12/3/2024
Did you know that on average, we spend between $14,000 and $15,000 per pupil per year in Nebraska? Did you know that we have approximately 50% of our public school students (K-12) not reading at proficient levels? As we continue to spend more, our proficiency rates have actually gone down over the past several decades across our nation! Why is this? Everyone is looking for someone to blame.
I have never been a fan of blaming others, especially when it comes to the kids I teach. I grew to love teaching when Writer’s Workshop and Lucy Calkins were being studied around our nation. Lucy Calkins is one of the reasons I never called my students friends. My friends are adults. My students are future readers, authors, mathematicians, and scientists and that is what I call them. Lucy Calkins provided me with an excellent framework for teaching writing, but that is all it was, a framework. Lucy Calkins never stepped foot in my classroom and certainly never met my students. She didn’t know about my student who had a father in prison or my student with Selective Mutism. She certainly couldn’t be responsible for teaching me everything I need to know about teaching writing within her units of study. It was because I had the autonomy to become the expert over the curriculum maker, that I was able to teach effective writing. The same goes for other curriculum writers such as Fountas and Pinnell and the Balanced Literacy framework. Balance Literacy is merely a framework that provides scaffolds that gradually release students to independent reading and writing. It’s when we tell educators that they must teach a set of curriculum materials with fidelity, that we take away their professionalism and create a blame game culture. To be frank, it also takes all the joy out of teaching and is causing excellent educators to leave the field.
As a result of the “science of reading," we now have more than thirty school districts in Nebraska that have spent millions of dollars on the Amplify curriculum called CKLA. I will discuss CKLA further in a future post. Teachers are, once again, being told to teach these materials with fidelity. What could go wrong? I will give one example of something I have heard multiple times since everyone began studying the science of reading. We are no longer allowed to level books in our classrooms because it isn’t an equitable approach to teaching reading. Guided reading is all wrong and teachers should focus on phonics. Here is the thing, systematic phonics should have NEVER gone away. There is a continuum of literacy instruction that must happen if we are to raise proficiency levels across our nation. Students must have access to a LOT of easy books to build confidence. Students need to read books at their instructional level to grow as readers. Students must be exposed to books above their instructional level to build vocabulary and comprehension, which I will also discuss further in future articles. If we truly want to solve our reading crisis in our nation, we must stop relying on curriculum makers and single narratives to dictate everything we do in our classrooms. Once again, systematic phonics should have never gone away, but it did, even though the science has been there all along. It went away because teachers were told to teach new curriculum materials with fidelity instead of having the autonomy to do what is best for the students in their classrooms. Let’s stop with the blame game and take accountability for the teaching and learning that occurs in our classrooms.
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