This week Maika Yeigh, a Portland Public Schools parent serving on a committee reviewing new reading materials for elementary schools, told Murmurs that one of the group’s leaders had made an unusual statement. According to Yeigh, Annie Tabshy of the school district told committee members that if they couldn’t support any of the four different options from textbook publishers that were under consideration at the district that they needed to leave the committee. In response, one committee member did leave.
Tabshy’s statement rankled Yeigh, who has raised many questions about the quality of all of the programs. She and dozens of teachers and parents have repeatedly spoken out in favor of slowing down the materials-adoption process. It’s a $4 million a year proposition and one that schools advocates say deserves closer scrutiny. On Wednesday, some of those critics mailed an open letter with almost 100 signatures from parents and teachers to the Portland Public Schools’ Board of Education. It was not the first such missive.
Brenda Gustafson, a spokeswoman for the district, says that Annie Tabshy did not say committee members had to leave the committee if they couldn’t recommend any of the options; Tabshy said, according to Gustafson, that the members could leave.
In the meantime, the committee is recommending “Reading Street” to Superintendent Vicki Phillips. It’s a program with surprising connections to the University of Oregon and the federal Department of Education. More to come.
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Any program that is said to teach reading by using worksheets and filling in blanks is questionable.
Any program that thinks all students learn the same thing and at the same rate is highly unbelievable.
And Portland schools gets all this for a mere $4 million dollars each year for the next 5 years.