One school’s approach to reading as a ‘civil right’
For Richmond’s Nystrom Elementary School, students’ longstanding struggle with reading is not only an academic issue but one about civil rights.
The Bay Area school began the year with a proclamation that acknowledges that systemic racism has led to disproportionate outcomes in reading skills for children of color for generations. It asserts that every student is capable of reading and that it’s the school’s responsibility to ensure every child leaves Nystrom a skilled reader. The school committed to overhauling its literacy program with a new curriculum and researchbased classroom practices in an effort to bring every student to grade-level reading.
“When you think about equity, reading and literacy instruction has to be tied to that,” said Jamie Allardice, principal of the school, which comprises mostly Black and Latino students in one of the Bay Area’s poorest ZIP codes. “If we are having kids leave Nystrom unable to read or read at grade level, we need to do our job better.”
The school’s plan this year has a greater emphasis on phonics in lessons and one-on-one intervention, as well as in classroom discussions and culturally relevant texts.
During the 2018-2019 school year, only 19.34% of Nystrom’s third through sixth grade students tested at grade level or above in English language arts on the state’s Smarter Balanced tests. That was up from 13.34% in 2017-2018. But it was still far below the average for California, where 51.1% of students in third through 11th grade tested at or above grade level for English language arts in 2018-2019. West Contra Costa Unified, as a whole, only had 35% of students testing at grade level or above in English language arts that year.
California has long been challenged by its low reading scores, as well as with disparities between low-income and Black and Latino students and their white and wealthier classmates. The latest effort to change this inequality is an initiative by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and lawmakers to get every third grade student reading by 2026. Research shows that students who aren’t reading at grade level by the third grade will struggle to catch up throughout their education career.
How Thurmond’s lofty goal will be accomplished is yet to be determined. He’s forming a task force of educators, parents and education experts that will make policy recommendations, which Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, D-Alameda, will propose in a bill for the upcoming legislative cycle.
Because Nystrom’s reading performance lagged prior to the pandemic, Allardice said he’s shying away from the “learning loss mindset,” or the idea that students’ academic progress slowed or reversed during the pandemic.
“I feel like the learning loss terminology puts the onus on the kids,” Allardice said. “They’re saying the kids have lost something, but in many cases, it’s not the kids, it’s we as adults who need to do better for our kids.”
Allardice said teachers conducted DIBELS assessments to see determine students’ literacy skills. DIBELS stands for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills and consists of grade-specific assessments, such as naming letters for kindergartners and reading aloud for sixth graders.
The results of the assessment, Allardice said, showed a clear need for more “explicit and systematic foundational skills instruction” than the school was previously providing. Foundational reading skills include phonics, the ability to decode words by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters, as well as to derive meaning from them through language comprehension. Teachers will up their instruction and practice opportunities for foundational skills from 10-12 minutes a day to 30 minutes a day, Allardice said.
Teachers will also be doing “targeted work” to help build students’ reading skills, which are often “discreet” and require oneon-one attention.
The assessments will continue at the end of each trimester to measure growth and identify whether adjustments need to be made, he said.
One of the biggest changes the school has made was switching English language arts curriculums from McGraw Hill’s Treasures — now available as Wonders — to EL Education. A major difference between the two curriculums is that EL Education has students reading highquality books every day; whereas, the Treasures had students reading portions of books within an anthology. Each week was a new story, Allardice said, instead of “building knowledge of the world through meaningful texts and discussion.”
EL Education is opensource, meaning its instruction guides are available for free online — the only cost is for printed reading material.
“When you think about equity, reading and literacy instruction has to be tied to that. If we are having kids leave Nystrom unable to read or read at grade level, we need to do our job better.”
— Jamie Allardice, principal of Nystrom Elementary School