letters and words. As those skills become more strategic and automatic, students develop a strong 'rope' of reading comprehension that they'll use to learn for the rest of their lives. St. Hilaire says the body of research isn't an educational fad. 'This is how our kids need to learn how to read,' she said. 'To hear kids' excitement about reading, to hear teachers excited to be teaching reading — this is how reading needs to be taught.' School board president Gabe Galbraith says he's heard students at all levels were staying engaged and are demonstrating strong understanding of the content. 'In addition to improving reading comprehension, it fosters critical thinking and problem-solving. Initial results are showing positive growth in our students testing,' Galbraith said in a statement. 'The process has been very collaborative with staff doing a tremendous job with the initial discussions and piloting material in classrooms. The community provided very positive review feedback and the board has spent significant time collecting feedback and observing lessons in classrooms,' he continued.
