As reading scores slip, Wake changes teaching methods. But that’s led to backlash.
Wake County’s reading scores are dropping, and some teachers are unhappy with changes in how language arts is taught.
But school leaders say they’re on the right path to helping students become strong readers.
The Wake County school system introduced a new language arts curriculum in 2017 and put greater emphasis on the use of phonics at the early grades. While the short-term results aren’t there yet, school leaders say the changes represent the latest research on how best to teach students to read.
“You are asking people who are successful and also strident in their careers to actually totally turn their brains to a whole different way of teaching so that students can learn,” school board member Monika Johnson-Hostler said at a committee meeting this week. “Change is hard.”
Wake is in the midst of the ongoing national debate about how to teach reading, especially at a time when statewide and national reading scores are not improving. For instance, fewer North Carolina third-grade students are reading at grade level than before the Read To Achieve program was started.
Wake adopts the ‘science of reading’
Many schools across the country use an approach called “balanced literacy,” which includes some phonics. Phonics help teach students to read by associating sounds with letters. Balanced literacy also includes strategies such as having young students guess words they don’t know based on the context, such as by looking at pictures or the first letter in the word.
But Sherri Miller, Wake’s K-12 literacy director, says there’s a “national epidemic” where teachers aren’t using the best strategies for helping students learn to read.
“We have teachers who haven’t gotten the kind of training and learning around the science, the true science of what’s happening in the reading brain,” Miller told school board members this week. “That’s what we’re after.”
Miller said Wake switched from balanced literacy to a more comprehensive approach that calls for a greater systematic use of phonics instruction.
“There’s no teacher out there that’s trying to make it difficult for students to not be able to read,” Miller said. “They are putting their heart and soul out there everyday.
“But we have not equipped them with that knowledge base. They haven’t learned that in undergrad and really everything that they learned maybe even 20 years ago is all updated.”
A report released this week from the National Council on Teacher Quality ranked North Carolina 12th in the nation in terms of teacher preparation programs teaching their students on the science of reading instruction.
Use of phonics stressed in reading
School administrators updated the school board this week on changes in the language arts curriculum. For instance, Wake increased this year use of the Letterland phonics-based program in second grade to provide 60 minutes of instruction a day. Letterland is already used in kindergarten and first grade.
Wake also this school year began using LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), a training program with a strong emphasis on phonics. Literacy coaches are being trained now, but it will be expanded next school year to include elementary school classroom teachers.
Wake is also now in its third year of phasing in the EL Education language arts curriculum in elementary and middle schools. The new curriculum has brought changes such as more culturally diverse books and students spending more time in groups discussing what they’ve read.
School officials say all these changes were needed because too many students weren’t getting enough help before.
“We’ve made a decision in the last five years to say in many areas what we’ve been doing has not been getting the results that all of our kids deserve,” said Drew Cook, Wake’s assistant superintendent for academics. “All we have to do is go one level beneath the surface of those averages across subgroups to see that we’re not much different from any other large district in the country.”
Some teachers have embraced the changes, Brittney Jennings shared how excited her fifth-grade students at Lincoln Heights Elementary became after reading “Esperanza Rising,” a book about a Mexican family that moves to California during the Depression to work in agriculture.
“They were saying, ‘Let’s stay inside for recess and continue talking about the book. I can relate to the characters,’” Jennings told school board members.
Rhonda McFarland said her fifth-grade students at Hodge Road Elementary now want to get involved in conversations when they sit in circles discussing the books.
“They’re coming to you and they want to read this multi-chapter book and go for it,” McFarland said. “They probably didn’t like reading in the first place. But now they’re trying. They’re challenging and pushing themselves.”
Some teachers oppose changes
But there ‘s been a backlash, with multiple school board members saying at this week’s student achievement committee meeting that teachers have complained to them about the changes. In particular, board members are hearing from second-grade teachers who are dealing this year with both the increased use of Letterland and the new EL Education curriculum.
“We’ve gotten emails from second-grade teachers who don’t necessarily want to give up what they’re doing because they feel like they’ve had really good results,” school board vice chairwoman Roxie Cash asked Miller. “What do we do about that?”
But Miller said it’s likely that the students who those teachers had good results with would have been successful with any strategy that was used. Miller said the strategies that some teachers learned when they were studying to become teachers are ineffective when helping students who have difficulty learning to read.
“There is a pedagogical shift in how we’re teach reading in those early years,” said Miller, who will start as principal of Lacy Elementary School in Raleigh next week. “It is uncomfortable for teachers who have been teaching in guided reading groups based on levels for decades.”
In the short-term though, Wake is reporting a drop since 2016 in the percentage of students in third, fourth, fifth and sixth grades who are passing the state’s end-of-grade reading exam. For instance, Wake says 69% of fifth-grade students passed the reading exam in 2016, compared to 61% in 2019.
But Wake is also reporting reading gains for kindergarten and first-grade students for each of the last three years. Scores are down in second grade, but that’s why Miller says Wake increased Letterland usage at that grade level.
Miller said the changes in how reading is taught in the early grades will carry over and help the students as they advance to the upper grades.
Wake slowing down new high school curriculum
The district is slowing down the reading changes in one area though.
Initially, Wake planned to have most high schools begin using a new in-house developed language arts curriculum this month. But now Wake plans to pilot it first starting this fall with a few schools before going districtwide.
The slowdown comes as Wake has faced criticism about how it started a new high school math curriculum that some parents want eliminated.
“This pumping of the brakes really just helps focus the intentionality and the things that we learned from rolling out other curriculums,” said school board member Lindsay Mahaffey. “I think that is huge.”
This story was originally published January 31, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
