Marin schools reset approaches to reading instruction

Soon after her son started first grade at Vallecito Elementary School in Terra Linda last fall, Dawn Patrice noticed something had changed.

“He started really resisting going to school,” Patrice said of Bodhi, now 7. “He said, ‘I don’t like going to school.'”

This was very different than in kindergarten, when Bodhi was eager and happy to get to class, Patrice said. The issue, she found out, was reading. Bodhi was struggling.

To investigate why that was happening, Patrice and her husband spent the school year trying to get answers from Bodhi’s teacher, the principal, the school board and the Miller Creek School District administration about something called “balanced literacy.”

Balanced literacy is a framework that teaches kids to read a word by taking cues from the word’s context in a sentence or on a page.

The cues or strategies include such things as looking at the first letter of a word, looking at the pictures or guessing which word would make sense. She was stunned when Bodhi’s teacher told her about it, Patrice said.

“I said, ‘What about looking at the word and sounding it out?'” she asked the teacher. “That’s how I learned how to read.”

Balanced literacy does not focus on teaching students to read a word by “sounding it out,” or by using a science-based phonics program, Patrice found out. That did not make sense to Patrice or to her family.

The Miller Creek School District board of trustees has voted to add two phonics programs to serve the earliest grades next year, according to Becky Rosales, the district superintendent. But Patrice says she didn’t want to take a chance.

Patrice, who is transferring her son to Ross Valley Charter in Fairfax for the new school year, is not alone in her dissatisfaction.

All Marin schools  — and many school districts across the nation — are resetting their reading instruction models. After reading test scores tanked or stalled during the pandemic nationally, statewide and locally, educators decided to move toward more of what is called “science-based” reading instruction.

“Reading instruction is one of the top three leverage points we’re working on,” said John Carroll, Marin superintendent of schools. “Our 17 school districts are in various states of evolving in terms of improving reading instruction.”

The Marin County Office of Education has already held a seminar for educators on phonics and the science of reading. A second seminar will be conducted in August, Carroll said.

“Every district is participating in these,” Carroll said of the seminars.

He added that the balanced literacy programs that some Marin districts are still using are “not necessarily bad,” but “incomplete.”

“On their own, they don’t constitute a research-based literacy program,” Carroll said.

“I think what we have right now is an opportunity, if we can get research-based reading instruction back,” Carroll added. “To me, that’s a huge, potentially great thing.”

He added that “the time is right” for this shift, as the county is rebounding from the pandemic.

“I think we’re heading in the right direction,” he said.

Several Marin school districts have been using a portion of the nation’s most popular balanced literacy curriculum — the “reading workshop” by Lucy Calkins, according to a spreadsheet prepared by the county office on reading curricula.

Calkins, who originally eschewed phonics as a reading education tool, has updated her product with phonics and other science-based strategies in the last two years.

In April, she met with staff from the Larkspur-Corte Madera and Ross Valley school districts. Both districts have been using elements of her program in the past year, but have been supplementing it with other techniques.

“In RVSD, literacy instruction has always emphasized robust and systematic phonics and word study,” said Marci Trahan, superintendent of the Ross Valley district. “Our current focus is aligning our instruction with research on the science of reading.”

The Ross Valley district does not plan to purchase Calkins’ updated program, Trahan added. She said there was not enough time from April to June to analyze and test the new program to be able to make such a decision.

The Larkspur-Corte Madera School District will purchase the revised Calkins program, but will supplement it with other trainings that are more science-based, according to Brett Geithman, the district’s superintendent.

Larkspur-Corte Madera staff will use a multisensory program called Orton-Gillingham, along with “explicit phonics instruction, phonological awareness, oral exercises [and] comprehension development,” Geithman said in a recent letter to district parents.

“Our intervention team’s plans are currently in alignment with the reading research,” he said.

“In August, November, and March, teachers will engage in workshops to provide the foundational components of a word study workshop,” Geithman added. “The K-2 focus will be on explicit phonics.”

Geithman said the district is also switching out its reading-level assessment tool from the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System, which is based on a balanced literacy model, to the DIBELS mClass system as its universal screener for students who might be struggling with reading. DIBELS, created by the University of Oregon, stands for “dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills.”

“Based on the results of the universal screener, teachers will assess students that are at risk for demonstrating reading difficulties using diagnostic assessments,” Geithman said. “Those tools pinpoint the specific need for the intervention and allow the team to monitor progress.”

Geithman said the district made the changes in its approach to reading instruction after recent media articles and podcasts. They included a six-part American Public Media podcast called “Sold a Story,” and a New York Times article last year about the science of reading, Geithman said.

According to a May 9 article in the Times, all New York City public schools are moving away from the balanced literacy model and embracing phonics and other science-based reading programs.

On June 6, the newspaper’s podcast, The Daily, ran an episode on the topic called “The Fight Over Phonics” that detailed many of the issues around reading instruction.

According to the podcast, some of the recent research on reading included brain studies using a special magnetic resonance imaging machine. It showed that reading did not come naturally to most students, but many did better using an audio component — such as “sounding it out” — to embed and identify a word in the brain.

The balanced literacy proponents have contended that kids would naturally learn to read in the same way that children naturally pick up languages when they are spoken by their parents. According to the new research, that’s not the case with reading; children need to be taught to read in a structured way.

In the Mill Valley School District, trustees approved a $128,800 consulting contract this month with Glean Education. The company incorporates a weeklong intensive training for teachers in the Orton-Gillingham reading approach, according to a copy of the contract.

At the Novato Unified School District, staff are using a combination of the Calkins system and science-based programs, according to Jennifer Larson, an assistant superintendent. She said the district supplements the Calkins program with the Heggerty “phonemic awareness” and “Bridge to Reading” programs.

At San Rafael City Schools, staff are using a combination of “decoding and comprehension” tools to teach reading, according to Stephanie Kloos, director of elementary education. Decoding involves children learning to recognize, read and pronounce patterns of words — such a series of words that end in “ing,” for example.

“Our focus continues to be on supporting teachers to effectively and appropriately teach reading to all students,” she said.

An elementary curriculum advisory committee has recommended the use of the science-based programs Fundations and Heggerty for “systemic and systematic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction,” Kloos said.

The district will begin those programs in August, Kloos added.

At the Miller Creek School District, Rosales said the district has not adopted the Calkins model. However, she said, some of the district’s teachers are familiar with its strategies and are using some of its elements in their classes.

She said the district “uses an integrated, balanced literacy approach that combines authentic, literature-rich activities with explicit reading and writing instruction which allows students to demonstrate understanding across subject areas.”

The goal, she said, is to have all students reading at grade level by the end of third grade.

The district’s adopted reading program is the “Wonders” curriculum published by McGraw-Hill, Rosales said.

“In 2023, two specific phonics programs were piloted by primary grade teachers and adopted by trustees in March,” Rosales said. “These will be fully implemented in 2023-24.”

One of the phonics programs is for transitional kindergarten students and the other is for kindergarten through second grade, she said.

“Both programs align with California’s state standards in foundational reading skills,” Rosales said. “K-2 teachers will be trained in our newly adopted phonics programs, Fundations and Zoo Phonics, prior to the beginning of the 2023-24 school year.”

The two programs are expected to cost $80,000, Rosales said.

Patrice, meanwhile, says she wishes she could have had her son stay at Vallecito, where he can walk to school.

“It’s going to be a 30-minute commute by car, each way,” she said of having to drive her son to Ross Valley Charter.

But the charter school uses Orton-Gillingham as its reading program model, she said.

“It’s direct instruction, using phonics, looking at the words,” she said.

“They used to have the Reader’s Workshop, but they got rid of it,” she said, recounting what the charter school officials told her. “That’s what I needed to hear.”