New Curriculum to Improve Literacy Comes with New Problems for Teachers
The first time Allison Rodriguez picked up the book “Llama Llama, Time to Share” last year, her kindergarten class was ecstatic. They were going to learn about new animals, and how sometimes, they can have more fun when they do things together. They giggled and screamed in their class circle and enjoyed answering questions about the text.
The second day reading Llama Lama from the beginning was still exciting: the illustrations in the book were bright, and the exclamations from characters made the kids laugh.
But after a week of reading the same story, as soon as Rodriguez walked towards the bookshelf in her Bronx classroom, her kids began to groan. “At some point, not only was I like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to read this again,’ but the children in the classroom were like ‘Really? Again?’ They were just over it.” Even though the children wanted to move on to a new story, they had not fully grasped certain literacy skills.
The book was part of her classroom’s required readings list from EL Education, a new curriculum that was chosen by New York City to improve literacy rates in public schools.
In September, elementary schools in 15 of the city’s 32 districts were required to use EL or one of two other new curriculum options, as part of the NYC Reads Initiative launched by Schools Chancellor David Banks and Mayor Eric Adams. Their plan is to move away from the previous Teachers College curriculum, which has been taught in the city since 2003. They hope to improve upon New York’s 2022 state test results, in which only 49 percent of the city’s students from grades 3–8 scored proficient or higher in English Language Arts (ELA).
While Banks and Adams say the new mandate will address the city’s literacy problem, teachers who have used EL have mixed reviews. They say that the lesson plans can be unpredictable, and sometimes take too long. Rodriguez, who was a K-1 teacher for the DOE for the past nine years before resigning to be a stay-at-home mother, says the kindergarten curriculum was “incredibly redundant” at times. And there are other teachers at different grade levels who say many of the modules are too dense and fast-paced, and that their students aren’t able to comprehend the key takeaways. Bronx District 11 is currently the only district in the city that has chosen the EL curriculum.
WHAT IS EL EDUCATION?
Anchored in the “Science of Reading,” EL encourages students to read complex, diverse subject matter for their grade level while teaching them structured phonics (the spelling and sound pattern of words in a clear sentence). Part of what made EL appealing to the city’s leaders is its heavy emphasis on social justice and environmentalism.
Lisa Sacks, who worked as a literacy coach in NYC public schools for 24 years before resigning this year to work at a private school, says EL is one of the worst curricula she’s ever had to teach.
“The premise of [EL] is that they want to get authentic literature into students’ hands, which is great in theory,” Sacks said. But while the children would follow along closely while she read, she said, they weren’t learning essential grammar or proper reading comprehension skills.
“It doesn’t teach the actual art of reading or writing,” she said. “I think it exposes them to great literature, but I don’t think that it teaches them the way they need to learn.”
Sometimes, Sacks says, her children weren’t able to grasp anything in the lesson plan because the topics were too complicated for second grade. For example, last year, one of EL’s lessons for the grade was about tent schools in Africa. These are temporary education centers, usually built by UNICEF, for children fleeing war, persecution and natural disaster.
“It was a hard concept for second-graders to grasp,” she said. “The whole unit was above their heads.” While she agrees that diversity in classroom stories is important, a lot of the kids were unable to relate to the required texts in any way, and that made comprehension hard.
Rodriguez agrees. “We would bring up a topic about something, and the children would kind of look at me like, What is that? What does that mean? How do you use that?” she said. “So we have to explain and it winds up taking away from the objective because my students need to understand certain concepts before I can even teach the lesson.”
TEACHER PUSHBACK
The DOE selected EL Education after a review of the curriculum in 2021–22. On its website, they point to the efficacy of the curriculum by referencing a study EL commissioned conducted by WestEd, a nonpartisan, nonprofit agency. WestEd found that in the 2018–19 school year, children in Tennessee who were taught EL scored almost 10 percentile points higher on their state ELA test than those who didn’t.
In an emailed statement to Labor New York, EL Education’s representatives said that they have seen the positive impact of their curriculum in districts all across the country. “From Hamilton County, Tenn., to Detroit, Mich., and Robeson, N.C., students using the EL Education K-8 Language Arts curriculum are thriving,” they wrote.
TOO MUCH CONTENT, TOO LITTLE TIME
Despite results seen in other parts of the country, EL hasn’t been easy to adjust to in the city, and Chancellor Banks minimized concerns that schools have brought forward. “Principals always want to have as much autonomy as possible on a wide range of things… but not on this,” he said in a Sept. 12 episode of Crosstown with Pat Kiernan for NY1. “We’ve had very little pushback, I’ll tell you that.”
However, Alana Davidson, who has taught 7th to 12th grade in the Bronx for the past 15 years, says she had to consult with her administration several times while teaching EL. “I had to just put my own spin on it because it was not realistic to get through,” she explained.
“A 45-minute lesson plan turns into four days.” The topics “weren’t terrible” for her 7th- and 8th-graders, she says, but she had to adapt them heavily to suit her classroom. “Last year, I only got through two of the four units required,” Davidson said. She feels lucky to have a helpful principal and administration, but says a lot of teachers feel stifled when they have to follow lesson plans to a tee because their higher-ups are strict. “I try to add a little more personality back to it.”
EL Education’s representatives said that their instruction method is a learning curve that takes everyone time to adjust to: “We have heard from many teachers that planning and preparation become quicker and easier as they gain familiarity with the routines and materials.”
LACK OF TRAINING
Bronx’s District 11 was part of phase one of the curriculum rollout that started in September. The mayor’s office says these schools were supposed to receive personal-development training from EL and their districts before the academic year started, but not all teachers got the training they needed.
“Last year I was asked to teach EL to the entire 2nd grade,” Sacks said. “I was given no training.” Rodriguez did receive emails from EL Education about personal development, but was told that the training would have to be completed on her own time. It was not provided by the district or school, she says. Some teachers in District 11 have also stated to other outlets that while they received the training, it would have been better to see EL lessons taught in a classroom setting.
The city’s wealthier districts, such as Manhattan’s 2 and 3, and Brooklyn’s 15, will be in the second phase of the rollout, and training for their mandated curricula will start next school year, after phase one schools test it out. The DOE declined to comment for this story, and the mayor’s office did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
While Rodriguez says EL is her least favorite curriculum, she sees the benefits of trying something new. “No curriculum is perfect. No curriculum is going to provide every single differentiation for your students. And as educators, that’s also our job, right? Knowing our students, knowing how this group of children learns this way and that group of children learns a different way,” Rodriguez said. What’s most important, teachers agree, is that by introducing a new solution to fix literacy in public schools, they don’t create new problems.
