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DURHAM -- The Durham public school system has commissioned a survey to gauge employees' reactions to the elementary reading curriculum implemented last summer.
District officials promised to do a survey in the fall after the curriculum drew fire from teachers and parents.
Previously schools and individual educators had great latitude in their approaches to teaching reading. Administrators decided to make a change after seeing poor state reading scores in 2008. The new program, by contrast, emphasizes uniformity and the use of a set of materials, Reading Street, that had been purchased by the district in 2006.
Critics said the new so-called comprehensive literacy framework in general and Reading Street in particular took a lowest-common-denominator approach and crowded out other subjects. They also charged that it was so highly choreographed as to handcuff veteran teachers.
Administrators acknowledged that the introduction of the new program -- complicated by the cutting of hundreds of jobs last year -- had not been handled well. The system also made it clear that instructors had much more room to take individual approaches to teaching as long as they were meeting the required lesson objectives.
Stacey Wilson-Norman, Durham's assistant superintendent of elementary curriculum and instruction, said elementary school principals, reading coaches and classroom teachers were all notified of the survey by e-mail. Answers were due this week, but the deadline for responses has been extended to Friday.
"I think as a district we want to review the results to analyze how we can continue to make the implementation better and stronger with the feedback from the teachers," Wilson-Norman said.
Susie Gilbert is a third-year kindergarten teacher at E.K. Powe Elementary School who has worked for the district for 12 years. Although the district regularly solicits teacher input before making textbook purchases, this is the first time she can remember administrators checking with a large number of instructors on how a curriculum is actually working.
"I'm excited about it because it gives teachers an opportunity to give input into how the literacy program is going and if they have ideas and suggestions for change and what is working and what isn't working," Gilbert said. "I think any time that you try to get all the stakeholders involved that that's a good thing."
While survey answers are not supposed to be linked to individual teachers when they are presented to the district, Gilbert said she put things in the survey that "I would have felt comfortable saying to somebody if they came and asked me specifically."
Her thoughts on the comprehensive literacy framework? "There are ways that you can reach commonality without a lockstep approach for every person," Gilbert said. "And that part wasn't taken into consideration to begin with."
She'd like to see teachers with modest experience given more flexibility on reading instruction than new teachers, and veterans given yet more freedom than intermediate teachers.
Rodrigo Dorfman is a member of Durham Allies for Responsive Education, a group formed from people protesting the reading curriculum. He's concerned that administrators with Durham Public Schools respond to criticisms that show up in the survey.
"The last thing you want is for teachers to pour their heart out and then for them to feel that they've not been heard," Dorfman said. "And that's the thing that I hear over and over, that [teachers have] not been heard. And I think this is an incredible opportunity for DPS to get an uncensored, unfiltered overview of how the teachers feel."
