The Montgomery County school board on Tuesday adopted two separate English language arts curricula for county public elementary school students in a traditional school setting and the district’s Spanish immersion programs.
The new curricula are expected to be implemented in the 2024-2025 school year starting in the fall, according to Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) officials.
For the traditional elementary setting serving pre-K to grade five, the board will purchase Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts (Amplify CKLA) literacy curriculum, which is grounded in the Science of Reading program. Amplify CKLA currently serves more than 2.7 million students in the U.S., according to the curriculum’s website.
To serve kindergarten through grade five students in one- and two-way immersion programs, the board will purchase the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: ¡Arriba la Lectura! language arts program.
School board member Shebra Evans (Dist. 2) said she was excited to see the implementation of the new curricula and asked school officials to invite board members to schools to “see it in action.”
The school system proposed the adoption of the new curricula to update its approach to early literacy and attempt to close literacy gaps for Black and brown students, students receiving special education and the growing population of emerging multilingual learners, school officials said Tuesday. In addition, officials noted to the board that the current Benchmark curriculum “lacked foundational literacy skill development” and was not aligned with the Science of Reading research.
The school board purchased Benchmark in the 2019-2020 school year.
The Science of Reading is a body of research that has been conducted across the world over the last five decades that informs how reading and writing develop, according to the Reading League. In January, the Maryland State Board of Education mandated that all literacy instruction in public schools must be aligned to the Science of Reading, including structured literacy, effective in the 2024-2025 school year.
Board members and interim MCPS Superintendent Monique Felder were generally supportive of adopting the new curricula. Felder, a former MCPS administrator who was appointed in February after the resignation of former Superintendent Monifa McKnight, noted that when she was serving as the chief academic officer for a school district in Nashville, the Amplify CKLA curriculum was implemented and showed promising results.
“For the first time we outperformed the state in the history of that school district in a matter of two years of implementing this curriculum,” Felder said. “… And I will say it’s a great curriculum in that it is not only rigorous but serves as a mirror and a window which is what we want children to see.”
“We can do all the reference checks in the world but there is nothing like having experience with it and seeing results,” board President Karla Silvestre said in response to Felder.
The new curricula will be implemented starting in the 2024-2025 school year for an initial term of three years with three one-year renewal options, according to school board documents.
Every five years the school board reviews curriculum content and in 2017 the district contracted the Johns Hopkins Institute of Education Policy to assess the district’s English language arts curriculum from pre-K to grade eight, documents stated. Results from the assessment recommended that MCPS “purchase externally created curricular and instructional materials.”
In addition to the assessment, the documents also stated that MCPS’ student achievement data shows “significant gaps in performance” for Black or African American and Hispanic/Latino students, students in poverty, as well as students receiving special education and English language development services.
According to MCPS Chief Academic Officer Peggy Pugh, the district has “undergone a monumental shift in how we do teaching of literacy to the early ages” since adopting the Benchmark curriculum.
A key interest in the selection of the new curricula was that it would meet the needs of a broad spectrum of learners. According to board documents curriculum requirements included:
- Align with the science of reading research;
- Meet needs of all learners and has explicit materials for emergent multilingual learners, students receiving special education services and highly able learners;
- Meet the needs of district’s immersion programs;
- Include culturally relevant and responsive materials;
- Have a balance of digital and print materials;
- Integrate assessment to inform and improve instruction; and
- Includes parent-facing materials to provide parents/caregivers access to the curriculum.
Curricular and instructional materials for Amplify CKLA will cost the district approximately $26.9 million, according to board documents. ¡Arriba la Lectura! will run the district approximately $958,825. For both programs, the cost will be broken down into three sums across three years.
Implementation of the program will begin with a pre-launch this spring to introduce the new materials and establish an understanding with school system leaders, said Melaika Brown, a supervisor for elementary English langauge arts in the Office of Curriculum and Instructional Programs.
Brown added that all pre-K teachers will have one day of professional training and kindergarten to fifth-grade teachers will have two days of professional training this summer centered around the new programs. In addition, administrators, reading specialists and staff development teachers will have a half day of training.
“Throughout the school year we will continue to provide that ongoing support, so more learning for teachers, more learning for leaders,” said Brown, noting that the elementary English language arts team will be heading into classrooms and seeing what implementation looks like and gathering feedback from teachers.