GUILDERLAND — New York may be joining the states, like Florida and Texas, that require primary students to be taught to read largely through phonics rather than the formerly popular whole-language approach.

Rachel Anderson informed the Guilderland School Board on Tuesday about Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan, requiring the State Education Department to “establish new instructional practices” for teaching students from pre-kindergarten to third grade.

“It’s what she has been calling her back-to-basics program,” said Anderson, who is the district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.

“The caveats for the practices are that they must be evidence-based, scientifically based, must be focused on reading competency, and must align with the culturally responsive, sustaining framework which came out earlier this year,” said Anderson.

The pendulum from whole to parts learning swings every three decades or so. The debate is as old as the founding of the United States.

As far back as the earliest Massachusetts colonies, educators debated whether children should read from the Bible first, or be taught the alphabet first.

Along with the shift from whole to parts learning, there has been a shift in emphasis from child-centered programs to adult scientific analysis.

A Victorian committee set up by the National Education Association and headed by Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, the Committee of Ten, found reading instruction and education to be lifeless and dull and recommended child-centered reading in its 1892 report.

By 1910, the story method had become the most popular method of teaching reading. Teachers began with whole stories, then worked down to the page level, then to the word level, and finally to the sound level.

With World War I, a public outcry over how bad American soldiers were at reading led to the first movement for standardized achievement tests and intelligence quota, or IQ, tests. At the same time, there was a movement towards consolidating small schools into large school systems and running them like businesses.

Public concerns over poor teaching led to the creation of teachers’ manuals, thought to be the best way of reaching the many rural schools, and standardizing teaching methods. There was a shift from oral recitation in the classroom to the use of workbooks.

A scientific movement emerged, where reading in the same grade was taught at different levels; the thought was it didn’t make sense to hold all students to the same standard.

By the 1960s, starting with parts was seen as the only way to teach reading. The idea of communist influence was tied to a whole-language approach; millions of dollars were spent by the federal government on research to find phonetic sequences with the hope that science would make the schools failure-proof.

What followed, and is now on its way out, was the whole-language approach. Instead of learning first letters, then sounds, then words, as in the traditional parts-learning approach, students were exposed to literature first so that they want to learn to read and write, so that their learning was, in the vocabulary of whole language, “purposeful.”

The pandemic may have hastened the latest embrace of parts learning as some parents, at home with their children, observed online lessons and concluded children were guessing at words based on pictures rather than sounding them out phonetically.

Anderson went over the deadlines that the governor’s proposal would entail.

The State Education Department would have to “establish evidence and scientifically based best practices no later than July 1, 2024” and school districts would have to review curricula annually to “ensure alignment.”

“By September 2025, every school district will have to certify that their curriculum, instructional strategies, and professional development are aligned with those practices,” said Anderson

She went on, “So the good news is that we have been working for just about a year with the elementary literacy instruction group to develop an in-house curriculum that is aligned to some of these best practices or what we think the best practices will look like ….

“We anticipate that we are going to be in very good shape to sign off on what the State Education Department will ask of us by September 2025 if this comes to fruition.”

The governor’s plan includes $10 million for the New York State United Teachers Education and Learning Trust for training for educators.

“How that will be distributed, we don’t know,” said Anderson. “We already have a very robust coaching program in place and our literacy coaches are the ones who are taking the lead on this curriculum development project that we've already been working on.”

A literacy coach from the Capital Region Board of Cooperative Educational Services is also working with Guilderland literacy coaches, she said. “So we have multiple layers of support and I think we are in a really good place.”

Budget

At the same Jan. 30 meeting, Guilderland’s assistant superintendent for business, Andrew Van Alstyne, informed the board how Hochul’s proposed budget would affect Guilderland’s finances.

As he explained to the Enterprise earlier, Hochul has proposed two changes to Foundation Aid.

The state’s Foundation Aid formula, Van Alstyne told the board, asks how much it costs to successfully educate a student, taking into account the extra resources needed to educate students with disabilities, students in economic hardship, or English language learners as well as how much money a district can raise locally.

“This year, ’23-’24, is the first school year that every school district in New York state has received its full Foundation Aid,” Van Alstyne said.

Hochul wants to end “the practice of save harmless,” he said, which won’t be relevant for Guilderland. The practice kept giving the same aid to schools even if their enrollment went down.

“Enrollment across the state is declining,” said Van Alsltyne. “But particularly in small rural districts, we are seeing really significant declines … It’s going to be driving the conversation and advocacy across the state.”

The second change Hochul is proposing is a “technical tweak” to calculate inflation by using a 10-year average, dropping the highest and lowest figures, instead of using the prior year’s inflation amount.

If this change is enacted, Guilderland would lose about $326,000 in Foundation Aid, he calculated.

“We are hoping that will be restored to the traditional inflation measure,” Van Alstyne said.

Hochul has not proposed changes to expense-based aid — such as for transportation, BOCES services, or building aid — where the district gets aid the following year as a percentage of what it spent in the current year.

 If Hochul’s plan went through, Van Alsttyne calculated, Guilderland would lose 1-percent of its current aid, going from $37.6 million this year to $37.3 million next year — a reduction of about $366,000.

In December, Van Alstyne told the board, if it were to keep the same staffing and programs it has this year, next year’s budget would increase 6.1 percent from $120 million to $127 million, leaving a $1.7 million gap.

Those calculations were based on the historic full restoration of Foundation Aid promised by Hochul. So, with her executive budget proposal, the gap for Guilderland would widen to over $2 million.

Both Van Alstyne and Anderson said, “There are more questions than answers.”