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Legislation related to reading instruction

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Legislation related to reading instruction

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The ‘Science of Reading’ in 2024: 5 State Initiatives to Watch

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These actions join a mounting tide of reading legislation across the country.

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Impact of knowledge-building curriculum 

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Impact of knowledge-building curriculum 

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Portage, Mich. -
Portage, Mich., is more than 500 miles from the ocean-so students here who attend Moorsbridge Elementary don't have much experience with tropical storms. They hardly ever make it up to the Great Lakes region.

And yet, the 4th graders at Moorsbridge know a lot about hurricanes.

In an English/language arts lesson last November, the class directed their teacher, Courtney Eiseler-Ward, as she drew a hurricane diagram at the front of the room. The students explained how to represent the storm, drawing on books they had read and videos they had watched.

The hurricane should look like a circle from above, they told her, because the collision of the hot air from the water and cold air from above makes it spin. Draw it in the middle of the ocean, they said, because that's where hurricanes form before making their way to the coast.

Conversations about wind speed and low-pressure systems might usually be the province of science classes. But in Portage, these subjects-along with topics in history, civics, and world cultures-are the bedrock of the English/language arts program.

Portage is one of a growing number of districts across the country to use what the field has begun to call a "." These ELA materials are designed to systematically grow students' content knowledge about the world, often by integrating social studies and science topics. The district implemented its program this year with middle school teachers. A group of early-adopter elementary school teachers began, too.

Unlike other ELA curricula, which often give teachers choices of books or allow students to pick their own, knowledge-building programs feature tightly constructed sequences of text that are all thematically related. And while students still practice comprehension strategies-such as summarizing or inferring-the curriculum prioritizes deeply understanding the content, rather than isolated skill exercises.

These programs stem from the idea, backed by research, that having a broad array of background knowledge makes individuals better readers. General world knowledge is correlated with reading-comprehension ability.

Versions of knowledge-building curricula have been around for decades, but the idea has recently gained new acolytes. Advocates in the "science of reading" movement have championed these programs, and the concept has been repopularized through the book The Knowledge Gap, which argues that teaching decontextualized reading skills is the root cause of the country's educational inequalities.

"The idea of ELA being about something is a really good one," said Gina Cervetti, a professor in the University of Michigan's Marsal Family School of Education who studies the intersection of literacy and content-area learning. It can help students think more deeply about big ideas, make connections across topics, and show their understanding through their writing, she said.

Still, what that content should be, how teaching it should integrate strategy instruction, and how to approach this large shift in teaching practices are open questions-and researchers and educators don't always agree on the answers.

The research behind 'knowledge-building'

A knowledge-building curriculum turns the focus on comprehension instruction on its head. Its primary goal is to teach content. Skills and strategies are still present, but they're a means to the end-not the end itself.

"The content becomes a chief driver," said Sonia Cabell, an associate professor at Florida State University's College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences. Cabell has co-authored several meta-analyses on the effect of teaching literacy skills and subject-area content in tandem.

Studies show that knowledge-building approaches that work in English classes share a few common traits, Cabell said.

Units are organized around content topics-such as plants or seasons-rather than general themes, such as "what makes a good friend?" They use text sets-readings and read-alouds-on conceptually linked topics to help students build a , or a mental model that allows them to apply what they've already learned to understand something new. The programs identify words to teach explicitly that will repeat throughout a unit. And writing and discussion prompts connect directly to the text and give students an opportunity to analyze what they've learned.

The texts that students are reading in these curriculum series are generally more complex than those in an average ELA class, said Jackie Eunjung Relyea, an assistant professor of literacy education at North Carolina State University.

In classrooms where teachers use leveled texts, which purport to match students' individualized reading levels, "the priority and emphasis is on readability," she said."But the texts they use in knowledge-building ELA programs challenge the students to engage critically," she said.

are still important in this equation, Relyea added. Teaching these strategies explicitly can help students become better readers, a large body of research shows. But students can use these strategies more proficiently when they have some knowledge about the text they're reading, said Cervetti.

"We have limited attention," she said. "If we're working really, really hard to understand a text that we're totally unfamiliar with, it's unlikely that we'll be leveraging those strategies."

(Recent EdWeek Research Center data, representing nearly 300 educators' responses, found that most agreed that both teaching content and comprehension skills were important. But more of them put a top priority on the skills.)

Even if the theory of action behind the knowledge-building approach is sound, researchers note that there are still things to learn about how it works. Knowledge about a specific topic makes it easier to read text about that topic-knowing a lot about ocean animals, for example, might help one understand a book about deep sea diving. But it's not always clear how far that knowledge can transfer to support understanding of other topics. Would knowing a lot about ocean animals help someone on a test of general ?

Some research has shown that a couple of commercially available knowledge-building programs can lead to better general reading-comprehension scores. But few programs that schools can purchase have gone through these independent tests, and as Cervetti put it, "there's a great difference between a controlled efficacy trial and use in the real world."

She also cautioned that any ELA program, no matter how rich in social studies and science content, shouldn't be considered a replacement for those courses. There are ways of reading, writing, and thinking that are unique to science, for example-analyzing and interpreting data or planning investigations.

If students' only science instruction is learning about science content in ELA, "we lose a lot of what is most essential about acquiring disciplinary understanding," Cervetti said.

How these curricula work in classrooms

In Eiseler-Ward's 4th grade classroom in Portage, where students were discussing the hurricane diagram, she and her co-teacher, Susan Pullo, prepared the class for their daily writing assignment: Write about why and how hurricanes form, using cause and effect sentences.

"Will your drawing help you?" Eiseler-Ward asked, referencing the diagram the class made together. "What else could you use?"

Students worked together in teams, flipping through the book they had read earlier that day on hurricanes to pick out key information. At one table, a student started to write that hurricanes form in oceans. Another jumped in to correct-" warm oceans," the second student said.

At the elementary school level, most of the lessons in the program that Portage uses follow the same format. First, teachers explicitly teach important vocabulary words or concepts-in this lesson, "atmosphere" and "evaporation." Then students read a text. (In earlier grades, they listen to a read-aloud.) Finally, the class completes a written response.

This structure isn't unique to a knowledge-building approach. But the questions that the curriculum asks students are vastly different from those in the district's previous programs, said Courtney Huff, a district literacy coach.

For instance, she said, the 4th grade team had always read Shiloh, a novel by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor about the bond between a boy and his dog, a text teachers felt was dull. This curriculum also happens to include Shiloh. But the lesson was transformed.

"The unit we were doing before was so surface-level," Huff said. The new unit plumbs deeper themes: What do the characters believe? What do they value? How do they change? "The kids would whine when it was time to put the books away," Huff said.

And in 5th grade, students study human rights by exploring young women's experiences in the Middle East under Taliban influence. They read The Breadwinner, a novel about an 11-year-old girl in Kabul, but also memoirs and first-person accounts from real children living in Afghanistan and a book about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani women's rights advocate who won the Nobel Peace Prize as a teenager. Incorporating knowledge from throughout the unit, students write about such sweeping questions as: "How do beliefs, ethics, and values influence behavior?" And: "When should you take a stand against injustice?"

"These big driving questions, kids can't get enough of talking about them-versus, 'who is the main character?'" said Mackenzie Sheahan, the district's director of K-8 curriculum and professional development.

Debating the question: Whose knowledge?

Having students read the same books and articles allows them to share a common language in class discussions. But taking this kind of prescriptive approach to the texts students read can also court controversy.

English classrooms have long been at the center of a political battle about whose voices to center in the classroom. A knowledge-building curriculum prescribes these decisions for an entire district, and it can bring these issues to a head.

Some commercially available knowledge-building programs have been criticized for having a Eurocentric slant, placing disproportionate emphasis on white, male authors and figures in history. Portage district leaders kept that in mind as they went through the curriculum-selection process. "We were really approaching it from the lens of, we want to represent every single person in our community," said Sheahan. The district is about 77 percent white, 6 percent Black, 8 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian, and 9 percent two or more races.

One of Portage's final choices didn't pass muster on its diversity, equity, and inclusion metrics. A consultant pointed out that it featured some illustrations that seemed to offer a distorted historical representation, including one of enslaved children playing happily on a plantation.

"That was kind of shocking to us," Sheahan said.

The program the district eventually picked met the district's DEI benchmarks. But this past summer, before schools even began using it, some school board members and parents started to speak out against the program, calling it "biased" and "socio-politically driven" in a tense board meeting.

The district responded by hosting a family literacy night to walk parents through the curriculum and answer any questions they had. Going forward, Sheahan said, it will be important to invite parental input and approval earlier about these kinds of curriculum changes. "What I've learned is we have to do the back work," she said.

In other districts, teachers are figuring out how to navigate some of the gray areas-a prescribed list of texts that meets their goals for representation in some ways but falls short in others.

In Evanston, Ill., 5th grade teacher Steve Yasukawa is in his first year using the district's new knowledge-building curriculum, a different program from Portage's.

He appreciates the tight link to social studies in the ELA materials, but he's had mixed feelings about the way the curriculum depicts Indigenous people in U.S. history. In the year's first unit, students explored the history of U.S. westward expansion and its effect on Indigenous tribes, specifically the Nimiipuu, also known as the Nez Perce.

That unit incorporated many primary sources that depicted Nimiipuu culture and presented maps that used not the state boundaries of today but the historic homelands of different Indigenous nations-choices that set students up for a "mental shift," Yasukawa said. The program was, literally, centering Indigenous voices.

But Yasukawa didn't agree with the curriculum writers' decision to use the term "Nez Perce" instead of Nimiipuu throughout the materials and felt that one novel in the unit inaccurately portrayed the relationship between the Nimiipuu and the U.S. government.

On balance, Yasukawa thought the pros of the unit outweighed the cons and knows that one curriculum won't perfectly meet all his needs. But the knowledge-building curriculum is harder to flex.

"The knowledge building in these modules is so specific to the text that if we moved away from these texts, it would take years" to adapt the lessons, he said.

Trying a new way of teaching

This is a key feature of knowledge-building programs: The texts are set, unlike programs that are based on student choice.

In the Evanston/Skokie schools, where Yasukawa teaches, district leaders have talked about the change as a way to advance equity. Reading programs that match children with different books often operate on a leveling system that can keep students who score lower on reading-comprehension tests perpetually behind their peers.

"If students are always given materials that are below grade level, they will never be able to achieve grade level," said Shyla Kinhal, the district's director of literacy.

With the new ELA program, all students read the same texts. Now, Kinhal said, district leaders are working to help teachers offer other kinds of support for students with different reading abilities. Before moving on to specific texts, teachers can teach important vocabulary and concepts, or they can pair students to read the text together-without changing the text itself.

In Portage, instructional coaches have also created worksheets that students can use to organize their thoughts as they read or before they write-resources that make explicit some of the reading and writing strategies that are more implicitly conveyed in the curriculum.

Even with all this support, though, students still struggle with some of the lessons. Teachers and district leaders in Portage agree that they're holding students to higher standards than they have in the past.

In one 6th grade English class, students were discussing similarities and differences between two brothers in the novel they were reading. Then, their teacher asked them to make connections to a news article they had read in an earlier class period about researchers' different theories for why siblings develop diverging personality traits. She asked them: What evidence does the novel demonstrate for any of these theories?

This question stumped the group for a while. Translating the scientific ideas in the article to apply to the brothers in the book was a heavy lift.

Yasukawa, in Evanston, has also struggled at times to help students synthesize information from class discussions and the curriculum's texts into their written work.

Still, students' interest in the discussion demonstrates to him that the curriculum is helping students really connect with the text they're reading.

"They love it. They love arguing," he said, remembering how students kept raising their hands, agreeing, and laughing with one another during a recent Socratic seminar.

In education, people always talk about the pendulum swing, Yasukawa said-the way that thought leaders and district administrators seize onto a new idea and decree that everything about the way teachers approach their work should change.

"I hope what I'm experiencing right now is not the end of the swing," he said. "I hope it's still bringing us in this direction of knowledge-building and making connections-because the kids are really engaged."

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Reading Comprehension Hinges on Building Knowledge. New Curricula Aim to Help

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Students need to know a lot of content to become good readers. Enter new curriculum series, which prioritized shared texts exploring history, science, and literature.

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Using neuroscience to help learners stay engaged and retain information.

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Teachers can use insights from neuroscience to help ensure that learners stay engaged during class and are more likely to retain information.

In this article, we'll touch on insights from neuroscience about the attention-getting system of the brain. Understanding this process informs teachers about specific techniques they can employ to capture students' attention as new topics are introduced.

The brain evolved to promote survival. Every second, millions of bits of sensory information from the receptors of the eyes, ears, internal organs, skin, and muscles make their way to the brain's attention entry gate, but only about 1 percent of it enters consciousness. The system that determines what gets in (i.e., what the brain attends to) is the reticular activating system (RAS). This primitive network of cells in the lower brain stem, through which all sensory input must pass to reach any higher regions of the brain, is essentially the same in your cat, your dog, your child, and you.

In the wild, an organism is well-served by an attention system that gives priority to things that are unexpected, changing, and different from the usual. This is the key to the RAS attention gate: Any perceived source of danger is prioritized. However, in the absence of threat, attention is directed to any changes in an animal's or human's environment.

CAPTURING ATTENTION IN THE CLASSROOM

Although survival in the wild isn't much of a priority for most humans today, the RAS is still programmed to attend to perceived threats and change. If students feel physically and psychologically unsafe in a school or a classroom, they're less likely to focus their attention on the lesson. As noted earlier, in the absence of perceived threat, our brains are particularly receptive to what's new, curious, or unexpected.

In school, the students' brains are always attending... just not always on the topics we're teaching! When students aren't attentive to a lesson or a textbook, the RAS isn't giving priority entry to the teacher's voice or words on the page, but to other more interesting or distracting sights, feelings, and thoughts.

In order to capitalize on the brain's selectivity, here are six practical and proven attention-getters you can use at the start of a new unit or lesson.

1. Surprise students

Since the brain is attracted to novelty, do something unusual or unexpected to arouse curiosity and open the RAS attention filter.

Examples: Wear something unique, bring in an unusual object, or play a song when students enter the room to promote curiosity, hence focus. Tell students that there's a link between your clothes, the object, or the words in the song and something in the lesson. Invite them to guess what it is.

At the beginning of a unit on negative numbers, or on past tense in language, a teacher enters the room by walking backward and then asks students to guess why.

2. Present odd facts, anomalies, or discrepant events

The brain is fundamentally a pattern-making organ. Constructing patterns enables humans to make sense of the world. However, when an established or expected pattern is broken, the brain is immediately aroused.

Example: A science teacher blows up a balloon, then slowly pierces one end with a sharpened wooden cooking skewer. To the amazement of students, the teacher pushes the skewer through the opposite side of the balloon without bursting it. Students are transfixed and want to see the demonstration again!

3. Invite students' predictions

The ability to make sound predictions is fundamental to survival, and the brain rewards successful prediction through its release of dopamine, a pleasure-inducing chemical. Teachers can provide opportunities for students to make predictions about the relationship of the curious sensory input or other novelty to the lesson. When this happens, students will seek information to help them make correct predictions and remain attentive as their brains seek to find out if their predictions are correct.

Examples: In a science lesson for first graders, ask children to predict which objects will float and which will sink in a tub of water. A high school psychology teacher can ask students to predict the results of a schoolwide student survey. In both cases, students are engaged and eager to find out if their predictions are correct.

4. Pose a provocative (hook) question

A stimulating question can be an "itch" in students' brains that they'll want to scratch.

Can what you eat prevent zits? Does a fart contain DNA? Is aging a disease? What superpower would you want?

The best hook questions are open-ended. They're meant to stimulate thinking and discussion and to open the door to further exploration. Give students a reasonable amount of quiet thinking time before they answer. Have them do a quick write about their thoughts and/or engage in a think-pair-share with another student. After this personal engagement, learners are likely to be more attentive to your teaching on the related topic.

5. Cite a current event or issue relevant to students

Students often have opinions about current events or controversial issues in their school, town, state, etc., and these can be used to spark engagement.

Example: For a unit on persuasive writing, a middle school teacher shows a newspaper article about a school board proposal in another district that would require students to wear uniforms. Students then discuss the pros and cons, state their position, and even switch sides to try to better understand different perspectives and develop rebuttals, all as an opening to the unit on persuasion.

Humor is a guaranteed dopamine booster and can serve as a great attention hook.

Example: A sixth-grade mathematics teacher begins a unit on ratio and proportion by presenting funny caricatures of celebrities. She asks students to describe why the pictures are funny, and they note that various physical features (e.g., eyes, nose, ears, head) of the characters are greatly exaggerated. Then, the teacher shows da Vinci's Vitruvian Man to illustrate idealized proportions of the human body.

Hook and Hold Attention

We recommend that you rotate your attention-getting techniques to avoid being predictable. The intent of using the techniques described above is to hook student attention, but the intent isn't simply to gain immediate attention for the moment. The longer-term goal is to hold that attention over time. There are numerous ways to capitalize on initial attention by employing active-learning strategies, including the use of authentic tasks and projects, inquiry-oriented instruction, cooperative learning, Socratic seminars, simulations and role-plays, and design thinking (e.g., using makerspaces, where students can create tangible products), and allowing students appropriate "voice and choice" options in assignments and performance tasks.

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Teachers can use insights from neuroscience to help ensure that learners stay engaged during class and are more likely to retain information.

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On a tiny triangular lot in the city's Belmont neighborhood, kids waiting with their parents for the No. 40 bus can also work on their executive functioning skills, playing a hopscotch variation designed to train their brains.

In Chicago, a wooden game mounted on the wall of a laundromat teaches children, in two languages, how to find color patterns in a lineup of detergent bottle tops.

And in Santa Ana, Calif., a basketball court doubles as a giant, real-time fractions lesson.

These are three examples of an unusual model of on-the-fly learning mixed with urban design, one that has emerged from decades of research on the role of play in kids' lives.

The installations, overseen by the Philadelphia-based Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network, come compliments of a unique team of researchers, educators and urban planners who are exploring how cities can support the learning kids do in school. In the process, they're experimenting with how to turn ordinary adult-child interactions into opportunities to lift even the neediest kids - especially those whose parents can't afford expensive afterschool and weekend activities.

"We're trying to layer on to places and spaces where kids and families already spend time," said Sarah Lytle, a developmental psychologist and Playful Learning's executive director. For instance, if a mother and child are already at the grocery store, the network greets them with colorful signage that encourages conversations around sorting different kinds of produce.

Likewise, the installations don't demand a lot from adults - in fact, they often offer a place to rest and recharge while kids take the initiative.

Preliminary research on the effort is promising, with nearly 20 studies pointing to the efficacy of the approach. The supermarket project, for instance, addresses a problem that besets low-income families: Research shows these parents talk informally with their children less often than middle-class parents do. And even when they do, the conversations tend to be shorter. The supermarket project significantly increased both the frequency and length of those conversations, especially among low-income families, one study showed. Adults were nearly four times as likely to chat with their kids if a store had the signage, bringing their level of conversation up to that of middle-class parents.

Philadelphia's bus stop installation, designed by architect Itai Palti and known as the Urban Thinkscape, offers several ways for children to play, among them an original twist on hopscotch: When they see one foot on a tile, they put two feet down, and vice versa when they see two. This game of opposites, Lytle said, works kids' executive functioning skills, "which we know is really important for all kinds of later development."

In the laundromat, an eye-level matching game offers children a chance to place plastic laundry bottle caps according to prescribed patterns - as with the Philly bus stop installation, Lytle said, to keep the learning playful, kids need to be in control.

"An adult might set up the environment for a child, but an important piece of it is that the learning is always directed by the child."

Education in 'surround-sound'

Playful learning advocates are quick to emphasize that these interventions are limited, not meant to replace school but support it.

"The reality is that kids, particularly in their earliest years, only spend about 20% of their waking hours in those formal learning environments," said Lytle. "And so the idea is: How can we capitalize on that other 80%?"

That key question long puzzled a pair of researchers in the Philadelphia area: Temple University's Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and the University of Delaware's Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, who have spent nearly 15 years studying the centrality of play and non-school factors in children's learning. Much of the bedrock theory for this effort comes from their research.

"We are increasingly learning that education is a 'surround-sound' issue," Hirsh-Pasek said. "It's not an issue that stays behind brick walls, but it seeps out into the community."

"The reality is that kids, particularly in their earliest years, only spend about 20% of their waking hours in those formal learning environments. And so the idea is: How can we capitalize on that other 80%?"
Sarah Lytle, executive director, Playful Learning Landscapes

Any effort that aims to educate must do three things, she maintains: It should be culturally aligned with families' backgrounds, follow the science of how children actually learn and measure what matters to families.

Humans learn best, Hirsh-Pasek noted, when we're active and engaged, usually with other people. School lessons are typically passive, she said, and not really built around meaningful questions. "I mean, frankly, I don't care if the train is traveling 30 miles an hour and the ball drops off the train. Learning abstract content is important, but we learn more deeply and in ways that 'stick' when examples are meaningful. We can do better."

When it comes to measurement, Hirsh-Pasek said schools typically don't focus enough on what families want most: Good communication skills, creativity, critical thinking and knowing the basics. They want their kids to be able to learn from failure and cultivate what's become known as a "growth mindset," persevering in the face of hardship.

Lytle, who oversees Playful Learning work from her office in Seattle, studied with Hirsh-Pasek at Temple in the 2000s. At the time, Hirsh-Pasek was becoming one of the first early childhood researchers to take play seriously, at a time when the larger field of education was focused laser-like on basic skills.

Helping Those Who Help Young People Play, Learn and Grow Outside of School

"It's something that serious researchers didn't get into," Lytle said, "but she thought it was really important. She sometimes says 'play' used to be a four letter word."

The work that followed laid out not only playful learning's theoretical framework, but helped researchers see how much kids are learning as they play.

As with the grocery store signage, a 2018 study on the bus stop installation found that families had longer conversations there than at a neighborhood playground, and that they talked more about STEM topics such as numbers, fractions, patterns and measurement. A follow-up 2020 study found that both caregivers and kids put their phones away while at the site.

But as steeped in delight as it is, the work isn't without thorny real-world challenges, as when Lytle recently gave a journalist a tour of Philly's Urban Thinkscape, one of the city's earliest successes from 2017, and one that serves as a model for how educators and developers can transform formerly neglected stretches of pavement.

"Frankly, I don't care if the train is traveling 30 miles an hour and the ball drops off the train. Learning abstract content is important, but we learn more deeply and in ways that 'stick' when examples are meaningful. We can do better."
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, professor, Temple University

The space, in a set of busy crossroads, bristles with wooden-plank walkways and activities like the one-foot/two-foot hopscotch, word and picture puzzles built on protective railings, and a steel sculpture that, at midday, reveals shadows of hidden objects on the ground beneath.

But as Lytle showed a visitor around, a neighborhood man approached and asked if she was there to help with the rats.

Not quite sure how to react, Lytle said she was simply touring the space, but the man persevered, saying the ground beneath the installationwas "full of rats. Big rats."

Matter-of-factly, Lytle replied, "O.K. That's good to know." She suggested contacting an official who oversees the property, adding, "I think we're working on relocating this, actually."

She later said the network has actually begun encouraging communities to keep repurposing spaces like these as they age.

An idea goes global

Challenges aside, the Playful Learning idea is starting to spread around the globe.

At the moment, five other cities - Pittsburgh, Chicago, Santa Ana, Calif., Tel Aviv and Lima, Peru, are in the middle of concerted efforts to create these spaces. Other cities are also dipping their toes into the water, including Omaha and Durham, N.C.

Mostly foundation-funded, they're also affordable in most cases - the supermarket signage costs about $60 per store. And a few cities are beginning to work the installations' management into their annual budgets, with line items for a playful learning coordinator. In Philly, the effort is largely funded by the William Penn Foundation, which has invested nearly $13.7 million since 2017.

The expansions got a boost from a 2020 agreement with the Brookings Institution, the renowned Washington, D.C., think tank, which is pushing to scale the project so that more cities can join, pairing experts in early education and development with those in urban policy.

A New Push for Play-Based Learning: Why Districts Say It's Leading to More Engaged Students, Collaborative Classmates ... and Better Grades

Brookings' Jennifer Vey said the installations can have a broader impact beyond improving interactions between kids and parents: They can impact cities' health. Because efforts like these bring families together in public spaces where they feel safe enough to bring their children, "it helps strengthen the civic fabric of a place." And of course it brings potential economic benefits, supporting the small businesses that surround these social spaces.

It can also enrich public schools' offerings, said Rigo Rodriguez, a Santa Ana Unified School board member and professor of Latino public policy at California State University-Long Beach. The school board has long sought a new kind of intervention in a district where about 80% of entering kindergartners are English language learners and one-third of students come from families living below the poverty line.

With the help of Andres S. Bustamante, a University of California-Irvine professor, the district began repainting elementary school basketball courts to create a game he calls Fraction Ball. In the game, a goal from the traditional three-point line earns just one point, with smaller arcs closer to the basket representing shots worth 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 points on one end of the court, and 1/3 and 2/3 points on the opposite end. Fractions line one side of the court, decimals the other.

"There's a limitation to strategies that just try to reform an educational system, because they depend on people who show up. It really struck me that what we can do as a district is to support the creation of learning environments across the board, right where every child is."
Rigo Rodriguez, school board member, Santa Ana Unified School District

"We want it to be playful and embodied and outdoors and to be more conceptual than procedural," Bustamante said. "You're getting an idea of what a fraction means."

As part of the game's debut, researchers tracked student's math skills in fourth and fifth grades. They found that Fraction Ball led to " significant gains " in children's understanding of how to convert decimals to fractions and vice versa - impressive for an informal intervention that only lasted three weeks, Bustamante said. It encouraged researchers to create an in-class curriculum around the game.

"The reality is that kids do have to learn the procedural stuff," Bustamante said. "They need to know how to find the common denominator and add unlike fractions and all that stuff."

All the same, the achievement data persuaded the school board to bring the game to all 35 elementary schools, Rodriguez said.

"There's a limitation to strategies that just try to reform an educational system, because they depend on people who show up," he said. "It really struck me that what we can do as a district is to support the creation of learning environments across the board, right where every child is."

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From Bus Stops to Laundromats, Cities Embrace Play to Help Kids Learn

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Philadelphia and other cities are quietly building installations like the "Urban Thinkscape" to layer on learning where families already spend time.

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The rate of students chronically missing school got so bad during the pandemic that it will likely be 2030 before classrooms return to pre-COVID norms, a new report says.

But even that prediction rests on optimistic assumptions about continued improvement in the coming years. For some states, it could take longer. In Louisiana, Oregon and South Carolina, for example, the percentage of students chronically absent for at least 10% of the school year went up in 2022-23, according to the analysis from the American Enterprise Institute.

The report, based on available data from 39 states, calls chronic absenteeism "schools' greatest post-pandemic challenge."

Post-Pandemic, 2 Out of 3 Students Attend Schools With High Chronic Absenteeism

"We need to make a hard pivot moving forward," said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank. Minor decreases in chronic absenteeism rates are not enough to stave off "a disaster for the long term" he said, especially in low-performing and high-poverty districts that had serious absenteeism problems before the pandemic.

Malkus, a former middle school teacher, called for districts to make attendance a high priority, especially among elementary educators. Parents, he said, are more likely to respond to messages from children's teachers than from "a stranger from the school district."

The report, one of two separate studies of chronic absenteeism released Wednesday, further underscores the enormity of a national crisis that is hindering students' ability to recover academically from the pandemic. The second analysis shows a substantial increase in the share of districts where at least 30% of students missed 18 or more days of school.

The review of federal data breaks down the rates into five levels of chronic absenteeism, with extreme being the highest.

"We came up with these categories before the pandemic," said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works. At that point, nearly 11% of districts nationally had extreme levels. "Then the pandemic hit, and it was like 'Oh my God.' "

By 2021-22, the rate had more than tripled to almost 39%, according to the report, the final installment in a three-part series from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. The data "compels action from state education agencies and policymakers," researchers wrote.

6 Hidden & Not-So-Hidden Factors Driving America's Student Absenteeism Crisis

'It's alarming'

Some state lawmakers share that sense of urgency. So far, eight bills in seven states aim to reestablish good attendance habits among the nation's students.

Earlier this month, a Maryland Senate judicial committee called interim state chief Carey Wright to testify about whether news reports of shockingly high rates in Baltimore - with over half of students repeatedly missing school - were true.

"It's alarming," she told the members, after sharing district and state-level data. "We have a lot of children who are chronically absent at very young grades, and that's a real concern, particularly when you're thinking that they're starting their educational career."

In Maryland, 274 schools out of 1,388 had an extreme chronic absenteeism rate in 2017-18. By 2021-22, that number had reached 700.

Lori Phelps, principal of Woodbridge Elementary in Catonsville, joined Wright to explain how her staff reduced its rate from 28% in 2021-22 to just over 9% in 2022-23.

Identifying patterns that increase absences is part of the answer, she added. For example, students were more likely to miss school on early-release days, so the staff worked with parent leaders to offer an afternoon program on those days. The PTA charged $10, but waived the fee for students with the most absences.

"We all want to prioritize those very important state scores," Phelps said, "but we made a decision two years ago to prioritize attendance."

No buses

But even parents determined to get their children to school face significant obstacles if they don't have transportation. In Colorado, every district has cut bus routes to save money or because of driver shortages, said Michelle Exstrom, education director for the National Conference of State Legislatures. She serves on a state task force expected to propose transportation solutions by the end of the year.

"In rural areas all over the country, where kids don't have a ride to school, it's like, duh, they're not going to be at school," she said. A lot of parents can't leave work at 2:30 to pick up their children, she said, and even high school students with cars often can't drive to school because there's not enough parking, she said.

In Ohio, two lawmakers think some extra cash might reduce chronic absenteeism in kindergarten and ninth grade, two grade levels with rates around 30%.

The bill, from Democrat Rep. Dani Isaacsohn and Republican Rep. Bill Seitz, would offer $500 annually to families in low-income districts to boost attendance rates in those grades and ideally save money on dropout recovery services in the long run. If the plan passes, it would start as a pilot this fall .

Seitz told The 74 he expects "significant supportive testimony," based on the success of a similar program led by a philanthropist in Michigan.

As Nation Reels from Chronic Absenteeism, Indiana Confronts it in the Extreme

Another proposal in Washington, which had a 30% chronic absenteeism rate last year, would provide grants for home visits and tutoring to keep frequently absent high school students on track for graduation. And a Virginia bill would update the definition of "educational neglect" to include a parent's failure to comply with attendance requirements.

'Studied in real time'

But both Malkus and Chang expressed skepticism of state solutions that fail to factor in the highly localized nature of the problem. In Oregon, for example, one reason chronic absenteeism levels haven't dropped is because "there are whole communities still feeling the effects of wildfires," said Marc Siegel, spokesman for the state education department. In general, Malkus said it's unlikely state legislation would be "a rapid-enough response." And Chang worried that legislators could be "too prescriptive."

"I think folks have to have local flexibility to unpack the issues," she said.

But she does think states are helping in at least one critical area: producing more accurate and timely data.

In the past, it was often June before states released chronic absenteeism data from the year before - a fact that delayed efforts to help students. In Rhode Island, the public can even monitor the percentage of students at each school on track to be chronically absent by the end of the year. Malkus would like to see more leaders take that approach.

"If we want to address it with eyes wide open," he wrote, "chronic absenteeism needs to be studied in real time."

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Report: Schools Won't Recover from COVID Absenteeism Crisis Until at Least 2030

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Dire news from two separate studies require a 'hard pivot,' researchers say - and some lawmakers are starting to listen.

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How school districts will make critically important decisions about remaining stimulus aid over the next year

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How school districts will make critically important decisions about remaining stimulus aid over the next year

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First came a historic amount of money. Now comes a series of daunting questions.

School districts across the U.S. have been allocated an estimated $190 billion in federal funding over the past three years as part of a broad effort to help school districts recover from the financial, health, and academic setbacks brought on by the pandemic.

That money has supported an astonishing range of programs in the nation's schools, including improvements to HVAC systems, Chromebook purchases, social-emotional learning, summer programs, and tutoring. But soon, school districts must adjust to a new reality: that the last of the money will need to be committed by the end of September 2024.

EdWeek Market Brief's new special report, The End of K-12 Stimulus Funding: What Comes Next, looks at how school districts will make critically important decisions about remaining stimulus aid over the next year. But the report also goes well beyond that, exploring which programs are most likely to be cut when the money runs out, what alternate sources of funding districts will turn to, who in K-12 systems will make decisions about stimulus and post-stimulus policy, and how education companies are attempting to make their case to districts to keep their products off the chopping block.

The report is based primarily on a series of nationally representative surveys of K-12 decision-makers conducted by the EdWeek Research Center, as well as on analyses and insights provided by EdWeek Market Brief's editorial team.

Among the report's key findings:

School systems have ploughed through a significant amount of their stimulus aid already. About 8 in 10 say they have gone through at least three-quarters of that money. Only a small minority say the bulk of their funding is unspent.

K-12 officials foresee major academic consequences when federal stimulus aid runs out. Two-thirds of those surveyed say the loss of that money will have a negative impact on learning over the next two years.

Many of the same programs that have benefited from the heaviest investments of stimulus aid - particularly in academic recovery and supports for student well-being - are also those that school district officials are now preparing to scale back, the survey research finds.

When federal emergency aid runs out, districts expect to rely most heavily on their general funds to support programs they've invested in over the past few years - a reminder of the tradeoffs and tough decisions districts will face on which products/services to keep.

Many K-12 businesses are planning proactive strategies to avoid being adversely affected by the loss of federal aid. More than a third of K-12 businesses surveyed by EdWeek Market Brief have planned or conducted marketing campaigns to tout their products' value, and another third have helped districts identify alternate sources of aid.

The report also explores the standards school districts will use to evaluate whether to keep using stimulus-funded products and services. District and school leaders are choosing a mix of hard and soft metrics, which will include some combination of test results, usage data, and anecdotal feedback that superintendents, chief academic officers, chief technology officers, and others get from teachers and students.

In addition to the survey-based research, the report offers answers to key factual questions on the deadlines school districts face for committing and spending their share of stimulus funds, and what's known about new flexibility that school systems have been granted by federal officials.

Go here for more information on accessing EdWeek Market Brief's report. It's an essential primer on how districts are making use of the historic level of stimulus aid, and how they're preparing for life without it.

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New Special Report: What the Loss of Stimulus Funding Will Mean for the K-12 Market - Market Brief

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EdWeek Market Brief breaks down the results of its surveys of K-12 officials on how they are preparing for the drying up of billions of dollars in emergency federal aid.

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K-12 Enrollment Fails to Emerge from Pandemic, Federal Data Shows

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Reflecting fall 2022 figures, Louisiana saw the most growth, while several states saw declines of at least 4%.

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On a recent walk after spending a day working with middle school teachers on engagement strategies, I was listening to the "We Can Do Hard Things" podcast. The guest, Allison Russell, was talking about the emotional intelligence of young people and mentioned that she'd just learned that her daughter was part of Generation Alpha, which refers to people born after 2010. This was the first time I heard this term, which is surprising given that my own two children and many of the children I support are of this generation.

I had questions and I wanted to know more. As I learned more about the attributes of the youngest generation, I began to think about the implications for educators.

I've spent two decades as a literacy specialist coaching teachers and providing professional development and I've seen a lot of transition in the field. I've supported teachers as they navigate frustration about rapidly changing curricular trends and assessment requirements, figure out where they stand on teaching reading, and - over the past few years - learn how to reach students during and after the height of the pandemic.

Currently, I coach teachers across 18 K-12 schools in the Campbell Kapolei Complex Area in Ewa Beach and Kapolei Hawaii. In conversations with teachers and leaders about the current problems in our schools including academic delays and behavioral challenges, COVID-19 is most often pointed to as the culprit.

In my heart, I've known for some time that the challenges facing our youth go beyond the pandemic. Learning about what makes Generation Alpha so unique has helped me understand how we might shift our practices accordingly to lean into the strengths of this generation.

Understanding Generation Alpha

The name "Generation Alpha," was coined by Mark McCrindle, a generational researcher and corporate consultant in Australia. According to McCrindle, the children of Generation Alpha began being born in 2010, the year the iPad and Instagram were launched. From their earliest years, he says, "they have been screenagers."

In a 2015 interview with the New York Times, when asked about the name "Generation Alpha," McCrindle said "It didn't make sense to go back to A," noting that it's the first generation to be fully born in the 21st century. "They are the start of something new, not a return to the old," he added.

McCrindle was right. These children are unlike any generation before them, which may be said of all generations; however, it is indisputable that the children of Gen Alpha have access to more information and connectivity at an earlier age than any other generation, and we need to consider that as we educate them.

This generation was 10-years-old or younger when the world shut down due to COVID-19. They experienced a world besieged by a virus and now they carry an ingrained understanding that the action of one can affect the well-being of many.

These kids are arguably the first generation who had devices in their hands before they could walk. They intrinsically understand how connected the world is, whether through witnessing a virus moving through the globe rapidly, communicating with family many miles away on FaceTime, or developing close friendships through social media with people they may never meet in person. These truths are simply part of how the Generation Alpha's worldview is being formed.

Most of the oldest students of this generation are now in middle school. As they move through adolescence, transitioning from childhood to adulthood, they're finding ways to leave their mark on the world. This year, I've been working closely with middle school teachers at multiple schools and I've seen that they're struggling more than ever. I have been part of numerous conversations about how these students have a more challenging time conforming to the current norms of schooling. I've heard many teachers and administrators talk of learning loss, behavioral challenges and developmental stagnation due to the pandemic. And I've heard repeatedly that engagement is low. Teachers are frustrated that students do not seem to have the academic or social skills expected in middle school and often share that their students do not care about learning.

Somehow, it always seems to come back to the years students missed during the pandemic and how the loss of those previous learning experiences is preventing them from being successful now.

But, I'm curious whether something else is also at play. I wonder what this generation knows that we aren't measuring? What have they learned that is not demonstrated on the tests they take? How are educators creating conditions to prepare them to mold this new world they were born into?

Leaning Into the Strengths of This Generation

My focus this year with middle school teachers has been on learner engagement. Developing a greater understanding of the unique strengths of Generation Alpha has helped.

This generation of learners can access whatever information they want, which may be the reason many educators I work with are noticing they are no longer engaged in learning at school. Many of these kids (falsely) believe that there is nothing their teacher can teach them that they cannot discover online. So, the ever present challenge of making learning relevant has become even more difficult.

One way to create relevance and engagement for our students is to lean into what they value. To help educators do that, I often ask them: "Do we know what our students value? If not, how can we find out?" One snag for middle school teachers is that many of their students are still figuring out who they are and what they value, so our role is to support them in that exploration as we craft learning experiences.

As I've worked alongside these teachers to consider what it means to successfully reach their students, we've discussed how to leverage the strengths of this generation of learners, including connectedness, curiosity, a capacity for empathy and a desire for change.

This generation has a deep sense of global connection, which teachers can tap into. The teachers I coach say their students use technology to effortlessly connect with people across the world. Designing assignments that offer students opportunities to create something they can share with a wider audience - where their voices can extend beyond the classroom - has increased engagement.

Curiosity is another Generation Alpha attribute that I encourage educators to build upon. Having information at their fingertips has made these kids curious and we need to create space for the big questions they have. Building more choice into learning allows students to explore their curiosity. When I work with educators, we often begin with a lesson plan that has been taught many times before and consider how we might tweak it to provide more choice. Sometimes that means having more ownership over what they learn. Other times it means getting a say in how they learn or how they demonstrate what they understand.

Although it may not seem like it through the angst of adolescence, most of the middle school teachers I work with say their students have a large capacity for empathy and a desire for change. In part, that's due to their stage of development, but it's also related to their connectivity. Through their digital worlds, these students are exposed to more people and ideas than generations before them. That, of course, comes with drawbacks. For example, I talk a lot with educators about how their students' social lives look quite different than ours may have, and we must teach them how to be cautious online and how to be good digital citizens. But it's also due to these rich digital lives that these students are aware of issues beyond their neighborhoods and communities, and why many are passionate about solving a variety of challenges, such as environmentalism and homelessness. Tapping into what our students care about most can help us teach them in a way that will empower them to make change.

These students are at their best when they believe that they can fight for what is right, and win. As educators, although we cannot fully prepare them for what is to come because it is deeply uncertain, we can walk alongside them, share our life experiences, knowledge and wisdom with them. But it's important to honor their paths and resist the impulse to force them on the well-traveled road. After all, the path they will follow is one we have yet to traverse.

In the book "Becoming Wise," Krista Tippett, a journalist and 2014 winner of the National Humanities Medal, writes, "The interesting and challenging thing about this moment is that we know the old forms aren't working. But we can't yet see what the new forms will be." What if children of Generation Alpha have insights into these new forms? Are we equipping them with the skills and confidence to bring these new forms to life in beautiful, joyous and just ways?

As the Alpha generation goes through the transformation of adolescence, we must be there to nurture their vision and foster their power as they forge what comes next.

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What Educators Need to Know about Generation Alpha - EdSurge News

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On a recent walk after spending a day working with middle school teachers on engagement strategies, I was listening to the "We Can Do Hard Things" ...

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The educator shortage crisis is real, and it requires immediate and sustained attention to identify and implement long-term solutions to improve educator recruitment and retention.

Every child needs and deserves a neighborhood school with well-prepared teachers, class sizes that enable one-on-one attention, and nurses, counselors, and healthy meals to ensure they can thrive. That is why educators at all levels-school district leaders; local, state, and national policymakers; families; and communities- must work together to solve this problem.

The good news is that we know what to do; we have the solutions in front of us. We cannot and should not turn from them and rely on short-term fixes.

In a new report, NEA outlines a wide variety of long-term strategies and solutions that are effective at recruiting and retaining educators and, most importantly, reflect the needs and priorities of educators themselves.

Across the country, educators and their unions, school and district administrators, and policymakers are working together to make education an attractive and competitive career.

How did we get here? These six charts show how educators are being pushed out of the profession by low wages and a lack of respect-if they even consider becoming an educator in the first place.

While we have a long way to go, the path to achieving a well-staffed, equitable, and just public education system is clear.

1. A Crisis Already Well Underway, Exacerbated by the Pandemic

Multiple indicators point toward an educator shortage crisis that has been brewing for more than a decade, since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.

Figure 1 uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) to show job opening and hiring trends for the public education sector, which cover all positions in Pre-K-12 and higher education.

Looking at the area shaded in gray, it is evident that job openings started to outpace hires in late 2017, more than two years before the onset of the pandemic.

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6 Charts That Explain the Educator Shortage | NEA

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Educator shortages started before COVID-19 but were exacerbated by the pandemic. Shortages span many categories of school staff. Here are 4 graphs to explain what's happening.

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New York City kicked off its new literacy curriculum mandate this year, requiring elementary schools in nearly half of its districts to choose among three curriculums. One pick dominated: Into Reading, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Teachers wondered whether the same curriculum - which has won mixed reviews from educators - would continue to gain traction, as every elementary school must join the initiative by September 2024.

Now, there's an answer: All elementary schools in 22 of the city's 32 local districts will be required to use Into Reading, according to the Education Department.

The program's popularity means the majority of the city's elementary school students will soon use the same curriculum for reading. That's a major shift, as the city's previous approach gave principals leeway to choose their own materials.

It represents a big bet that one flagship curriculum will help schools Chancellor David Banks achieve his top goal: improving the city's literacy rates. And it's also a striking outcome given the Education Department vetted three options that officials said are high quality, including Wit & Wisdom, from a company called Great Minds, and EL Education, both of which have won praise from some advocates and educators.

Five districts will require EL Education, and five will use Wit & Wisdom, including Brooklyn's District 15, where schools with dual-language programs will use Into Reading. It's the only district that did not use a single choice across its campuses. (A full list of each district's curriculum choice is included below.)

"It seems like, once again, Into Reading really wins," said Susan Neuman, a professor at New York University and literacy expert.

Some educators and advocates have raised concerns about Into Reading, including that it is not culturally responsive enough. But Neuman said there is little definitive evidence about what the curriculum's popularity will mean for student learning. "It's really difficult to say one is better than another at this point," she said of the three options the city selected.

Neuman and others said the three newly mandated curriculums are likely an improvement over the materials many schools have used in recent years, including a popular program created by Teachers College Professor Lucy Calkins. Backed by a growing chorus of experts, Banks has argued that Calkins' curriculum has not worked, in part because it doesn't include enough systematic instruction on the relationship between sounds and letters, known as phonics. It also includes some discredited methods, such as using pictures to guess what a word says.

The Education Department said it picked three curriculums more aligned with longstanding research about how children learn to read, often referred to as the science of reading. Separately, the city has required schools to use an approved phonics program alongside the three reading programs. Using a single curriculum across districts will allow the city to scale up more effective teacher training efforts, since materials won't vary as much from campus to campus. Students who transfer schools will be less likely to start from scratch with a new curriculum.

Into Reading gets foothold in NYC schools even before the mandate

There are several reasons Into Reading likely has proved to be the most popular choice among local superintendents, who were tasked with making the final decision for their districts. The program is perceived to be the most traditional option and easier to roll out, with more regimented step-by-step lessons. And unlike the other two approved programs, Into Reading has a Spanish version that may appeal to schools with dual-language offerings.

"It's so scripted, and if superintendents and district teams are worried about implementation, it could be easier" than the other choices, said a staffer in a local superintendent's office who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the company behind Into Reading, also deployed a savvy marketing strategy. The publishing house made digital materials free for schools to use during the pandemic, potentially helping it gain a foothold in several districts. Superintendents may have been more compelled to select a curriculum already in their schools, since switching materials can be a difficult and time consuming process.

EL, Wit & Wisdom gain slightly more traction in second round

Despite Into Reading's popularity, the other two curriculums were slightly more popular among superintendents who are part of the second phase of the mandate beginning this coming fall. Both Wit & Wisdom and EL Education place a greater emphasis on boosting students' background knowledge, advocates say, a key element for boosting students' reading comprehension across a wide range of subjects.

Those curriculums often lean on challenging nonfiction readings in an effort to ensure students are reading at their grade level, though some educators have said they can be difficult for students who are behind.

Some superintendents in the city's more affluent neighborhoods, where certain schools have long-standing commitments to Calkins' program, seemed to gravitate to Wit & Wisdom and El Education. District 2, which snakes from the West Village to the Upper East Side, is using Wit & Wisdom as is District 3, which covers Manhattan's Upper West Side.

District 15, which includes Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Sunset Park, and Red Hook in Brooklyn split its schools between Wit & Wisdom and Into Reading. Still, other districts with fewer children from lower-income households - including Bayside, Queens District 26, and Staten Island - are using Into Reading. And some high-poverty areas, such as District 7 in the South Bronx are using EL Education.

Curriculum choices are only one part of the equation, though. Experts say the quality of teacher training and how committed educators are to making changes are also crucial. Among teachers in the first phase of the curriculum mandate this fall, some educators said they haven't received as much support as they hoped.

"It's been effective, but they say they want more of it - that it has to be ongoing," said Marielys Divanne, the executive director of Educators for Excellence-New York, an advocacy group that supports the city's curriculum mandate. "Curriculum alone is not sufficient."

Kindergarten teacher Carla Murray-Bolling said she's anxious and excited about the new curriculum mandate. Her school, P.S. 84 on the Upper West Side, uses Calkins' program but will be required to switch to Wit & Wisdom this coming fall.

Murray-Bolling likes certain elements of Calkins' curriculum, called "Units of Study," including a recent lesson that teaches children that reading is a special power they can unlock - a superhero metaphor that got her students excited. But she also said the amount of time her students are expected to work independently can be a challenge, since many of her students have yet to master basic reading and writing skills.

"I'm anxious to see the changes," she said, noting that she was not aware of opportunities for teachers to offer input on the new curriculum choices.
Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.
Still, she's coming in with an open mind for the Education Department's reading overhaul.

"If they feel it's a curriculum that's strong, and they think it's good for the students, I don't see anything wrong about that," she said.

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The list is out: See what curriculum is dominating NYC's reading mandate

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All elementary schools in 22 of the city's 32 local districts will be required to use Into Reading, a curriculum from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that has won mixed reviews from educators.