Tag Archives: Amy Jones

Reading Horizons in Minneapolis: Full Implementation Ahead, Despite School Board Action

October 20, 2015

Speechless.

That is the word reverberating through text messages, emails, and Facebook posts today, among those closely following the trajectory of Reading Horizons’ troubling spin through the Minneapolis Public Schools.

After months of teacher and community-led protest, the Minneapolis school board voted, on October 13, to cancel the district’s deal with Reading Horizons, purveyor of a shocking set of “Little Books,” and a phonics curriculum some find invaluable.

On October 20, just one week after watching Reading Horizons get shot down by school board members, Minneapolis Public Schools’ Director of Elementary Education, Amy Jones, sent this message to the district’s elementary ed literacy specialists:

Good morning,

We are moving forward with Reading Horizons implementation this year while we start the search for another foundational skills program. It is in the best interest of our students and at the direction of Interim Superintendent Goar that we continue with full implementation.

Every K-2 classroom teacher, plus gr 3 classroom teachers in priority sites should already be providing Reading Horizons instruction for 20-30 minutes daily as part of the literacy block. 

Please check in with K-2 (3 priority) teachers to see what type of support they need in their implementation.

Given the Board’s resolution from Oct. 13 there will be a few changes as we move through this year.

#1 We will not be working with the RH implementation coaches in the future as we have discontinued our contract. However, we will continue to provide coaching through our literacy specialists and elementary T&L team. If you have implementation questions or require support, please reach out to them.

#2 We will be moving forward with a Reading A-Z subscription for each site which can be used for decodable texts aligned to Reading Horizons. Information on how to order the books from the copy center will be shared with literacy specialists. 

#3 We will not be utilizing the online RH software.

#4 We will be replacing the white board markers, which were found to be defective. New sets will be sent out mid-November.

We will also talk about this in on Friday at PD, but feel free to send me any questions and I will do my best to answer them.

Thank you for your work and patience.

Amy Jones

Director of Elementary Education

Teaching and Learning Dept.

612-668-5310

Minneapolis Public Schools

Confusing!

Was the board’s 7-2 vote to cancel the Reading Horizons contract a mere formality, and not a directive? Several board members–in particular Nelson Inz, who wrote the resolution that was passed, Siad Ali, Rebecca Gagnon, and Tracine Asberry–seemed to agree with the hoards of protesters that filled the meeting room that doing business with Reading Horizons actually was not in the “best interests of our students.” 

Jones’ email is actually the third admin-level message to come out since the board’s decision.

The first came from Minneapolis Federation of Teachers president, Lynn Nordgren, on Wednesday, October 14–just after the board meeting. Here is a condensed version of Nordgren’s lengthy email:

Dear Colleagues,

While it is critical that we have high quality materials for teaching reading, and while there are those who are finding great results with Reading Horizons, we feel we must recommend that further business with Reading Horizons must be stopped. The moral high road has to come first in light of what families and community have expressed and because we cannot continue to marginalize those who have been marginalized throughout time – even if the materials have been “cleansed”. Our equity policy must be honored – we must walk our talk. However, we do not want to leave teachers high and dry. They have been without good materials/resources for too long. Therefore, this is the series of steps we believe the district should take:

1. Stop doing any further business with Reading Horizons. If possible, get a refund.
2. Allow teachers to choose to continue to use RH until a new literacy program is adopted. RH should not be mandatory, however. It should be a professional decision to use or not.
3. Immediately begin a transparent, thorough, and inclusive process for selecting a new literacy program. Use available research about which reading/literacy programs are deemed the best.
Vet every option deeply with the many teachers who will be using the new materials. Include community and parents throughout the process. Adopt a process that can be used for all materials, curriculum, and assessments now and in the future.
4. Ensure all classrooms have adequate materials/resources – no matter what the subject area. Ensure teachers have adequate time to plan the next day’s work with students. It does not matter how good the curriculum is if teachers do not have time to plan engaging lessons and gather needed resources.
5. Apologize and move forward knowing this will not ever happen again.

We understand some of you will not agree with these recommendations. It really came down to being able to move past the controversy and do the right thing ethically but also ensure you have what you need to be successful with students. In the end, it is up to school district leadership to determine the next steps following what happened at the school board on Tuesday night.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful feedback. Once again, you have shown how incredibly knowledgeable, skilled and caring you are. I am honored to be your president.

Respectfully,

Lynn Nordgren
MFT 59

Nordgren’s email clearly leaves the door open for Reading Horizons to be used, but says it should not be mandatory.

Then, Goar sent a message to staff on Monday, October 19. While Goar’s email indicates a desire to push for more “foundational literacy skills,” it doesn’t say Reading Horizons will continue to be “fully implemented,” against the wishes of the school board and all of those who organized against the district’s relationship with the company:

Sent: Monday, October 19, 2015 11:25 AM
Subject: Update regarding contract with Reading Horizons

Dear Principals and Teachers,

At the October 13th meeting, the Board of Education passed a resolution terminating the district’s contract with Reading Horizons, a vendor of literacy curricula. As you know, supplemental materials provided with a foundational skills curriculum we purchased proved to contain offensive and racist stereotypes and were returned.

At the meeting, I acknowledged it was a failure of people and process that brought us to this point. I take full responsibility for these failures and I sincerely apologize for the pain and challenges that have resulted.  I am committed to fixing the way we select and purchase curriculum so this never happens again. Now it’s time to look to the future and determine next steps.

My priority going forward is to have as little impact as possible on our students’ learning. I know you all share my concern for the reading challenges too many of our children face. We need to have a transition strategy to avoid leaving classrooms without essential fundamental reading skills tools. Children need strong reading skills to be college and career ready.

The Board of Education decided that the contractual relationship with Reading Horizons needed to end based on policy violations during the selection of the curriculum. I fully respect this decision and will direct the selection of a replacement curriculum utilizing a vigorous process that will thoroughly evaluate effectiveness, cultural appropriateness and will include input from our community.  

In the meantime, we will continue to utilize the foundational skills to support our core literacy curriculum, Good Habits, Great Readers. We will keep everyone posted on the search for a replacement curriculum. We will find and approve a replacement as quickly as possible while ensuring the integrity of the process.

Thank you for your patience as we go through this transition, and for your commitment to the students of MPS.

Thank you.

Michael Goar

Interim Superintendent

What happened, then, between October 19 and October 20 that caused MPS to again try to insist that all K-2 (and 3, in high priority schools) teachers use Reading Horizons’ materials, for the same amount of time and in the same manner? (This is an odd move for a district that keeps touting “autonomy” as one of its key gap-closing strategies.)

And just who is in charge here?

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Minneapolis teacher at center of Reading Horizons storm identifies herself

shana
Dickson teaches first grade at north Minneapolis’s Elizabeth Hall Elementary School.

Sarah Lahm

August 31, 2015

Minneapolis teacher Shana Dickson is “Roxanne Berger.” 

Last week, I wrote a series of blog posts chronicling Dickson’s reaction to an early literacy training session, provided by the Minneapolis Public Schools, and hosted by the district’s new phonics curriculum provider, Reading Horizons.

The training had a profound and upsetting impact on her, but Dickson was afraid to go public with her experience. Yes, the training was off-putting and offensive, to Dickson and others who were there with her, and the “little” accessory books handed out by Reading Horizons, intended for classroom use by the district’s K-2 students, were filled with shockingly dated, racist, sexist, and oppressive images and stories. 

Lazy Lucy
An attempt at diversity

Still, Dickson was worried that revealing her name would jeopardize her job, and her relationship with some of her fellow teachers. And so I shared her story, and identified her as “Roxanne Berger.”

But the blog posts took off, forcing the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) to respond to questions and anger from the public. At first, it seems MPS tried a “shoot the messenger” approach, by claiming that my original blog post, “Phonics or indoctrination? Minneapolis teacher training takes a step backwards,” contained “inaccurate and misleading information.”

Original MPS RH announcement
Original MPS response, posted on Facebook by Brian Hayden

Very quickly, MPS backtracked and removed the part where they imply my blog posts are false. Here is the beginning of MPS’s revised statement, which is attributed to interim Superintendent Michael Goar:

A lot of questions have been raised about parts of Minneapolis Public Schools’ early literacy program. Interim Superintendent Michael Goar helps answer those questions:

I have become aware that there is great concern among some parents and other stakeholders in the Minneapolis Public School district about an early childhood literacy curriculum MPS is launching this school year. I’d like to take this opportunity to address these concerns and share in the outrage of our diverse communities.

The whole statement, along with parent, staff, and community comments (including some who support Reading Horizons), can be found on the Minneapolis Public Schools’s Facebook page. Basically, the district is insisting that Reading Horizons be allowed to redo the accompanying “Little Books,” because their approach to phonics is so powerful:

Here is an important consideration. Reading Horizons works. Research shows this program has been successful in improving student outcomes across the country, including outcomes in diverse districts like ours.

But we are as concerned about the culturally inappropriate material as everyone else and we quickly addressed and removed the materials, as we should have. We will continue to explore options regarding this issue.

Let me say again, kids who read grow up to succeed, and early literacy is key to the future of our kids. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have further questions or concerns.

If anyone out there can find research about Reading Horizons’ curriculum that has not been produced by Reading Horizons itself, please send it to me. So far, all I can find to support the claim that “Research shows this program has been successful in improving student outcomes…” is research done by Reading Horizons, which might just have a stake in this whole thing (see this post about the $1.2 million contract they secured with MPS).

In the wake of Goar’s statement, more media coverage followed:

  • First, MPR reporter Bob Collins picked it up for his “Newscut” blog.
  • Then, StarTribune education reporter Alejandra Matos wrote about it.
  • KSTP News also covered the story.

According to Dickson, this groundswell of coverage and support helped her decide to publicly identify herself:

“…because I feel like enough people are in support of the cause, I have noticed so many people passing along your blog and I felt like even if there are those who disagree with me, there will also be many who stand with me. “

Up next: Minneapolis teachers, parents, and community members demand that MPS cancel the Reading Horizons contract

Start with Part One of this series: Phonics or indoctrination?

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Reading Horizons: A curriculum “even a janitor” could teach

Sarah Lahm

August 27, 2015

Stay with me. In early August, several Minneapolis teachers contacted me about an early literacy training session they had been to. What happened there shocked and offended many of them. I am happy to help tell their stories, which I decided to do in a series of blog posts. The stories center on two teachers–one white, one a teacher of color–and their reactions to the religiously tinged, “Common Core” ready, and all-around offensive training they attended. The teacher of color does not feel comfortable using her real name. Instead, I refer to her as Roxanne Berger.

Read Part One: Outsider’s imprint here.

Read Part Two: Why teachers of color leave here.

Context and background

One Asian character in 54 books
The sole Asian character in all 54 books. No Latino students were featured, as far as I know.

Emerging details show that, in July, Minneapolis school board members approved the district’s contract with the Utah-based company Reading Horizons. The contract is worth $1.2 million and is coated in promises that must have been tough to refuse, for a district desperate to close the “achievement gap,” boost test scores, and set all students on a path to success. 

If, the contract approval document declares, MPS buys the million dollar program, and if MPS teachers implement the Reading Horizons curriculum with “fidelity,” then this will happen:

All MPS students will demonstrate higher levels of reading skill in grades K-3. Achievement gaps between white students and students of color will narrow across all grades. MCA reading scores in grades 3-10 will increase over time, presuming implementation of the Reading Horizons program with fidelity.

But it turns out that Reading Horizons has an overtly religious public profile, and, another reader has pointed out, many of the company’s board of directors (all white men) appear to have connections with Mormon-based Brigham Young University.

Most troubling, however, has been the news that the classroom books Reading Horizons had prepared–and attempted to make “diverse,” at MPS’s request–were deeply offensive, and loaded with racist, sexist, narrow images and stories. (Please refer to Part One and Two above for further details about this.)

Teachers also report that the training itself was problematic, as it was led by a Reading Horizons employee who has asked not to be named. Her company profile, however, includes language that might raise some red flags, including these statements:

Now that I am a Reading Horizons trainer, it has become my mission to help transform teachers into reading specialists. I give them the tools to “save” the students I couldn’t.

Roxanne Berger, the teacher of color who asked not to be publicly named, wrote down nearly everything this employee said during the two-day, early August training session she attended. Here is some of what she shared with the teachers, according to Berger’s notes:

“I have a passion for poverty culture”

“They say you can’t stay in high poverty spaces for more than 5 years or else you’ll burn out. Well I’ll tell you what, I stayed for 7 years.”

“I was ready to quit. My empathy for people in poverty started to decline.”

RH Kings
All kings are white men. There is one prince and one princess who are not white.

Read the company’s July 23, 2015 press release, announcing its new contract with MPS. 

Part Three: Money for what?

As the Reading Horizons training scandal broke in early August, emails sent among Minneapolis staffers reveal efforts to try to explain why the district entered into a contract with Reading Horizons in the first place.

It is clear that a continuous lack of adequate classroom resources factored into the decision.

Teachers and staff report choosing Reading Horizons because at least the curriculum did come with some companion books for kids. Other programs were only technology based, which did not seem appropriate. Plus, the emails say, district teachers have been repeatedly asking for money to build up their classroom libraries, only to be told no.

In fact, one teacher has said–behind the scenes–that this is the third time in 10 years that MPS teachers have had a district-selected early literacy curriculum pushed on them, without adequate companion books for classroom use. 

And so going with Reading Horizons seemed like a good option because it would bring books into the classroom, even if they are a little “problematic.”

MPS communications associate Dirk Tedmon further defended the contract with Reading Horizons, from a different angle, by minimizing the “Little Books” and highlighting the quality of the company’s work.

“The Reading Horizons training was very expensive and very thorough,” Tedmon explained, and about much more than the accompanying set of books for children to read. “They are even called ‘Little Books’ because they are such a little part of the training,” he asserted.

The contract with Reading Horizons which is, again, worth $1.2 million, includes follow-up coaching services–to be done from afar, as the company is based in Salt Lake City and its trainers are not local.

Six-year-old Lucy, who lives somewhere in Africa, is “lazy.”

But, given what she has seen so far, Berger is not seeing the value: “It baffles my mind to think of the money the Minneapolis Public Schools spent on this.”

Especially when, many teachers say, the district’s Teaching and Learning department has been decimated by recent layoffs, not to mention an abrupt 2011 reshuffling that saw nearly all department staff “released” from their positions.

Former Teach for America member Mike Lynch then came from a job with McKinsey and Company (global business consultants) to head up MPS’s new “Teaching and Learning” department. His primary job was to oversee the implementation of a more explicit teaching program called “Focused Instruction.” 

Lynch is now gone, and the future doesn’t look bright for Focused Instruction, either. Some teachers are reporting that, when they try to access Focused Instruction online, they are being met with a big STOP sign, cautioning them that Focused Instruction is not adequately aligned with the Common Core State Standards.

Hence, the need to purchase a new early literacy curriculum arose.

So scripted “even a janitor” could use it

Mandy Perna, an Armatage Montessori teacher who attended the training with Berger, also noted that the Reading Horizons approach–beyond the offensive “Little Books”–struck her as odd: “The company’s ‘Implementation Coach’ kept emphasizing how scripted their curriculum is, saying things like, ‘isn’t it so great? It’s so scripted even a janitor could use it!”

Berger, too, found the scripted nature of Reading Horizons’ work “a little excessive.” It’s built around a carefully sequenced method of teaching, where students would be given concrete lessons in decoding and reading, and then be given a “Little Book” to read that would match their own reading level.

And those reading levels are to be determined by a computerized diagnostic test for the 5, 6, and 7 year olds in the district. Berger says a Reading Horizon rep told teachers that she herself had taken the test, and that it took her 45 minutes to complete it.

“I wonder how long it would take my kids to finish it, then” Berger wondered incredulously.

All of this is taking place within a national push for teachers to be held accountable for the test scores of their students, with an additional emphasis on controlling what happens in the classroom. Teaching explicit, sequenced lessons might have some value, especially for new teachers, says Perna, but it doesn’t reflect what she does in the classroom.

“Reading Horizons seems like a one size fits all approach, and I wonder about the kids who don’t need these lessons. I have first graders who are reading Harry Potter books. Will there be behavior problems, if they are supposed to sit through this?”

Continued pressure from teachers

By August 12, district employee Amy Jones had sent a more thorough email to K-2 teachers, giving them explicit instructions for how to return the offending  “Little Books” so that Reading Horizons can redesign them.

Noting that the Minneapolis Public Schools “will be seeking teacher input on the redesign,” Jones’s email makes it clear that, at this point, the district has no intention to cut ties with Reading Horizons. Instead, the email indicates that the books will be revised, with staff input, for use during the 2016-2017 school year, with no indication of what books teachers will be using this year.

But Berger is left with more questions than answers. She says she was told that the other reading curriculum vendors were “worse” than Reading Horizons. “Am I supposed to feel better about this?” she asked. “Do we continue to settle because it’s our ‘best option’?”

“Who looked at the books? Who was given a choice about this? If the problem will be blamed on Reading Horizons, then we should sever our relationship with them.”

The story is still evolving. Please stay tuned for MPS’s recent response to this story, as well as further input from teachers.