Global Courant
We know that the best insights into what works in a school classroom come from teachers. That’s why when many of them told us they were upset about the dismantling of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s successful Primary Promise literacy program, we were concerned. When we learned that the district had done little to share information about the problem with the more than 20,000 families whose children will be affected by the program shutdown, we felt compelled to add our voice to those of the teachers: Ending Primary promise is the wrong move .
Primary Promise provides K-3 students with the individual attention they need to learn to read. And it takes the same approach to help students build a foundation in math.
You don’t need a jargon-filled 40-page report to describe the program. Primary Promise funds the hiring and training of teachers and assistants who provide direct assistance to students who need it most. It’s simple, straightforward and something teams in schools have proven they can implement at scale. It has been put into action in more than 300 of LA Unified’s approximately 450 elementary schools.
The terrible truth in public schools across the country is that more than half of primary school children cannot read at grade level. This has major consequences for someone’s life. Learning is cumulative. When children learn to read in third grade, they can read to learn; if they miss this grade, they are likely to falter in later classes. Research tells us that fourth graders can’t read at the grade level are four times more likely to drop out of school. That in turn means they will have much lower lifetime incomes. Surely we cannot allow more than half of public school children to be left behind.
To see how Primary Promise works, let’s take a look at a typical first grade classroom with 24 students. One teacher tries to work with the students who are at the grade level, while also trying to help some students with phonological awareness, others who are struggling with decoding words and others who are working on letter sounds.
In other words, we’re asking a single teacher to teach four different groups of six-year-olds at the same time. That’s really hard to do.
Primary Promise addresses the challenge by adding a second teacher or assistant to the class, so that one teacher can work with the upper level children, while the other can help small groups of students with their specific needs. Students selected to participate in the program are those most in need of assistance as they lag far behind their peers.
This approach is central to the current national debate on early literacy. Much has been reported on the large-scale shift in New York schools from “balanced literacy,” with a focus on discussing stories—theme, character, and plot—to the “science of reading,” or phonetics, which builds on the foundations of sounding and understanding individual words. Primary Promise gives Los Angeles students a big head start in the same direction with a curriculum rooted in best practices and teams of trained teachers to do the job.
Primary Promise started in 2020. Since then there have been three published evaluations of the results: October 2021, March 2022 and July 2022. All show that the program is working extremely well.
In a measure of results, the district looked at samples of first graders before and after the fall semester of 2020. At the start of the school year, only nine out of 100 students in Primary Promise read at the grade level, but by the end of the semester that was number grew to 37 students. That compared to only two out of 100 students who were not in Primary Promise who made similar progress.
In addition to the data, teachers and families overwhelmingly tell us that Primary Promise works. Parents supporting teachersthe largest parent-led support group in LA Unified, calls it “the most promising early literacy program in the country.”
Supt. Alberto Carvalho has acknowledged that this approach works, but defends his decision to cut the program based on cost while shifting funding to middle and high schools. The annual investment in Primary Promise is well under 1% of LA Unified’s budget, and aid for high school students should not be at the expense of their elementary school siblings.
LA Unified’s budget is a reflection of its values. As recently as March, the school district reported a record $5.8 billion surplus. Yes, some of that will come from one-time pandemic relief funds, but unless the money is completely gone, the superintendent and school board could come up with the dollars to fulfill the Primary Promise.
At the School council meeting June 6, the superintendent spoke of developing Primary Pledge into something “more democratic and just.” We don’t know what he means by “democratic and fair,” but we do know that English students and black students are making dramatic progress in Primary Promise. Shall we call that just and long overdue?
Primary Promise has turned out to be a remarkable success. It must be continued.
Austin Beutner and Ray Cortines were both superintendents of LA Unified. Primary Promise started when Beutner was superintendent.
