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There are many conversations happening among educators in Anchorage. One conversation is about our contract, another is about our new curriculum. I believe it’s important for us to separate the two conversations. I will not disagree with anyone that believes that we need to have a better contract. Yet, I’m exhausted from fighting for one year after year. However, the conversations about our new reading curriculum are muddying the process for a fair and equitable contract.
Our old reading curriculum was outdated and not relevant. It was hard to align our program with our district adopted Common Core State Standards. It was full of narrative pieces, and the informational pieces were difficult to find. I found myself working harder year after year to fill in the gaps that my students were missing. Anchorage School District teachers asked for, and received, a new curriculum. About 70 educators from all over Anchorage were tasked with finding that new program. As the district was rolling out the K-2 pieces, they certainly didn’t do it well. Teachers were given a half-day of implementation training and were given a huge amount of curriculum to weed through. And we complained.
ASD heard the complaints and again gave teachers a huge task: take our new curriculum (K-5) and develop a comprehensive and explicit approach to teaching it. We spent thousands of hours mapping out priority standards, developing practice sets to explicitly teach phonics and decoding, and whittling down 340 minutes of instruction in one day to a mere 90 minutes. It was an arduous process.
Unfortunately, many teachers are opposed to our English Language Arts Priority Plans. I hear complaints about lack of academic freedom, micromanagement, a belief that their students don’t need this and the infamous dog clickers. Teachers are blaming our new schedule for a lack of play or recess during the day. This is where I part ways with many educators in our district.
The priority plans our teachers created were developed with research-based studies. In the 1990s, the National Reading Panel convened. The panel scoured thousands of research studies and highlighted the importance of foundational skills among all readers. The NRP found that phonics and phonemic awareness instruction are key to reading. Without foundational skills, many readers will fail to read by a young age. Reading performance is the key predictor of success. It also found that children that learned to read well early on also benefited from phonics and phonemic awareness, because it provided support with spelling. The priority plans incorporate what the NRP has told us for years: All students benefit from explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
Why, then, did we purchase a curriculum that didn’t already do this? There is no single curriculum that will do that. Educators are still divided on how to teach reading. There are still educators who believe whole-language is the way to go, and others believe in systematic phonics. When students learn to become teachers at the university level, we are not taught how to teach reading. Instead, that task falls to the districts that hire them. Our district has taken on that task. Teachers don’t like it. I hear about it every day: “Don’t tell me how to teach!” If only it were that simple. ASD recognizes where we are failing our children and has spent time and money to alleviate the burden it has placed on us. New curriculum is never easy to weed through, and any school district would be remiss in not doing that for us.
I am exhausted, and our new year has only begun. I don’t want to hear from a middle school teacher about dog clickers and scripted programming in elementary schools. I would never publicly give an opinion about the middle school model, because I don’t teach middle school and I don’t understand it enough. When teachers start spreading rumors and hearsay and we represent it as the truth, we break down as professionals. We start losing credibility. I am asking all elementary teachers to separate our contract and the new curriculum and ask themselves, “What’s best for my students?” and move forward from there.
Margaret (Maggie) Jones is a teacher and instructional coach at Fairview Elementary School.
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