![]() Inexplicably, most schools of education continue to teach prospective teachers balanced literacy contrary to all the scientific evidence. Teacher training is also an important piece of the puzzle. ![]() Unfortunately, SBUSD plans to use the Calkins program until 2029. 2/us/reading-teaching-curriculum-phonics.html Recognizing the problem, New York City schools recently discontinued the Calkins program, as featured on the front page of The New York Times. These same problems, with their attendant low literacy levels, exist in many districts throughout the state.Ī few years ago, in response to critical reviews, a token phonics component was added to Calkins’ program, but it is too little and too late. Instead, it relies on a linguistic guessing game called the three cueing system which urges students to look at pictures and context to guess the word instead of using the actual science-based decoding of words. “Lucy Calkins Units of Study” only sporadically teaches phoneme awareness (the ability to parse out oral speech sounds) and phonics (the ability to map sounds onto letters). The problems are twofold: the district’s use of what is called a balanced literacy reading program authored by Lucy Calkins and the accompanying balanced literacy teacher training. Having served as a SBUSD board member, the President of the California State School Board of Education, and more recently on the Superintendent’s “Early Literacy Task Force,” I have serious concerns about the low literacy rates and their causes. The district’s redesignation rate, whereby English Language Learners transition to a regular classroom, is an abysmal 13%. The percentage is in the 30s for minority students. Currently (and pre-pandemic as well), barely half of the students in SBUSD read proficiently meeting the district’s standard. ![]() The Santa Barbara Unified School District is failing in its most fundamental responsibility – teaching all of its students to read. “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglass
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