In 2019, our district undertook a review of our early literacy curriculum and instructional model, which we acknowledged was simply not meeting the diverse needs of our students. While academic achievement had improved modestly, far too many students were still not reading on grade level, something that weighed heavily on everyone in the district.

The review revealed many pain points beyond test results — a lack of alignment to standards, teachers feeling overwhelmed by cross checking between materials to ensure we were covering things, and a failure to build knowledge and skills in a systematic, sequential fashion. It also revealed that we’d not provided our staff with the training they needed to build their capacity and confidence to expertly teach foundational literacy skills.

“We were grabbing things from 125 different places, from any place, covering things not spelled out in the Units of Study curriculum,” second grade teacher Stacey Vaillancourt said. “And it was so subjective. What one teacher was reading was not what another one was; there was no consistency.”

Maybe most importantly, we came to realize that our curriculum didn’t hold interest for many of our students. Too often texts emphasized Eurocentric characters and perspectives at the exclusion of providing a balance of windows and mirrors that connected knowledge to the lived experiences of all students. And because our old curriculum, Units of Study, was organized around text and writing genres as opposed to topics or themes, the scope and sequence made it difficult to cohesively build students’ background knowledge and vocabulary in a thoughtful and meaningful way, knowledge that all of our students need.

To further complicate things, a third-party review conducted by Johns Hopkins University of the texts being used in our classrooms revealed that students were being exposed to a steady diet of texts that lacked the depth and complexity expected for the grade level.

Motivated by these growing concerns, early in 2019, a team of 25 classroom teachers, special educators, multilingual teachers, and school and district leaders dug into student performance and growth data, consulted the research, and examined available reviews from EdReports. While the process was slowed slightly by the pandemic, our team emerged with a set of criteria through which prospective materials were considered, and ultimately, Salem Public Schools landed on an evidence-based curriculum resource that all K-2 classrooms began implementing this school year.

Moving a whole district to a new curriculum is a huge undertaking at any time, and certainly so following a school year disrupted by a pandemic and school closures.

Read the full article about literacy curriculum by Kate Carbone at The 74.