Dear PS 107 Families,
All of our best wishes for health, happiness, and good fortune in the coming year to the many 107 families celebrating the Lunar New Year! Big thanks to our AAPI parent committee for putting together Lunar New Year activities for every student, which went home on Friday. We’re so grateful that all 107 students can learn about New Years traditions from the many different countries across Asia who celebrate this holiday.
I’m also thrilled to announce that changes are coming to the way PS 107 teaches reading and writing. Some of you may be familiar with the term Science of Reading, which is a large-scale, interdisciplinary body of research conducted over the last several decades about how children learn to read and write. This research has slowly been making its way into more mainstream circles and was turbo-charged by the pandemic, when parents across the country had a front-row seat to the methods being used to teach their children to read and write, which, for most schools (including PS 107) is known as “balanced literacy.” Many parents observed that their children did not really know how to read — and that balanced literacy methods seemed not to be working as intended.
Experts estimate that 40% of children learn to read without much direct instruction; while another 60% need direct instruction to become competent readers. Overall, between 15% and 20% of students have dyslexia, which is a spectrum of language-based learning disabilities impacting a child’s ability to learn to read. At PS 107 in 2022, 75% of students in grades 3-5 were on grade level in reading, as measured by the New York State English Language Arts test. While this is but one measure of student proficiency, our internal assessment results also align with this statistic.
We are among the higher-performing New York City public schools. Across the city, reading proficiency rates range from 49% proficient (3rd grade citywide) to 39% proficient (5th grade citywide). Of course, socioeconomic factors play a major role in reading achievement, which explains much of the difference between PS 107’s proficiency rates versus the city as a whole. (Take a look at Scarborough’s Reading Rope, which details the many skills that weave together over time until a student is a skilled reader. Many of the language comprehension skills are those that children from more advantaged families have when they enter formal schooling. For more details, see here.)
In New York City, meeting the needs of students with reading-related difficulties has become a major priority of the Mayor and the DOE Chancellor. Mayor Adams is himself dyslexic, and he has made bringing evidence-based reading instruction to NYC Schools a cornerstone of his administration. At the same time, lawmakers at the state level, including our own NYS Assemblyman Robert Carroll, are pushing legislation that would require schools to use evidence-based literacy methods. (As of July 2022, 29 states and the District of Columbia have passed similar laws.)
Unfortunately, the curriculum that is currently used by PS 107 (and many, many other schools across New York City and across the country), called Units of Study, is not evidence-based, and consistently produces inadequate reading outcomes. There is a movement to not allow schools to use the Units of Study and many are calling this the civil rights issue of our time.
Earlier this year, I was approached by Assemblymember Robert Carroll, who sits on New York City’s Literacy Advisory Council and who is a strong advocate for evidence-based reading instruction. He asked if we would consider shifting our literacy teaching practices to what’s called structured literacy: explicit, systematic, research-based methods that teach all of the critical components of literacy. Assemblymember Carroll’s outreach came at an opportune time, as not only was I in the midst of an existential crisis about how we teach reading and writing at PS 107, but so were many staff members, concerned that the Units of Study were not working for significant percentages of their students.
I myself attended Teachers College for graduate school, specifically so that I could learn from Lucy Calkins, the creator of the Units of Study, and so that I could teach using the Units of Study, which aligned at the time with so much about what I believed about reading and writing. When I started teaching at PS 321 in 2004, about one-quarter of my second graders could not read or write, and I did not know how to support them. I diligently implemented the Units of Study, and yet, these students made no progress. This continued through my years of teaching until we added phonics instruction to our curricular repertoire. I was drawn to this work and started learning more on my own, bringing a lot of this learning into my teaching of English language learners when I transitioned from being a classroom teacher to being an English as a New Language and Academic Intervention Services teacher. At long last, my students — those with reading difficulties and those without — began to make steady and notable progress.
And so, I accepted Assemblymember Carroll’s offer to become one of four “Landmark” schools in New York City, schools who are following the national trends and the research in literacy instruction by implementing structured literacy. This initiative comes with additional funding and support, which will be key to its success. However, this is also a new initiative and the details of it are still being developed with the DOE’s Office of Literacy. Furthermore, as a staff, we will be crafting an approach that is right for the PS 107 community. Initially, parents will see most curricular shifts occurring in Kindergarten and 1st grade, and there will be more support for students who are struggling in grades 2-5.
At this time, we are being asked to train as many teachers as possible in the Orton-Gillingham approach (all of our special education teachers are already trained in O-G, thanks to our generous PTA!). We are also working on a literacy intervention program for our students in grades 2-5 who are reading below grade level. PS 107’s Instructional Leadership Team will be working together to determine which shifts are most important and should come first. We will keep our parent community informed as we make these changes.
In closing, there are a few things that I want to make absolutely clear: PS 107 teachers are truly remarkable and have not been doing anything wrong. They have been using a curriculum and an approach to teaching reading that the vast majority of educators across the country have been using for the past 20+ years. They have made joyful readers and writers out of the majority of 107 students for decades.
Some might argue that this is yet another swing of the pendulum towards more rote learning, the kind that many of us experienced as elementary school students, that also did not work for a subset of students, and that many of us found boring. I disagree with this assessment and believe that we are on the precipice of something entirely different and exciting, which is reading and writing instruction that is not only engaging, but offers us the opportunity to meet the needs of our struggling students and further elevate the achievement of our advanced students.
And yet, change, especially on this level, is challenging and brings with it difficult feelings, for myself included. I look forward to embarking on this journey as a community and crafting a literacy curriculum that meets the needs of all PS 107 students. As always, I welcome your questions, thoughts, and concerns and encourage you to reach out to me at jcohen72@schools.nyc.gov if you’d like to chat.
Warmly,
Ms Joanna
PS Do you have your New York City Schools Account (NYCSA) set up? Your child’s first report card of the year will be released to your NYCSA on Monday, January 30th! Please reach out to Nadia Benlarbi as soon as possible if you need to set up your NYCSA.