Brookline Literacy Coalition Newsletter

October 15, 2022

Welcome to the first newsletter of our new community organization, Brookline Literacy Coalition. We’re excited to share our passion for literacy with all of you!

Who are we and why do we need a literacy coalition in Brookline? 

Becoming fluent readers, deep comprehenders, and effective writers is critical for academic success and beyond! We are Brookline parents who are also literacy practitioners, researchers, and community organizers. We have seen through our work how evidence-based instruction can effectively and efficiently help children be successful readers and writers. 

We have also seen the powerful and destructive impact that reading failure can have on children’s lives. Beyond academic outcomes, such failure is detrimental to children’s social and emotional health. Anxiety, depression, and disruptive behavior are all strongly linked to reading difficulties. 

We formed our group in response to the glaring inequalities in reading achievement in our district. With only a third of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are English learners, and who have learning disabilities reading at an acceptable level (as revealed by the most recent MCAS scores).

But as journalist Emily Hanford wrote in the New York Times opinion piece last month, “School Is For Learning to Read”, “All kinds of kids, from all kinds of families — rich, poor and middle class — need more help with reading than they’re getting in school.” Also, just learning to identify words on the page is not enough, achieving comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading and requires background knowledge, vocabulary, and a range of cognitive skills. 

There is growing public awareness of the problems with popular educational practices and materials that are not aligned with the scientific evidence about what children need and how they learn. Many teachers are realizing that their teacher training programs and professional development have not adequately prepared them to teach all children to read well, and have even misled them. Too many students in our schools (in Brookline!) are not reading and learning to their potential. This is largely preventable. 

We decided to form Brookline Literacy Coalition to advance the knowledge of what works best for literacy and to advocate for the implementation of evidence-based instruction within our district. Everyone is welcome to join in our efforts—we believe that as a community we can advocate for meaningful change.

The founding members of Brookline Literacy Coalition are:

Ola Ozernov-Palchik

Ola is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and at the Wheelock School of Education at BU who studies the typical and atypical reading development and reading comprehension. She is the recipient of the early career award from the International Dyslexia Association and has engaged extensively in advocacy efforts related to early screening of dyslexia risk. She is also a lecturer  at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ola is a Brookline parent of two. 

Miriam Fein

Miriam is a speech-language pathologist and reading specialist. She provides instruction and support to students, teachers, and families in elementary through high school in several schools in Greater Boston. She is the parent of two children who have been in the Public Schools of Brookline since kindergarten and currently attend Brookline High School. 

Ben Kelley

Ben has been active in the Brookline Schools for many years. He is co-president of the Brookline Parents Organization and has advocated for and with students and parents on a wide range of issues. He believes that improving Brookline’s literacy instruction will fundamentally improve the education and outcomes for its students, and that we can achieve this through coordinated advocacy. Ben has two children who are current and future Brookline students.

What’s been happening in Brookline?

• The district chose a new well-validated screener to identify children who may be at risk for reading difficulties. The screener is not diagnostic, but just flags children who may need extra support.
• There are no systematic plans yet on how to handle students who have been identified as being at-risk.
• Some school committee members are pushing for a review of the literacy curriculum, but there is no concrete plan yet.
• There are ongoing concerns about limited time learning science and social studies in K-5. 

Brookline has a Curriculum Subcommittee that meets monthly. They discuss issues that relate to academic programming in Brookline, including literacy. Administrators and educators often present and answer questions posed by the committee members. The chair of this subcommittee is Jennifer Monopoli, and the other members are Steven Ehrenberg, Helen Charlupski, and Suzanne Federspiel. 

Curriculum Subcommittee last met on September 20th. The recording of the meeting (like all School Committee meetings) is posted by the Brookline Interactive Group on YouTube. You can find it here. 

Lesley Ryan Miller, Deputy Superintendent of Teaching and Learning and Michelle Herman, Senior Director of Curriculum and Instruction, presented on the organizational structure of the Office of Teaching and Learning (OTL) and on the goals and projects that they are involved with. Michelle Herman oversees literacy, math, social studies, science and world language in kindergarten through 8th grade.

We learned that Joanna Liberman, English Language Arts Curriculum Coordinator K-8 is on leave this year, and her duties will be performed by Kristin Gray, the district-wide literacy coach. 

Last year the office worked to update the website to more accurately reflect the information shared with parents about all the curriculum in Brookline. You can find overviews of the curriculum by grade here and information about the learning expectations (largely based on Massachusetts State Standards) here.  OTL is currently trying to get feedback from teachers about the curriculum, what materials the teachers are using, and their thoughts on how helpful the materials provided by the district are to them. 

There are several formal “reviews” happening in the district. For example, there is a review of social studies materials, of the Middle School program and of Child Study Teams. 

Child Study Teams are groups of educators in a school that meet to discuss students who need additional teaching or intervention beyond classroom instruction to make progress, and to discuss whether they should be referred for evaluations for Special Education.

One major goal is to understand how students are being identified as needing “intervention”, how that intervention is defined, and what kind of training or professional development teachers need in order to help those students. 

One major challenge in Brookline is that, beyond one professional development day per year and some time before the start of the school year, the teachers have no required professional development in their contract and no well-structured times to engage in professional learning. The office is trying to identify ways to provide teachers with more learning. 

At the beginning of this year, all kindergarten, first and second grade teachers received a 3 hour training in a new state mandated early literacy assessment. Brookline has chosen DIBELS/m-Class to fulfill this ‘dyslexia screening’ requirement. 

Currently, there is no formal review underway of literacy curriculum and instruction.  However, Michelle Herman said that she, Lesley Ryan Miller, and others have had many conversations about literacy because “it is in the news”. She also said the information from the new early literacy assessment will help them understand more about how classroom instruction is meeting students’ needs. They will hear more from teachers about this as part of their feedback sessions. They will be visiting classrooms, gathering information and “asking hard questions.”

Michelle Herman made these comments in response to a comment by Steven Ehrenberg, who, (around the 43 minute mark in the recording), highlighted the urgency of reviewing the literacy curriculum. 

He explained that two core components of the literacy program in Brookline, Fountas and Pinnell collection of programs/materials: Guided Reading, Benchmark Assessment System, (and Leveled Literacy Intervention or LLI, for those that need support), and Lucy Calkins/Teacher’s College Units of Study, have both been strongly criticized for being misaligned with the evidence about how children learn to read and for not providing teachers with what they need to teach reading and writing well. 

The criticisms of these popular programs are about gaps in the way they address phonics/word reading and spelling, and also weaknesses in how they support students to develop their reading fluency, vocabulary, knowledge and writing. Many districts are working hard to replace these approaches to English Language Arts with stronger ones.

Steven Ehrenberg urged the district leaders to prioritize a stand-alone literacy review. He expressed concerns about a widening educational divide in our schools and stressed that this is an issue of equity in our community. 

In Lesley Ryan Miller’s response to these concerns, she stressed the importance of engaging teachers in “a thoughtful process” which she said will take some time. She noted that there are also other literacy curriculum materials in use (besides the heavily criticized ones that were mentioned), such as Wilson Fundations phonics program. She also told the committee that a new literacy program, Heggerty Phonemic Awareness, will be piloted this year in kindergarten classrooms (one classroom per school). She also stressed the need to think about “the range of learners” in our schools. 

Helen Charlupski then asked a very important question: 

What will we do with the information we get from the new early literacy/dyslexia screening assessment? 

Based on Michelle Herman’s response, it appears that these students may receive extra attention within their classrooms or outside the classroom, but the plan does not yet seem clear. There was no discussion about how these students’ progress would be monitored or how the information from the assessment would be shared. 

At the end of the meeting, Suzanne Federspiel, raised the issue of time spent in kindergarten through Grade 5 classrooms on learning social studies and science content.

She said, “Students should have equitable opportunity across our district to learn about science and social studies”.

This has been an ongoing concern in the community and a topic we plan to discuss in future Brookline Literacy Coalition reports and meetings. It is closely connected with our vision for equity and excellence in literacy. 

Literacy instruction is certainly in the national news as well. From state legislation, to in-depth journalism, to big FaceBook groups for teachers with titles like “Science of Reading-what I should have learned in college,” it’s a topic on many people’s minds. 

How does this relate to what is happening in Brookline schools? What do parents and teachers need to understand? How can we work together to ensure the best possible experiences and outcomes for our children? We’d love to share ideas and hear your thoughts and questions. Please join us!

Literacy instruction is certainly in the national news:: From state legislation to in-depth journalism to to big Facebook groups for teachers with titles like “Science of Reading-What I should have learned in college,” It’s a topic on many people’s minds.  

How does this relate to what is happening in Brookline schools? What do parents and teachers need to understand?   How can we work together to ensure the best possible experiences and outcomes for our children? We’d love to share ideas and hear your thoughts and questions. Please join us!