Yelling. Interjection. Highly charged political debate. A crowded room with a putrid smell. 

It’s July of 1787, and you’re at America’s Constitutional Convention. 

This is how social-studies teacher Ann Hall encourages her students to think about new words: using all of their senses. Central Middle School (CMS)—where Hall teaches—emphasizes vocabulary. It’s their part in the district’s overall goal of literacy for students.

Mastering literacy is a challenge for anyone. However, in general, current middle schoolers are struggling more than those before them. Hall has witnessed this shift in her own classroom. 

“Decoding is hard,” Hall said. “What [decoding] means is to read and sound out words. If they don’t know what a word is, they’ll skip over it. And they’ll miss the meaning of the whole reading if they skip over too many of the words. It’s one of those things that they don’t know what they don’t know.
I don’t even think they realize that they’re doing it. We have to take it slower and really break it down.” 

Difficulty with reading and writing isn’t specific to CMS. 

Recently, Michigan students have fallen behind the rest of the nation in literacy. According to The Education Trust-Midwest, Michigan ranks 43rd in the country for fourth-grade reading. (This is a drop from 2019, when the state placed 32nd.) Even Mississippi, a state notorious for its poor education system, has surpassed the Mitten.

Despite this trend, FHPS schools have fared significantly better than the rest of the state. Our district has maintained its high rankings and test scores—but that doesn’t mean Ranger Country is free of problems.

Hall, like many Americans, is ready to move on from the pandemic. 

She watched her son—now in high school—complete all of his virtual assignments. For him and others his age, it was a matter of sitting down and doing the work. 

She didn’t understand the catastrophic impact COVID had on learning until she witnessed it firsthand in her classroom. During the pandemic, many students had foundational learning skills. The current middle schoolers did not. 

“It’s really eye-opening because those [years they missed] are the prime years of learning how to read,” Hall said. “And then when they came back to school, they were in second and third grade, but they were [at school] every other day because it was hybrid. And they wore masks. How much of that learning didn’t occur? That really put a perspective [on] literacy for me there because we’re seeing what happened [during the pandemic]. How do you catch those kids up?”

COVID’s effect is present for students even younger than middle-school age. 

Leslie Klomparens, a fifth-grade teacher at Central Woodlands (CW), has noticed a widening gap between students who excel at reading and those who struggle. Currently, she’s piloting a new English curriculum. This program is designed to fix the mistakes of previous curricula while combating the impact of COVID. 

“The kids that I’ve seen that are coming into fifth grade just aren’t as well prepared to read,” Klomparens said. “They’re just not where they need to be as readers. I think, slowly, we’re getting there. We’re getting back on track. I think this new curriculum is going to be huge. I think it’s going to be life-changing, in fact.”

For the past few years, FHPS has used the “workshop model” in teaching. This has two major components: instruction and work time. “Instruction” involves a mini-lesson in which teachers introduce a concept. The keyword here is “mini”—the bulk of the class period is allocated for student work time. Here, students are encouraged to imitate whatever skill or technique they have learned. 

While the workshop model worked well for online schooling, the system is not backed by the Science of Reading. The new curriculum for grades K-5 at FHPS is Amplify’s CKLA (Core Knowledge Language Arts), which includes evidence-backed teaching methods proven to be effective. 

“The premise is that kids learn a lot of background knowledge,” Klomparens said. “We just finished a unit on [the] early Americas—the Maya, Aztec, and Incas. They get immersed in that world. They built chinampas, [and] they built [Aztec] masks. Everything that they’re reading, writing, and all the vocabulary that they’re learning is about that topic.”

CKLA is significantly more rigorous than the workshop model. From a young age, students are learning about complex topics. In second grade, for example, students are already studying the War of 1812. The program’s depth and immersion make this possible.  

The curriculum also focuses on grammar. In the early Americas unit, Klomparens’ fifth-grade students focused on subjects and predicates. They’re currently learning poetry and tackling implied metaphors, much to the pride of CW’s staff members.

Klomparens foresees CKLA creating large-scale change in the district. 

“In two or three years, I envision these fifth graders are going to come in with way more skills,” Klomparens said. “Teachers must teach the curriculum with fidelity because I need to count on that the fourth grade teachers are teaching what they need to teach in fourth grade, and that I’m teaching what I need to teach in fifth grade. Again, this curriculum is so well designed that if you do that, the kids naturally build at the pace they’re supposed to go at.”

Curriculum changes for the lower grades naturally impact CHS as well. 

Every year, the new class of freshmen arrives with a different ELA background. This forces the high school instructors to modify what they teach in order to compensate for what students don’t know and to avoid repeating what they’ve already learned. 

High school English teacher Sarah Velie notes that this leaves much to the unknown, especially with grammar.

“Grammar has kind of changed over the years, and honestly, we’re still trying to figure it out because it’s changing coming up from the lower grades,” Velie said. “Every year we get a new set of students who have gotten different things in previous grades… Typically, we focus on parts of a sentence, how they work together to structure a sentence, types of sentences, and how you can utilize phrases and clauses within sentences. I think the overall goal is that we want students to be able to understand a sentence and how it works so that they can do it correctly, but also so that they can play around with style, move phrases around, [and] maybe alter or vary their sentence types.”

The high school curriculum is also changing on its own.

This year, English 9 and English 10 were replaced with Pre-AP (Advanced Placement) English 1 and 2, respectively. Velie currently teaches Honors Pre-AP English 1. The new curriculum prepares students and equips them with the tools to take AP classes later in high school. 

Naturally, coming from the College Board, these English courses focus on reading excerpts. Short pieces of text teach specific skills, but as Velie points out, they don’t give students reading stamina. Because of this, the English department has embellished the curriculum. The teachers have instituted what they believe to be important: reading full novels. 

“If we’re only ever reading excerpts, then we’re not gaining the ability to… really experience the character development, plot arcs, or artistry of a whole novel,” Velie said. “And I think that is essential. Studies show that reading novels—specifically fiction—really improves empathy in people because they can read about somebody else’s experience and be able to put themselves into that experience. And you can’t really get that from, you know, a page or two of text.”

Velie has discovered that giving students a choice in what they read increases their enthusiasm for ELA. Accordingly, she tries to make time for students to form personal connections with books. 

Klomparens does the same for her fifth graders. While CKLA is intensive, creating reading time for students is one of her main goals.  

In the past, CW has used the Accelerated Reader (AR) program. This allowed students to take online quizzes over the books they had read. After reading a certain number of words, students would become “millionaires,” which CW recognized. The prospect of becoming a millionaire incentivized students to read more.

Recently, however, the school has abandoned AR. Teachers have now shifted to conducting one-on-one conferences with students about what they’re reading. 

“When we had AR, we could use that as a tracking tool to see—are they comprehending what they’re reading?” Klomparens said. “Now it’s more just interaction, but the kids actually like that. If I’m gone, or if we miss a day [of conferencing], they’ll ask me, ‘Can you make up my reading conference?’”

At CW, students have a “primary” teacher. Kids are given a home base, even while they rotate through a handful of subjects throughout the day. This structure allows for personal connection in the learning process. Through her check-ins, Klomparens guarantees that, one, students are reading and, two, that they are reading at the correct level. She discusses plot, character development, and other literary aspects with her students. This happens on a daily basis. 

At the high school, this in-depth connection just isn’t feasible. Rather than multiple hours, each teacher only has 55 minutes to spend with each class. This leaves little to no extra time. 

Still, choice reading increases students’ interest in English, even for high schoolers.

“I would love to conference with students, especially when it comes to writing or independent reading,” Velie said. “But when you have over 30 students in a class, to get to every single one of them individually and really make it a genuine and effective conversation, it’s difficult. And it might take a full week out of your schedule. That really isn’t always possible.”

Velie’s teaching inevitably becomes more general as she has to cater to all students at once. When possible, she substitutes “lecture-style” teaching for small group work. This makes learning more personal, but only to a certain extent. 

A similar issue characterizes Hall’s social studies classes. Before the 2022-2023 school year, Hall taught challenge social studies alongside “normal” social studies. CMS has now removed all challenge classes outside of math.

The challenge course allowed accelerated students to learn the curriculum in greater depth and at a faster pace. Without it, Hall faces the challenge—no pun intended—of teaching multiple different levels of students at one time. 

“Now you have all the kids in one class,” Hall said. “I can’t focus on those kids that should have been in challenge [social studies]. But I also can’t focus on those kids who need the reading help, where I could sit with them and assist them. There’s positives and negatives, I get it, but it’s not helping [either group of students], or even the ones who are on the ‘cusp’—the ones that are so close to being proficient… You put them all in one room. How can we balance that? It’s not fair.”

COVID stripped the current middle schoolers of a complete elementary education. Hall has had to adjust her teaching style accordingly. She gives more—and closer—guidance where it wasn’t needed before. This requires time and diligence, which is difficult when every type of student is squeezed into a single class.

Despite this issue, CMS has been taking action to address literacy challenges. The school now provides “reading intervention” to students. Student growth is monitored using Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test scores. In the absence of growth, the school has helpers whose job is to specifically work with students and help them improve. The program is used for both ELA and math. 

The district as a whole is investing in new learning resources. Notably, FHPS now offers junior kindergarten. This is designed to “bridge the gap between a preschool program and Kindergarten to help ensure children are developmentally ready across all domains, not just traditional school readiness skills.” Hall sees this program—along with the free lunch program—as a promising direction for the district. These will help close the divides that exist between students based on what they have received at home.

Nationwide, our country is facing difficulties with reading and writing. But is it fair to label FHC’s challenges as a literacy crisis?

Our schools have maintained their high rankings. Upon entering CMS, visitors can see a proudly displayed sign stating that CMS is ranked as the seventh best middle school in Michigan, according to the U.S. News & World Report. (They’re first when factoring out private and charter schools.)

As Hall points out, something must be working. 

The test that FHPS administrators now face is keeping what works while fixing the problem areas. Undoubtedly, greater connectivity is needed between the elementary schools, CW, CMS, and CHS. Klomparens, Hall, and Velie all note the struggles that originate from a lack of communication and consistency. If each building has its own education system, students aren’t learning efficiently. They will either relearn the same information across multiple grades or miss entire concepts altogether. 

Cross-curricular connection is also needed. Literacy is the basis of every core subject; it can therefore connect them together. Consistency from class to class teaches students to make connections. The CKLA curriculum is interdisciplinary, blending English with topics like social studies. Hall hopes that this style of learning will be implemented at the middle school as well. 

Perhaps most importantly, students need a personal connection. They don’t magically outgrow this need once they reach middle school. Yes, connection is difficult during the busy school day. But yes, it’s still essential. 

No matter what changes are on the horizon in Ranger Country, it is certain that the teachers and administrators will continue to prioritize students. 

“That’s the best thing about this district: I mean, everyone is so pro-kid and wants to do what’s right for everyone,” Hall said. “That’s why I’ve been here for 23 years—because that’s my philosophy. The accolades are one thing, but it’s showing us [that] what we’re doing works. And if it doesn’t work, we always talk about, ‘Well, how can we fix it?’”