Latest news with #Wit&Wisdom
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
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
NYC expanding reading, math curriculum overhaul to more schools
Mayor Adams and Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos on Monday announced the expansion of their signature literacy initiative to middle schools for the first time. By next school year, 102 middle schools in eight school districts will be part of NYC Reads, a curriculum requirement focused on getting back to the basics of reading and phonics. The mandate is already in place at nearly all public elementary schools and preschools. During a press conference at Dock Street School for STEAM Studies in DUMBO, Brooklyn, Adams raised the alarm that students are reading at an 'inexcusable level.' Fewer than half of the city's public school students demonstrated proficiency on reading exams last year. 'Something goes wrong [from] the time they leave their mother's womb, and by the time they graduate from high school,' Adams said. 'We miss something in between, and we have to address that. And our administration sees this crisis with urgency and focus.' All but one of the districts overhauling its middle school reading curriculum — Manhattan's Districts 1 and 3; the Bronx's Districts 7, 9, 11 and 12; and Brooklyn's District 13 — are using a program called EL Education. District 19 in Brooklyn will use the curriculum Wit & Wisdom. (There are 32 geographic school districts across New York City.) NYC Solves, the math curriculum requirement, will also be expanded as planned to 84 more middle schools in six additional districts: Districts 5 and 6 in Manhattan, 8 in the Bronx, 17 in Brooklyn, 25 in Queens, and 31 on Staten Island. It is currently in 101 middle schools across eight districts and all public high schools. Schools have a choice between three options: Illustrative Mathematics, Amplify Desmos, and IReady Mathematics. The former schools chancellor, David Banks, had been publicly teasing an expansion of curriculum mandates since at least last school year. Both the reading and math initiatives are expected to be fully implemented in middle schools citywide by fall 2027. At the press conference, the Adams administration touted some early signs of literacy progress since the transition, including a 1.8-point boost on quick 'screener' assessments in kindergarten through second grade. But the major overhaul in reading instruction — a shift away from a popular but flawed approach that encouraged kids to lean on context clues — continues to face headwinds. Last year, schools in pockets of the city that began implementing the reforms fared worse on state exams than districts that were slower to make the change. After teacher and principal unions pushed back on some of the stricter components of the mandates, the school system started to loosen some requirements. Still, the slip in test score data is not deterring decision-makers: 'Other districts across the country have embarked on this type of ambitious curriculum initiative,' Aviles-Ramos said. 'And they also experienced some drops.' 'So, that is something that we expected. Because an implementation of this size, in a city this size, it takes a lot,' the chancellor continued. 'I'm super confident as we embark on state exam season that we are going to see improvements.'
