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Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion: The Voices We Don't Hear: Teachers Who Gave Up
A version of this essay originally appeared on Robert Pondiscio's SubStack. Earlier this month, I was flattered to be invited to a conference at Marquette University Law School, sparked by an article I'd written making the case that education reform has misfired by prioritizing testing, measurement, accountability, and other structural reforms instead of trying to improve classroom practice. A highlight of the convening was the final panel of the day, featuring four teachers and administrators who acknowledged that many of the challenges I cited—poor preparation, chronic problems with student behavior and classroom management, and the overwhelming demands placed on teachers—were real and concerning. But they pushed back politely on my assertion that we have made teaching 'too hard for mere mortals.' I was particularly struck by remarks from Taylor Thompson, an earnest and winningly dedicated first-year fourth-grade teacher from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. '[Teaching is] not an impossible task. It's demanding. It's hard. Each day is not rainbows and singing and dancing,' she said, but it's not impossible 'if you are a collaborative person, work with your peers, and you have a community of coworkers and principals who don't allow you to silo into your own rooms and do your own thing. It can be a very, very empowering job.' Thompson brought with her materials from the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum; having worked on CKLA's launch during my time at the Core Knowledge Foundation, I was heartened that it contributed to her success. That said, I couldn't help but wonder if her first-year experience would be different—if she'd even have had the time and energy to come to Marquette at all—had she not been given CKLA but an empty plan book, and expected to spend 10, 20, or more hours a week scouring Google, Share My Lesson, or Teachers Pay Teachers for lesson plans and materials? When it was my turn to respond, I told the audience that what they'd just heard didn't contradict my argument; it amplified it. I suggested to my hosts that what we really needed was one more panel: earnest, well-intended people who wanted to teach but grew overwhelmed and walked away from their classrooms. Their absence from the conversation—not a flaw of Marquette's thoughtful event but a field-wide oversight—limits our ability to address the issues driving nearly half of teachers to quit within five years. Those stories are legion. Related After leaving the classroom, I worked briefly at an outfit called Prep for Prep under Ed Boland, who later left the organization to teach in a New York City public high school armed with little more than idealism. His 2016 memoir, The Battle for Room 314, described the relentless student misbehavior, homophobic slurs, and physical fights he endured. He wasn't a minimally prepared Teach For America corps member or, like me, the product of an 'alt cert' teacher prep program. He had two years of graduate school and six months of student teaching that he described as 'a mix of folk wisdom, psycho-jargon, wishful thinking, and out-and-out bullshit.' After one freakishly difficult year, Boland returned to his old job. 'I had taken courses in lesson planning, evaluation, psychology, and research. Next to nothing was said about what a first-year teacher most needs to know: how to control a classroom,' he wrote. NPR's All Things Considered not long ago ran a story about Liz Stepansky, the daughter of two school teachers who wanted to follow in their footsteps, thinking teaching would be a path to a stable, meaningful life. But when she took a job teaching at a South Carolina middle school, she found that she 'had no idea' what she was in for. Her middle school students 'dialed 911, threw balloons filled with bleach and ink in hallways and constantly pulled the fire alarm.''I'd go home and sometimes I'd spend an hour grading papers. And then I'd go back the next day and do it all over again,' she told NPR. 'I remember my paycheck being $800 and something every two weeks.' She transferred to another school, faced similar frustrations and threw in the towel. She's now a speech pathologist. It's not hard to find stories of earnest, well-intended people who want to teach but find the job untenable. But I can't recall hearing from a single one at any of the education and policy conferences I've attended over the last twenty years. Inattention to abandoned careers and disappointed hopes allow false and misleading narratives to gain traction. Last summer, I was invited to give testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Senator Bernie Sanders was proposing a $60,000 minimum teacher salary to address teacher shortages. 'By all means, pay teachers more,' I testified. 'But don't harbor any illusions that doing so will solve the problem.' Higher pay doesn't fix shoddy preparation, unruly classrooms, or the ever-escalating burdens we pile on teachers' plates as we treat schools as not just academic spaces but something akin to the social service agencies of last resort. 'We are asking teachers to do too many things to do any of them well at any salary,' I said. Teaching's aspirational nature attracts optimists, but crushing demands betray them. A RAND study I cited in my Senate testimony found 99% of elementary teachers create their own materials, stealing time from honing their craft and working more closely with children and their parents. A 2024 Pew survey showed only 36% of teachers feel adequately resourced; a 2022 NEA poll revealed nearly half plan to quit due to poor school climate. These are systemic failures, not personal ones. Related Teaching is among our most optimistic and aspirational professions, drawing idealists who believe education can transform lives. But celebrating only the successes—teachers who beat the odds, schools that defy demographics—distorts our vision. As I quipped at Marquette, it's like watching Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs and concluding, 'See? It can be done!' And it can—if you're Aaron Judge. Other fields learn from failure—medicine from misdiagnoses, aviation from crashes. I urged Marquette's audience to imagine a panel of teachers who quit—not to shame them, but to learn. What broke their optimism? What tools were missing? Thompson's success shows what's possible with support. But for every Thompson, countless idealists leave because they were overmatched, felt unprepared or betrayed by poor training or simply couldn't manage chaos. A few days later, Alan Borsuk, who organized and moderated the event at Marquette, told me about a conversation he'd had with a school administrator who was in attendance who disagreed with the notion that teachers who leave are failures. 'She said one of the best teachers they have whose students have done well for year after year is leaving after this year,' Alan said. That teacher, she insisted, was not a failure. Exactly! That teacher didn't fail. We failed that teacher. Education reform must weigh frustration alongside triumph. We need convenings where former teachers speak without judgment: their failures and frustration studied, not stigmatized. There's no magic wand that will make the job easy or friction-free, but when you connect with students and go home feeling successful, there's no job that compares to being a classroom teacher. You feel on top of the world. It's immensely satisfying work. The question ed reformers and policymakers need to ask now is what can we do to make more teachers feel successful and their jobs more doable.
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.
Yahoo
07-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Some Wisconsin school districts are turning to science of reading, despite lack of financial support from state
This is the second of two columns on the state of changes in reading education in Wisconsin. If you're looking to see if the reading education reform law that passed in Wisconsin in 2023 is having any effect, don't look so much to state government, where disputes and delays have meant there's been limited action. Look to places such as the suburban Milwaukee schools in Greendale and the Whitnall district. Or to districts such as New Berlin and Cudahy, which didn't wait for the state law to pass before embracing the phonics-oriented changes pushed by the state law. More: Cudahy Schools' shift to a new reading curriculum looks like it's paying off More: Cudahy's move to science of reading curriculum hasn't been easy, but test scores are encouraging More: Reading looks different now in Cudahy Schools, as students g-r-o-w through science of reading While more than $49 million of the $50 million approved by both legislative Republicans and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has been frozen by the legislature's Joint Committee on Finance as part of a power dispute in the Capitol, some districts have been moving ahead with implementing the "science of reading' called for by the law. In Greendale, reading scores for students were not as alarming as in some other places. But school district leaders felt too many students were not mastering reading by the time they completed third grade. The district has made major progress in adopting curriculum and teaching approaches in line with the science of reading. Superintendent Kim Amidzich said switching from what is often called a balanced literacy approach to teaching children to read using the science of reading was difficult for some teachers. Some were reluctant to change, while some felt guilty about previously using curriculum materials that left some students behind. Maggy Olson, director of equity and instruction for Greendale schools, said a trifecta of patient and supportive work with teachers paid off. The approach emphasized professional training, learning different ways to teach reading and personal development for teachers. Greendale tried several curriculums and settled on Core Knowledge Language Arts or CKLA, one of six curriculum choices endorsed by a statewide early literacy curriculum council created through Act 20. Barb Novak, director of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Office of Literacy, said recently that CKLA has been the most frequent choice of school districts statewide that have purchased new curriculum. Amidzich said the passage of Act 20 provided a good framework for change. As Olson put it, it added to the sense of urgency around getting more students to be capable readers. What the state didn't provide, at least so far, is money. Greendale took a loan from a different state fund to pay for some of the cost of the new curriculum, with the expectation that part of the cost would be reimbursed from the $50 million approved under Act 20. The result of not getting that help is increased financial pressure on the district. But Amidzich and Olson said they were pleased with the how the change was going. 'We see huge results,' Amidzich said. Olson said there have been double digit gains in proficiency rates, and 80% of students are hitting their reading targets. Greendale growth rates are in the top 5% of the state, Amidzich said, and all three of the elementary schools in the district were given five stars, the top rating, in the most recent state report cards for schools. Olson said that at recent meetings of school administrators from across southeast Wisconsin, there has been more talk about reading and more urgency to the conversation. 'We needed a jolt to tell us this matters,' she said, and Act 20 provided that. Brady Reinke, superintendent of Whitnall schools, is a firm supporter of the science of reading. He said, 'Now that we know (what works better), we've got to do something about it. ... It's a moral imperative.' Getting some money from the state to support implementation would help, he said. But not getting the money shouldn't stop schools. 'We can sit here and whine about that, or we can do what's best for kids,' Reinke said. 'You have to prioritize.' If you really believe reading is so important, then you find the money, he said. One recent morning at Seeds of Health Elementary School, a charter school on Milwaukee's south side, a third-grade girl and a reading teacher sat at a table. For one minute, the girl read a passage from a story about frogs, and then, for one minute, read from a story about a boy who loved socks. The teacher kept track of words the girl stumbled on. The result: a quick assessment of how many words she could read per minute and how accurate her reading was. 'Pat yourself on the back, my dear,' the teacher said, praising the girl's effort. The girl did her best to do exactly that. This was a glimpse of one requirement of Act 20 that is being implemented statewide: screening all public school students from 5-year-old kindergarten through third grade to identify those who are in the bottom quarter of students in their grade nationwide. Act 20 calls for those students to get individualized help to improve their reading. The first round of screening in Wisconsin was completed at the end of January. The law calls for screening to be done three times a year going forward — near the start, middle and end of each school year. The DPI specified a specific screening program to be used in all schools. The cost of the screener is being paid by the state from money separate from the $50 million set aside for Act 20. But there is no specific state aid for providing individual help for students or coaching for their teachers. Especially in schools serving low-income populations, well more than a quarter of students will score in the bottom quarter of the national results, which means the obligation to help will be large. How schools will handle that is one of the important unknowns about Act 20's impact. The girl at Seeds of Health scored just above the 25th percentile. But about half the students in the school were below that point. Michael Pointer Mace, director of curriculum and instruction at Seeds of Health, said the school has added a half-hour a day to its reading efforts so there is time to give students both what they need to catch up to their grade level and still get reading and literacy work on their grade level. What about Milwaukee Public Schools, where overall reading scores are among the lowest in the nation? Jennier Mims Howell, chief academic officer for MPS, said results from each student's screening would be included in that student's records, and students would be given help based on their needs. She said MPS also planned to encourage students who need additional reading help to attend summer school. MPS has been using HMH Into Reading as its reading curriculum for several years. It is among those recommended by the state. Act 20 calls for reading teachers statewide to receive training in how to teach reading and specifies a training program known as LETRS. It is not clear how widespread LETRS training is so far, but teachers in districts such as Greendale and some teachers in MPS have been getting the training. Novak, the head of the DPI's literacy office, said she believes Wisconsin school districts as a whole have been changing their approaches to reading instruction in line with Act 20. Pressure is on nationally to get better outcomes, she said, and schools generally are putting more emphasis on teaching fundamental skills. Buying better curriculum, screening children, dropping approaches to reading that have been strongly criticized — these are potentially good steps, she said. But 'none of this matters unless they change the way they are teaching.' Holding back the $49 million that Act 20 said would be made available to schools means some schools have had 'a tremendous out-of-pocket cost,' Novak said. And not funding the coaching work that was intended to improve the teaching of at least some teachers around the state 'really weighs on my heart.' Kathy Champeau, a veteran reading teacher and a leader of the Wisconsin State Reading Association, said her organization remains critical of the science of reading and of the requirements of Act 20. The real issues that are not being addressed, she said, are providing all students the expert teachers and the resources they need. That gets at the heart of why scores statewide have been flat for years and have declined recently, she said. 'Instead, we have a legislation that is based on speculation as to why our test scores are the way they are,' she said. Act 20 relies on private companies to provide curriculum materials, training and screening procedures when reading instruction should rely on educators' expertise, she said. That means teachers are being given training in how to use products but not how to teach, Champeau said. But even as Act 20 has encountered political headwinds — the hold-up on state funding, uncertain prospects for money in the coming two-year budget and continuing resistance from some educators —there appears to be significant action to change reading instruction on a fairly broad basis in Wisconsin. Some if it is a matter of acting with more urgency, some of it is an eagerness to see better results for students, some of it is prodding due to Act 20. But overall, the pressure is on, even if overall scores haven't improved in recent statewide results, and patience will be needed to see if Act 20 pays off. On an optimistic note, the DPI's Novak's said, 'If we move forward in the spirit of Act 20, we'll see a change.' Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Some schools adopt Act 20 curriculum despite lack of state money
