A Year Into Sudbury’s New Reading Curriculum, the Report Card Is Mixed

For many Sudbury Public Schools (SPS) parents, the biggest change in their child’s school day this year came from a new English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum that was rolled out throughout the elementary schools. Last fall, every elementary classroom in the district switched to a new English Language Arts curriculum called EL Education. It was the culmination of a years-long effort, but also an effort that still hasn’t reached middle school students.

Over the course of this spring, district administrators reported back to the School Committee on how the rollout actually went. The answer depends a great deal on which grade your child is in and what you’re measuring. For a more complete picture beyond the elementary schools, the annual “benchmarking” data also provided insights into the middle school students.

The short version, drawn from the administration’s presentations this spring, is fairly clear. Reading comprehension in the upper grades improved, some long-standing gaps between some student groups narrowed, and Sudbury’s youngest readers hit an unexpected bump in the foundational skills, the phonics and decoding work that underpins everything else.

In both its Student Opportunity Act (SOA) progress report in March and its spring benchmarking presentation in April, the SPS administration named the challenges and laid out a plan to fix it.

Administrators reported that this year K-5 students finally experienced “a unified curriculum regardless of their classroom or building,” with teachers using common language and shared methods. Getting there was not a small lift. The district ran more than 25 hours of training for every K–5 classroom teacher, special educator and English-language teacher, starting back in June 2025, and coaches conducted regular “calibration walks” through buildings to keep instruction consistent.

On the comprehension side, which is tracked in grades 3–8 through a system called Track My Progress, the numbers moved in the right direction. English Learners improved their comprehension proficiency by 4 percent between September and March, and students with disabilities improved by 3 percent.

Just as important for a district that has worked for years to close gaps, the disparity in comprehension between those groups and their peers shrank by 4 points each. Students with disabilities actually met the district’s benchmark targets for comprehension, with 53 percent reaching proficiency. The state’s annual MCAS results told a similar story of modest progress. Proficiency for students with disabilities rose to 34 percent (up from 29 percent the year before) with the gap narrowing by 7 points, English Learner proficiency climbed to 17 percent with a 3-point narrowing, and proficiency among low-income students reached 38 percent, up 6 points since 2024.

The data is different for students in kindergarten through third grade. This is where students build the mechanics of reading like sounding out words, decoding, and fluency. By the mid-point of the last school year, those indicators slipped. On DIBELS, the assessment Sudbury uses to screen early reading skills, proficiency levels came down. The number of students qualifying for early literacy intervention rose by 12 percent across grades K–5, with the sharpest increase in second and third grade.

The early reading gap widened rather than narrowing for the district’s targeted groups, widening by one point for English Learners and 5 points for students with disabilities.

The intervention number runs in the opposite direction from the year before. In last year’s SOA report, before the full switch to EL Education, the district had celebrated a 27 percent drop in students needing early literacy intervention, including a 54 percent drop in kindergarten. So the swing from a big decrease one year to a 12 percent increase the next is a significant reversal. The SOA report noted “The number of students qualifying for early literacy intervention has increased by 12% in grades K-5 from September 2025 to March 2026. The greatest increase occurs in grades 2 and 3, which is likely due to a decrease in minutes for foundational skills practice and application due to the increase in minutes for implementation for the EL implementation.” (Page 7 below)

The administration offered an explanation in the reports. The new EL Education core program does not include the “decodable” readers, books written specifically to let beginning readers practice the sounds they’re learning, that were a bigger part of Sudbury’s approach before. And because the new program asks for more instructional minutes, the time available for that foundational phonics practice got squeezed, particularly in the grades where decoding is still being cemented. While that may explain the mid-year data, both issues were foreseeable ahead of the rollout.

The district’s benchmarking summary noted the lower early-reading scores “may have been caused by a shift in focus to the new ELA Core program, which does not include decodable reading.” (Page 68 below)

Starting in the 2026–27 school year, the district plans to add what it calls an “ALL Block.” That stands for Additional Language and Literacy, and is designed to give teachers a dedicated, structured window to practice decoding and respond to assessment data. The district also plans to bring EL Education’s own assessments into the mix, begin updating the sixth-grade curriculum, and roll out a new ELA report card. They also noted in the benchmarking report that they will “begin to update” the grade 6 ELA curriculum, though there are no formal plans for grades 7 and 8.

The stakes of the initial reports run higher than a single report card, because over a year ago the School Committee made clear it was getting impatient with the slow update process. When administrators laid out the rollout plan back in January 2025, committee members pressed hard on two questions the district couldn’t yet answer: when Sudbury’s middle schoolers would get their update, and how the district would measure progress at all, given that it had no system in place to assess and track student writing. Humanities Curriculum Coordinator Lauren Egizio told the committee then that the middle school timeline would depend on first seeing how elementary students fared under EL Education.

While the mid-year data showed mixed results, it’s unclear if end-of-year benchmarking data will tell a different story, and how that might influence plans for the middle school students. The district does not typically present end-of-year benchmarking data to the School Committee.

With some numbers, like student intervention needs, swinging dramatically from one year to the next, one thing remains constant: the lengthy timeline for the curriculum update. A curriculum update process that started before the pandemic has mixed results, and it remains unclear when it will be completed for all SPS students.