Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series taking a closer look at topics discussed by the Savannah-Chatham County Public School System (SCCPSS) leaders and Chatham County Board of Education members during a fall retreat on Aug. 21 and 22 at the Georgia Tech-Savannah campus.
As previously reported by The Savannah Morning News, 42 percent of SCCPSS third graders and 37 percent of eighth graders tested as reading below grade level on the Georgia Milestones Assessment System exams last year.
Superintendent Denise Watts, Ed. D., has often asked for patience in the process of improving literacy across the district. She has also stated, as previously reported, many factors go into assessing and addressing students’ proficiency beyond GMAS. District leaders reassured the school board at the August retreat that literacy efforts are ongoing and making progress.
Aug. 1 marked the beginning of the district’s six-year implementation of textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)’s Into Reading. SCCPSS chose Into Reading as well as Into Literature for sixth through 12th graders along with HMH’s Waggle and Writeable products this past February. The new literacy curriculum will cost the district $20,387,665 over the next six years.
Director of Elementary Curriculum Andrea Burkiett said that with that expense, HMH provides a coaching service, called Coachly, for the district’s English Language Arts (ELA) teachers. SCCPSS opted to purchase the services for the first three years of the implementation rather than the typical one year. She said school leaders know it is a “large lift” for teachers to both adopt a new curriculum and relearn how to teach students how to read. She assured that Coachly and SCCPSS have made efforts to align with literacy instruction training that K-5 teachers have been receiving through the Lexia LETRS program since January.
Following SCCPSS’s Literacy Effectiveness Officer Cherie Goldman’s update via her Setting our Sights on the North Star: Every Child a Proficient Reader report at the August school board retreat, the Savannah Morning News interviewed Burkiett and Goldman as well as Coachly’s General Manager of Services Amy Dunkin to find out what all these moving parts mean for SCCPSS’s students who still struggle with literacy.
SCCPSS purchased new literacy texts:Savannah-Chatham schools approves $20m for literacy curriculum, names literacy officer
Change comes from understanding the ‘science of reading’
Goldman reiterated the district’s case for changing course on literacy instruction to the “science of reading” approach. She said the term had become confused with simply “teaching phonics,” although that is only one of the literacy acquisition elements, which also include phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, knowledge and writing.
While “science of reading” has also become a go-to for textbook marketers, the phrase, as defined by The Reading League, refers to “a vast, interdisciplinary body of scientifically-based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing.”
Goldman added the literacy also entails “listening and speaking.” When students become truly literate then they can use language “to acquire and integrate the knowledge that they need to construct and communicate meaning” in Math, science or whatever the subject, she said.
To achieve this, Goldman said the district’s literacy efforts require constant monitoring and refining cogs within a universal system of literacy to “take it from implementation to sustainability.” The report provided specifics about those cogs which are:
Data-base decision makingLeadershipAssessmentProfessional DevelopmentCommunity Family/InvolvementUniversal Literacy InstructionLiteracy Intervention Instruction
Goldman shared insight on the efforts within each cog, but the professional development and universal literacy instruction components were specific to LETRS training and HMH’s curriculum, respectively.
2024 GMAS results;More than 1/3 of SCCPSS 3rd and 8th graders still not reading at grade level
An evolving curriculum coupled with teacher training
To understand the state of literacy education in the country, it has become essential reading or listening to engage with “Sold a Story,” a podcast based on the reporting of investigative journalist Emily Hanford. In the podcast, Hanford lays out why United States schools have significantly shifted away from a method known as whole language or the three-queueing system and moved towards the science of reading.
The podcast helped sway many school districts and states into making policy changes requiring science of reading instruction, by scrutinizing the the whole language and three-queuing methods that dominated curriculum materials published by Heineman.
HMH is the parent company of Heineman. This fact underscores that the science of reading has also caused a major reset within the publishing industry and while HMH introduced it’s Into Learning suite in June of 2018, it also added a structured literacy strand to Into Reading earlier this year.
HMH’s response to a review of its Into Reading curriculum conducted in 2023 by The Reading League said the review was incomplete because it occurred prior to a new element of the program being added in 2024. The new element is known as Structured Literacy, which HMH said, addressed many of The Reading League’s concerns, such teaching students to memorize high-frequency words “instead of identifying sound-symbol correspondences.” Dunkin called any curriculum, a “living and breathing instructional tool” that undergoes constant evaluation and improvement based on feedback as part of HMH’s obligation to be responsive.
Burkiett said the science of reading and HMH’s updated components are in response to a changing a body of evidence that has evolved and expanded to bridge “that gap between the science and the practice and the art of teaching.” She said as technology in and out of the classroom have evolved so, too, should instructional methods. She sees HMH’s willingness to make necessary changes as an advantage for teachers and students.
Dunkin responded similarly to the question of how effective a curriculum still in flux could be. To parents of SCCPSS students she said, “feel confident in knowing that there’s a large investment by us [HMH] as a corporation in ensuring that our solutions [curriculum, assessment, and instruction] are of the highest quality and yield the growth and outcomes that districts expect.”
She emphasized SCCPSS’s intentionality of its launch, especially its inclusion of Coachly, which is a “constant support” for teachers throughout the school year. She said Coachly meets each teacher where they are, whether a first-year right out of college or a 30-year rewiring decades of literacy teaching practices. Coachly does this, Dunkin said, through 1:1 coaching opportunities, on-demand lesson planning assistance and instructional videos as well as onsite group trainings.
Read another way, and articulated by Burkiett, the status of the curriculum as “under development is certainly one way to say it, but the other way that I would look at it would be, ‘you know better, you do better.'”
Joseph Schwartzburt is the education and workforce development reporter for the Savannah Morning News. You can reach him at [email protected].
