New Bedford’s literacy overhaul starts with its youngest learners

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In two kindergarten classrooms across town, one puppet was leading singing and cheer and a new approach to early literacy instruction.

“Monster! Monster! Big and round! Erase the letter that makes this sound!” So sang the joyous, if slightly screechy, chorus of 5- and 6-year-olds at Congdon Elementary.

The teacher handed the green puppet-monster (a household duster with big googly eyes made of fabric glued on top) to a little boy named Grayson, who bravely got up from the rug and teetered over to the white board.

“Ssssss,” hissed the teacher, Lisa Furtado. And Grayson directed the puppet to gobble up (i.e., erase) the letter ’S’ from the white board. The classroom applauded, and Grayson responded with a proud little hop. Then the song started again.

This tradition of learning letter sounds has been going on in Ms. Furtado’s class for years and years. It’s so beloved a tradition, in fact, that another kindergarten classroom across town, at Carney Academy, has taken up its own puppet tradition.

Hannah Furtado — Lisa’s daughter — has been teaching at Carney for three years. And on the same blustery autumn morning, her very own kindergarten students began singing, “Monster! Monster! Big and ….” before erasing letters from the white board — googly eyes and all.

While the monster itself isn’t new (though its territory is expanding via the Furtado family), it symbolizes the best of a new approach to early literacy instruction that has come to New Bedford. 

In recent years, the 26 schools across New Bedford have committed to an overhaul in reading instruction that, to outsiders, might seem obvious: give all teachers a high-quality curriculum, one that actually has been shown to teach kids how to read, and train the teachers on how to use it. 

Specifically, research says a high-quality reading curriculum should include a strong focus on vocabulary, language structure, background knowledge, and phonics —  teaching the sounds of letters and letter groups.

Obstacles to this new approach are higher than you might expect. Chief among these is that the state’s largest teachers union vocally opposes any policy that mandates literacy curriculum be based on literacy research. (Their criticism: such a policy could take teaching decisions out of teachers’ hands.) 

Also, many educator-preparation programs never properly trained generations of teachers on how to teach reading, despite the literacy research existing for decades. And lastly, changing the curriculum necessarily means changing how some teachers teach.

To overcome some of these challenges, a new statewide grant is supporting districts’ efforts to revamp literacy instruction for younger students, and New Bedford received $1.7 million this year — one of the largest awards anywhere in Massachusetts. 

Meanwhile, the legislation that proposes mandating a high-quality curriculum cleared a major milestone last month, passing the state’s house of representatives despite pushback from the teachers union. The bill now heads to the state’s senate, where it’s expected to pass but could be amended.  

The legislation, while significant to Massachusetts (where more than half of districts did not use curriculum based on literacy research, according to a 2023 Boston Globe investigation), won’t have much effect on New Bedford: the Whaling City has decided to independently take on these reforms, before the legislation passes. 

As of last year, the new reading curriculum is in all New Bedford schools, from pre-K through high school. “We have high-quality instructional materials all day long,” said Laura Garcia, a curriculum manager in charge of the district’s English Language Arts offerings. 

But New Bedford is relying on the state grant money to ensure that the new material is implemented well for thousands of its youngest learners (pre-K through grade 3).

Among the required tasks ahead: re-teaching a generation of teachers to support phonetics-based, vocabulary-focused, and context-rich reading instruction. To do so, New Bedford must offer after-school courses for its teachers, some of whom never received phonics instruction in their teacher-prep programs.

Furthermore, New Bedford must compensate all the teachers who attend these after-school courses, per union agreements. This is part of what the grant will support. So far, the literacy course is overflowing with interest, according to Garcia.

“We had 70 applicants within the first half hour,” Garcia said, though only 30 slots were available in the inaugural course offering. “There’s a want and a need,” Garcia said.  Teachers have sent her emails, she says, “saying, ‘Please consider me if someone drops out.’” 

Grant money has also allowed the district to hire Dr. Nicola Ansdell, a learning specialist in reading who will support early-grade teachers across the district. 

Ansdell says the new curriculum represents a pro-teacher and pro-child strategy.

To demonstrate this, Ansdell and the district chose to show off the mother-daughter-monster team — composed of the Furtados and their puppets.

“I absolutely want to be able to empower the teachers to use their professional judgement and what they know about the children in front of them to say, ‘I need to spend more time giving this student this skill,’” Ansdell said. Providing the curriculum and training, Ansdell said, will give teachers a “consistent capacity to respond,” but does not mean they will “do the same thing every time.”

For example, the elder Furtado, who has been at Congdon Elementary for 27 of her 30 teaching years, glided through the pre-made slideshow from the new curriculum. On her SmartBoard, she clicked along to discover a letter of the day (“N, for nest”), new words for the class to spell aloud together, and a video that showed a young boy pronouncing letter sounds. 

The class followed along, eagerly spelling words and practicing their “nnnn” sounds.

But then Furtado came to her own slide, customized for … the monster. 

For Furtado, it was a chance to call on specific kids to see if they got the day’s lesson. To see if they could identify a letter based on its sound. And to see if they knew the difference between a letter’s name (“Ess” or “En”) and the sound it makes (“Ssss” and “Nnnn”).

More importantly, perhaps, the activity injected a ray of unbridled joy that only a veteran kindergarten teacher knows how to do. When the monster came out, it seemed like the rug itself began to wiggle.

“These materials don’t teach the kids,” said Garcia, the administrator. “Teachers make those materials come to life.”

She continued, “Teachers are very busy. They are great at teaching. It’s too much for us to ask them to create the curriculum.”

Across town, the younger Furtado had the same curricular materials, so her students also learned the letter “N” and how to spell some of the same new words. For two classrooms taught by a veteran and a relatively new teacher, the overall experience was remarkably consistent.

But when the monster came out, the joyous tradition her mother had started now arrived in a new classroom — and the individuality made it all feel a bit more like home. 

Confronting reality: a long road ahead 

Despite New Bedford’s work to improve its reading curriculum, the district has a long way to go in realizing its literacy transformation. Student test scores, a useful measurement for consistent year-over-year data, have mostly flatlined or declined in New Bedford, according to the latest results.

At the October meeting of the School Committee, Superintendent Andrew O’Leary issued the customary cautions about the recent results from the MCAS, Massachusetts’ statewide tests. 

Among his caveats, O’Leary said that the published numbers are broad averages, and therefore they hide a lot of good results; that tests are just one of many metrics that districts use; and that by the time these results are published, the “data is already out of date.”

(Students take MCAS in the spring, and the results aren’t published until October, when students have usually advanced to the next grade-level.)

But O’Leary did pull out one significant trend from the morass of numbers. He said he’d been hoping to see a lot more progress in the grade 3 English Language Arts results, “based on our investments and curricular overhaul,” he said.

“It is a good marker of school quality, as much as I talk down averages,” O’Leary said.

Those grade 3 results showed 22% of New Bedford’s third graders — or less than one out of four students — scored at or above grade level on the English test. It was another decline in a years-long slide: before the pandemic, in 2019, 48% of New Bedford’s third graders scored at or above grade level, or more than twice as many as this year. 

“Mr. O’Leary and I are both disappointed in the scores for third grade,” said Garcia, the ELA administrator.

But Garcia says strong evidence shows that New Bedford schools are doing a lot of good for their youngest students. 

The state tests begin in 3rd grade, so they don’t capture the first four years (or more, if students enrolled in the district’s pre-K) of progress thanks to reading intervention — which in New Bedford, can be significant. 

Throughout those early years, New Bedford uses a widely-known micro-assessment, known as DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), to assess students’ phonics, alphabet knowledge, and other skills. 

Looking at the DIBELS data reveals a stark reality. Students in New Bedford arrive in kindergarten with bigger knowledge and skill gaps than kids do elsewhere, on average. 

Over the course of the kindergarten year, however, the number of New Bedford students who are considered “well below” grade-level decreases rapidly — and by year’s end they have significantly closed the gap to the national average. 

This “catching up” is happening every year until the third grade, according to district data. Still, the grade-level expectations get higher and higher each year, making it harder and harder to catch up.

Furthermore, Garcia says that some schools in New Bedford are exceeding national averages, and soaring on these assessments. “In higher performing schools, they are hitting the early literacy goal in DIBELS. They’re reaching 80%,” said Garcia. 

While this points to the uneven learning landscape across New Bedford, it also means that there’s a lot that the district is doing right, according to Garcia. And with a consistent plan and curriculum, these best practices can more easily spread.

Both the successes and very real struggles of the reading intervention have also caught the attention of New Bedford’s mayor, Jon Mitchell (who also serves as the ex officio chair of the School Committee).

After O’Leary’s MCAS presentation last month, the mayor commented on the accountability measures he’s pushed for.

“There have been leadership changes at a number of these schools,” Mitchell said, claiming that “accountability at the principal level … has returned.”

Mitchell also asked for patience, saying, “those changes won’t be reflected [in the testing data] for a number of years. … It takes a while to get the hang of things,” he said. 

Overall, Mitchell claimed that his focus on accountability “is a basis of optimism for future growth.” He continued, “We’re making sure that the people who are leading these buildings are delivering results.”

Garcia shares that optimism. “We believe we have the right people in place. We need to ensure that they get what they need,” she said.

“They are excited and they want to. We need to support them as best as we can.”

Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org

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