After the tumultuous recall of three Board of Education members in 2022, San Francisco public school officials pledged to sideline adult politics and focus on students — specifically outcomes in reading, math, and college readiness, all of which have shown distressing disparities for Black and brown students.
Closing gaps and boosting performance still comes with plenty of adult drama, though. A parent group has just sued the school district (SFUSD) over its middle school algebra policy, for example. It remains to be seen if the district’s plans to overhaul reading instruction, now underway, will face similar challenges.
The first major public hearing of the literacy revamp comes tonight. The school board will discuss an outside group’s report on the district’s low scores and its push to find a new way to teach kids to read. By the end of the year, the district wants not only to choose a new curriculum, but also put in place a new system to measure students’ reading levels.
San Francisco’s move is part of a national reevaluation of reading instruction that stems from what many have dubbed “the reading wars.” Boiled down, the fight is between phonics, the explicit instruction of connecting sounds with letters, and whole language, or understanding words from pictures and context.
Before joining UCSF’s dyslexia research group in 2011, Nancy Cushen White taught SFUSD students for 40 years. Her students had difficulties learning to read, and she blamed herself for not being able to teach them.
White said that balanced literacy, a system that leans on whole-language learning, isn’t teaching many kids to read: “It’s teaching kids how to get words from one page or one story, and that’s not going to carry over when they see those words again.”
Low scores
After the recall, one of the first jobs of the new board was to hire a new superintendent, Matt Wayne, who previously ran Hayward’s school system. Wayne and the new board quickly agreed to address student outcomes, released a five-year plan in October 2022, and promised to devote half their meeting time to the subject. (Critics say they’re struggling to hold to that promise.)
For third grade literacy — the standard benchmark — a target was set for 70 percent of students reading at grade level by 2027.
There’s a way to go. Only half of SFUSD third graders as a group have been at grade-level proficiency in the past four test years, which mirrors California’s poor national ranking. (There was no state test in 2020 or 2021.) But the climb is even farther for certain students. Less than a third of Black, Latino, and English learner students have been reading at grade level.
Before 2027 arrives, the district has more immediate goals in mind. Reading proficiency for Black and Pacific Islander kindergartners has dropped from 50 percent to 24 percent since 2018; by June 2024, the district wants to bring that rate back to pre-COVID levels. It also aims for 75 percent of all first graders reading at grade level in 2024, and to boost third-grade English learners to a 43 percent rate.
To get back on track, the district needs to change its materials, its tools to measure students’ progress, and the mindset of some of its teachers, according to a comprehensive review of 91 K-5 classrooms across 15 schools.
The review began during the 2021–22 school year in partnership with the New Teacher Project (TNTP). In May, TNTP released an audit that highlighted major deficiencies in student access to grade-appropriate assignments and strong instruction, and criticized teachers for low expectations for students, particularly in classes with a higher proportion of students of color and English language learners.
One literacy specialist voiced support for a phonics-based curriculum across the district. “You might walk through different classrooms at the same grade level and you wouldn’t necessarily see the same [curriculum] happening in each one,” said Amy Brownstein Lum of George Peabody Elementary. “Not every kid is going to acquire reading and writing in a whole class setting without the structure based phonics. That’s why there’s this push for better programs, because we need to make sure we’re servicing everybody.”
The science of reading
While pandemic learning loss has been a major concern, the TNTP audit said the district’s reading instruction was a greater factor in its literacy rates.
According to the review, the materials teachers use fall short of expected standards. They lack systematic and explicit guidance on foundational skills and are not very user-friendly, due to the excessive flexibility given to teachers.
One of the curricula SFUSD uses was created by Lucy Caulkins, who recently started to doubt her own methods and last year began to incorporate phonics, saying “the science of reading” had convinced her to change. The other method employed by SFUSD is Fountas & Pinnell, whose eponymous founders have not made the same “transformation,” as Caulkins has called it.
According to the podcast Sold a Story, at least 26 U.S. states since 2019 have passed laws to reorient instruction around the science of reading.
Earlier this year, the district faced criticism from numerous SF educators, parents, and students, whose petition called for research-based literacy instruction, high-quality instructional materials with a proven track record for all students, and prompt action to prevent further decline in literacy levels.
Now SFUSD is calling on educators to shift their mindset about students’ ability to read at their grade level, and to develop an understanding of grade level standards and instructional priorities.
It’s one thing to change the instruction. But the district has also determined that the tool to assess students’ progress before they reach third grade — which was also developed by Fountas & Pinnell — is also flawed. TNTP’s audit found that a different measurement does a better job, and SFUSD wants a new assessment in place for the 2023–24 school year.