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On Monday, January 6, Sudbury Public Schools administrators presented an update on an ongoing English Language Arts/Literacy (ELA) curriculum update that has been in-progress for over half a decade.
The presentation (page 5) reviewed the timeline for the process that has been used, which had multiple phases and a series of action items in each:
They are not close to any sort of finish line at this stage, according to the presentation:
After completing a pilot of two options, Into Reading and Expeditionary Learning (EL), the administration recommended selecting EL.
School committee members raised questions about the speed of the process throughout the discussion, and were heavily focused on the fact the rollout is only being done for grades K through 5. Middle school students will not see any ELA curriculum changes until an undetermined date in the future.
Vice Chair Meredith Gerson opened up the question and answer portion of the presentation going straight at the middle school implementation timeline. She asked Lauren Egizio, Humanities Curriculum Coordinator, what the middle school timeline would look like. Egizio responded “That’s to be determined because I want to see what the student outcomes look like with EL first, while also considering what’s currently happening in sixth grade and what are we talking about for the adjustments.” (41:44)
Committee members continued to question the timeline for middle school, and administrators reiterated that they wanted to take the time to gather outcome data from the K-5 curriculum rollout, that there has been recent ELA curriculum work completed at the middle school, and that they could roll out an update faster for middle school because they wouldn’t need to do a pilot and other phrases of the process.
When pressed again by member Mary Stephens, the administration acknowledged that it’s possible, depending on how the elementary school rollout goes, that they may need to engage in a similarly lengthy process in the future to update the middle school ELA curriculum. If they do not use the same EL curriculum for middle school, they would likely need to evaluate and pilot other options. (1:24:25)
The committee also raised questions about tracking student progress, particularly around writing. The district has no tracking system for student writing progress – a detail that emerged when the committee recently discussed Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) results. Chair Nicole Burnard brought up the recent MCAS results in which SPS students declined significantly in the ELA portion of the tests. She questioned the reliability of how MCAS is graded, and suggested a need for more precise and robust local assessment of student capabilities. (1:17:20)
Discussion about an ELA curriculum review and update traces back to before the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. The plodding process appears to be stretching at least three more years into the future, and the timeline for middle school remains completely unknown. With declining performance on the ELA portion of the MCAS tests and lingering academic impacts from Covid-19, the urgency of the work before the district was apparent during the school committee meeting. It remains to be seen if that urgency will be reflected in the curriculum review process moving forward.