Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Board of Ed for February: early literacy

 Kershaw opens (which is interesting, because of course she's early ed!)
PRISM grants, Literacy Launch, high dosage tutoring
"struggling to see improvement statewide"
grade 3 "dropped during the pandemic years and has not yet bounced back"
"there's been lots of legislative interest"

I am enjoying that this appears to be an early ed template for slides

and they had a glitch with slides and then the person was muted for nearly all of the presentation about PRISM I, so...didn't get a lot out of that

Annenberg evaluating in districts that received grants 
Literacy Launch and coaching...and the livestream just went down
500 teachers this summer, 1300 during the school year
Summer sign-up coming up today
coaching follow-up available for free 

rising use of high-dosage tutoring "an evidence-based approach"
I'm noticing that this is the new "research indicates" and it raises the same "which one" question
new fund for high-dosage tutoring $25M in Fair Share dollars
don't see it as a "one and only, silver bullet" strategy
integrated with other literacy interventions
EIR grant to offer additional tutoring while it is studied (federal grant)

Hills: five year metrics, would find it helpful to have "at least annual metrics"
"so that we can kind of understand how it's going before we get to" decisions
perspective on goals and how are those gotten to
"if I looked at other states...would I think these metrics are aggressive..."
response is "relatively few" districts have 80% or more students meeting benchmarks in grade 3
Hills: if we looked at different metrics...would I feel it's aggressive or not aggressive enough
if you were waiting for a Mississippi mention, you can mark off that square

West: encouraging to hear about all the activity
"I have a question about how we're defining 'evidence-based materials' for the purpose of the PRISM grant" because we may have to depending on the outcome of the literacy
response: "we use "high quality instructional materials"
"very few materials on the market have evidence of efficacy"
"are built using materials that have evidence of working
have several other measures
mostly talking about CURATE rating, which start off with third party review; first rated by EdReports (which has been controversial), if it is highly rated by EdReports, then it is eligible for CURATE; if CURATE looks at it positively, it is eligible to be considered 

Smidy: if a critical mass of teachers participate, the school can apply for the follow-up coaching

Mohamed: thinks it isn't okay for "one in five children" not being able to read after this investment
and she keeps using this central line infection analogy from health care, but third graders go to fourth grade; they don't die
question on support for educator preparation programs: have to be aligned to practices
Craven echoes these children as being "left behind"



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