SBUnifiedBy the Santa Barbara Unified School District
The Santa Barbara Unified Board of Trustees approved a new elementary English Language Arts Curriculum at the Tuesday, May 9th meeting.
The Trustees approved the Wit & Wisdom/Fundations curriculum after going through a thorough process led by Denise Alvarado, Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction, and a committee of teachers, staff, and administrators.
The process of selecting a curriculum began back in January. It included teachers from every grade level and school, emergent multilingual learner experts, special education experts, literacy and language experts, principals, and administrators.
Feedback was also gathered from community members involved in various committees such as the Literacy Taskforce and parents from each of our schools.
Before making a recommendation, a field test of the curriculum was also conducted.
“This process has been thorough, with an effort to get feedback from as many groups of teachers, staff, and community members as possible. This new curriculum is a crucial step to helping us improve literacy outcomes in the District. This is not the only work underway. Teachers across the district are working on developing their expertise in the teaching of literacy in two key ways. We have our first cohort of teachers participating in a two-year training, LETRS, which develops teacher knowledge of evidence-based practices. Similarly, teachers at all schools have been engaging in work around the book The Teaching Reading Playbook, which also supports teachers’ knowledge of structured literacy practices,” said Dr. Hilda Maldonado, Superintendent.
The first year of training will include professional development during the summer and every month during the school year. As a school system, we plan to meet the needs of new and experienced teachers. Therefore, this work will remain ongoing and use a set of common assessments to ensure we know what students need by monitoring their progress during the year.
The new curriculum will be used starting in the 2023-2024 school year.
I did a bit of Googling about this new curriculum. Despite the fact that we have a high percentage of kids who cannot read, they have chosen a program described as : “Wit & Wisdom as a curriculum is not learning how to read — it really is about the comprehension and exposure to different texts,” said Lauren Litman, a second grade teacher. “I think that’s our biggest struggle. We’re coming in assuming that the kids have the skills to do this.” Unlike the Teachers College curriculum, which is pitched as a comprehensive approach to reading instruction, Wit & Wisdom is focused more narrowly on building students’ background knowledge and is meant to be paired with other programs that focus on teaching fundamental reading skills.
The Teachers College curriculum, also known as Units of Study by Lucy Calkins, has been widely discredited across the nation because it is based on a debunked theory of reading known as “balanced literacy” and its “three-cueing” strategy. Instead of teaching the basics of literacy that include phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension in a direct, explicit way, children are taught instead to guess, take clues from the pictures or skip words they don’t know. Somehow that’s supposed to make them joyful readers. But they never learn the letter-sound correlation or the structure of language. This balanced literacy approach is what SBUSD has been promoting since 2007 with the disastrous Read 180, and again in 2014 with Lucy Calkins. They have resisted what’s called the Science of Reading ever since, which includes the five skills mentioned above. The real problem is that this administration, under Hilda, who loves Lucy Calkins, is neither knowledgeable about nor willing to commit to this completely different approach to reading instruction–which is not a commodity that can be purchased, which is the way they treat it. Wit and Wisdom will turn out to be another $1.7 million down the drain. Just like all the $$ they wasted on “balanced literacy” consultants, coaching and “professional development” that some members of this board voted for for so long, up to this school year. So much time, money and so many lives wasted with so little accountability of decision-makers. This bloated and arrogant bureaucracy with its highly paid administrators has to change, but it spends much of its time simply convincing others how they’ve got it all under control. And the teachers and the students continue to struggle.
English language learners, mainly Spanish, need a program written specifically for them. Whatever happened to Open Court? The district spent a lot of money for materials, reading coaches and workshops for teachers in each elementary school in order to meet the needs of the students.