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Is your child learning about animal behavior, how the 19th Amendment was ratified, or Japanese internment during World War II?
A new tool quietly launched by New York City’s Education Department gives families and the broader public a window into the topics students are learning about in English language arts classes at any given time. It also serves up free digital books connected to the specific unit students are learning about.
The platform, known as the NYC Reads Curriculum Finder, includes a trove of information about what elementary school and some middle school students are learning in English classes down to the school and grade level. It displays questions students are learning about — “what does it take to make a successful invention?” in one third grade unit — as well as the types of materials students are using, such as biographies, films, poems, and opinion pieces.
The curriculum finder is part of a broader push to ensure students are building on their literacy skills outside of school. Officials hope the database will give caregivers, educators, and after-school providers an easy way to boost students’ vocabulary and background knowledge, which research suggests is an important element of reading comprehension.
“We need to democratize this information about what curriculum a school is using and what a student is learning,” said Jennifer Ramos, an official at the Center for Public Research and Leadership at Columbia Law School, the organization that took the lead in creating the tool in partnership with the Education Department. “Everyone can look it up and say, ‘Okay, kindergartners in this district are learning about trees.’”
The tool is tied to the city’s reading curriculum mandate that requires all elementary schools, and eventually all middle schools, to use city-approved reading programs. Educators are expected to follow pacing guides, making it possible to track what topics students are learning about at precise times throughout the year. Schools were previously allowed to pick their own curriculums and hundreds of schools used a program that was discredited by reading experts.
The curriculum finder — which was developed in partnership with the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development and the nonprofit organization ExpandED Schools — is still a work in progress. Many elementary schools appear to have no curriculum information listed, the tool’s search functions do not always work seamlessly or display correct information, and it was out of commission in recent days as officials worked to make updates.
An Education Department spokesperson said the tool is in an “improvement phase” and officials are “improving completeness and accuracy of school listings.” Users can also submit reports of missing information or other feedback directly on the site.
An early target for the tool is after-school providers and community organizations, who have long struggled to sync their programming to what students are learning during the school day in part because reading curriculums were historically not consistent between schools or even from classroom to classroom.
Ashley Jones, who helps supervise free after-school programs operated by the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services, said staffers have sometimes relied on informal hallway conversations with teachers or gleaning clues from students’ homework to get a sense of what’s going on in classrooms.
“Schools are busy — we’re all busy,” Jones said. It can be difficult to find time to coordinate with students’ classroom teachers and the curriculum finder tool could help bridge that gap, she added.
Despite some glitches, Jones said the organization has started to experiment with the tool and is thinking about how to encourage her staff to incorporate it as they plan for next school year. She hopes the next step is more training for after-school staff to support student literacy, even as her program’s goal is not to simply extend the school day.
Other providers have yet to hear about the tool.
Emily Kirven, who runs Read 718, a Brooklyn-based organization that provides tutoring to hundreds of struggling readers, said she is “excited to play around with it.”
To access books that are connected to what students are learning in class, families must log in with their Education Department accounts, which could create a barrier for her staff accessing the materials, Kirven said. But she noted that it would still be useful to know what topics students are learning about because the organization likely has books on hand that tie in to the relevant topic.
“It just would be helpful knowing what they’re doing in different grades of different schools so that we can continue to better align our instruction.”
Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at [email protected].
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
