A Pediatrician and Parent's Case For Literacy Curriculum Reform in Quincy Public Schools

Parent comments made at December 2022 District Improvement Team Meeting

Good afternoon,

My name is Dr. Todd Porter and I am a parent of 3 children who attend school in QPS, 2 of which have a developmental reading disorder known as dyslexia. I am also a community pediatrician who cares for patients who are struggling readers. I also stand before you today as one of the founding members of a newly formed parent advocacy group called Literacy Advocates of West Central Illinois. It is my understanding that review of core literacy and intervention curriculums are in process and will be presented for approval sometime this Spring to this committee as well as being available for public review.

In the hopes that those involved in this curriculum selection and review are listening, I wanted to take this opportunity to make a public comment and share my personal journey with a dyslexic child and what I learned about how all of our children are being taught to read in school.

Our journey began in Jefferson County Colorado when my daughter was in second grade. She had already been pulled for guided reading intervention since Fall of 1st grade and was not making any progress. Sensing something was wrong we paid to have her privately tested and she was identified with dyslexia. We took this information to her school and asked for an IEP which she qualified for, not due to her diagnosis of dyslexia, but due to scoring 11th percentile on her MAP Early Language Arts (ELA)

testing despite having a vast oral language vocabulary. We ultimately pulled her out of her school IEP intervention because it was not effective and paid for private tutoring until 4th grade when we moved all three of our kids to a charter school in a neighboring school district that used a K-2 Superkids reading curriculum aligned with the Science of Reading and where the principal required that all K-3 teachers be trained in Orton-Gillingham. Before moving to this school we had spent nearly $15,000 of our personal finances to provide the necessary evaluations and interventions to teach our daughter how to read. This stopped once the school provided Structured Literacy for her.

Our youngest son had a much different experience. He was diagnosed with dyslexia prior to 1st grade but he received Structured Literacy in this Charter school from Kindergarten until second grade when our family moved to Quincy where he unfortunately returned to a Balanced Literacy curriculum as no other options existed. We were able to find one private OG-based tutor to tutor him twice a week through 2nd grade as we did not want him to lose ground by receiving a curriculum that is designed to teach children to guess at words rather than decode them.

I admit that I am not an educator, but I have spent the last 4 years attending dyslexia conferences and learning from journalists like Emily Hanford who have opened my eyes to how reading is taught and why our national reading rates are so poor.

Data compiled by Wirepoints showed that statewide in 2019 only 36% of all 3rd grade students could read at grade level with rates much lower in children of color. 2019 QPS data showed that only 25.9% of 3rd graders met or exceeded ELA standards, yet in black students this fell to 3.1% which constitutes a huge equity issue in our schools. As a medical professional, if these were my outcome measures then I would want to know if what I was doing aligned with evidence-based best practice and how I could improve.

I want to end with a quote taken from a recent letter signed by more than 650 current and former teachers. In this letter the authors state:

the “Central point of Sold a Story” podcast [by Emily Hanford] is that the research wars around foundational reading skills were already won and lost decades ago and that few educators have ever heard of this research, because an entire industry of education publishers, coaches and curriculum writers have either ignored or actively resisted it, needlessly encumbering the efforts of teachers like us, our students, and their families along the way”

“Yet Hanford produces mounds of evidence on the ways “balanced literacy” curricula like signatory Lucy Calkins’ “Units of Study” both shortchange and contradict alphabetic code instruction.

There’s nothing fabricated about this — as teachers, we have seen it with our own eyes. But we hope they will listen when we say that the tools and guidance we were given were both insufficient and misleading. We were handed Fountas and Pinnell’s “Literacy Continuum” textbook in our grad school programs; we were given boxed sets of Calkins’ “Units” upon arrival in our first classrooms. And we relied on them, encouraging students to use pictures or first letters to decode words, sending them off for independent reading without us having taught them how. That isn’t because we were “naively inadequate” but because we were taught repeatedly to use these three-cueing based strategies by so-called experts, and because the phonics contained within those boxed sets was anything but systematic.”

I feel that it is important to acknowledge that our children’s teachers in good faith are using the curriculum and methods handed down to them in their training with the expectation that this curriculum will teach their students how to read. Yet Balanced Literacy is flawed and teaches our children the habits of poor readers and is harmful to our struggling readers. Prior to moving to Quincy, my children attended a school that over the span of a summer had all K-3 teachers trained in Structured Literacy while also using a core literacy curriculum aligned with the Science of Reading. So it can be done within a short time span when both the administration and the staff understand the “why” behind why it must be done.

We parents of Literacy Advocates of West Central Illinois will be walking alongside you in this curriculum selection and we can tell you that any core curriculum and intervention that carries the names of Calkins, Fontas and Pinnell, Reading Recovery or HEROES will be unacceptable. Only programs that align with the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy which have been proven by decades of research will be suitable for our children.