This article provides further details on the recommendations of the Newton Public Schools (NPS) English Language Arts (ELA) Curriculum Committee presented by Director of English Language Arts & Literacy David Kloker with support from Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning Gina Flanagan at the May 11 School Committee meeting (see Fig City News report).
Grades 6-12
The ELA Curriculum Committee recommendation for Grades 6-12 is to round up the best lessons that have been taught throughout the district into a common teacher-created curriculum. The scope of these units would be created during the 2026-27 school year and fully adopted fall 2027. The Curriculum Committee would identify the best units that are currently being used across the district and include them in a menu for teachers across the schools. Particular goals include creating new units for extended informational texts and connections to the speaking and listening standards for Grades 6-8. This would include expectations of vertical articulation of text complexity as well as expectations in vocabulary, grammar, mechanics, usage, and spelling and common writing assessments across schools. Gina Flanagan flagged that this would be designed to ensure that all levels of ELA classes at the high school are addressing grade-level standards, since CP classes have sometimes been viewed as “below grade level.” A staffing recommendation was to embed ELA teacher leaders at the middle-school level to mirror the function of department heads at the high school and Literacy Specialists at the elementary schools.
There was some tension in the discussion between the desire to identify a curated list of appropriate grade-level texts (representing a broad variety of texts while avoiding duplication across grades) with what School Committee Chair Alicia Piedalue characterized as “book lists” that made her nervous because of their association with censorship.
The Committee indicated three areas they intended to focus on for improvements:
First, that all content teachers at the middle school and high school levels get training in their role in teaching students to access informational text. They said that English teachers are especially eager to collaborate with social studies teachers on introducing long-form informational text in Grades 6, 7, and 8. Middle school teachers will have the option to pilot three curricula for their informational text units. These units will be taken from EL Education, Amplify, and Study Sync.
Second, that clear functional writing expectations be set with a return to a set of common middle school writing assessments. The Curriculum Committee was advocating for a “common writing platform,” which is a centralized software tool or digital environment adopted across an entire school or district to teach, assign, edit, and assess student writing to allow for tracking student writing across grade levels.
Third, as part of English Language development, the Curriculum Committee recommended emphasizing public speaking skills. Both high schools incorporate a sophomore public speaking experience, and the middle school needs a corollary assignment. To that end, Dr. Kloker organized the first middle school Oratorical Festival this year, although it was extracurricular. Another example given was Day Middle School’s Poetry Slam. School Committee Member Tamika Olszewski said that she sees different ways that the Sophomore Speech experience plays out in the two high schools, and she hopes they will be developed into equitable experiences.
Additionally, NPS leaders hope to address communication gaps between teachers in Grades 5-6 and Grades 8-9 to ensure continuity across elementary, middle, and high schools.
Mayor Marc Laredo indicated that he liked the idea that all middle schools would have the same academic expectations of students, and he applauded the move to strengthen the public speaking aspect of the curriculum. He added that he wanted to ensure that students are reading a lot of books each year.
When School Committee Member Jonathan Greene asked why the district runs certain pilots only to decide to not use outside curricular materials, Superintendent Anna Nolin responded that first, it is a question of due diligence and building trust with the community, and second, if educators have not had access to outside resources for the past 10-20 years, the district should give them the opportunity to review additional materials. Dr. Kloker added that some of the teacher-created units in Newton have been successfully “piloted” for decades, and the district was able to compare them favorably to outside resources.
Tamika Olszewski stated that she loves the intentionality of the 5-year review and that great things will rise to the top, while she also hopes that “the corollary will be true that less effective things will be left by the wayside.”
School Committee Member Victor Lee voiced the concern that while NPS developing its own curriculum might look less expensive because there are no outside fees, it might have hidden costs in teacher time. He asked “Do we have enough time, energy, dollars, and support to do this effectively?”
Grades K-2 Early Literacy
The Curriculum Committee’s recommendation for Grades K-2 is to replace the Fundations phonics curriculum that has been used for a long time in NPS with the UFLI curriculum combined with supplemental materials for handwriting and spelling, starting in fall 2026.
Dr. Nolin noted that, unlike with curricula in other content areas, NPS has used Fundations long enough that a side-by-side comparison was possible between it and other programs. Dr. Kloker said that the district took an exhaustive look at Fundations, UFLI, the EL Skills Block, and Heggerty. Sixteen teachers piloted UFLI in Grades K, 1, and 2 and saw positive outcomes with students in the piloting year, which both he and Dr. Nolin noted is quite unusual, as it usually takes a year or two of teacher experience with a program to see results in student data.
In Dr. Kloker’s memo to the School Committee supporting the adoption of UFLI as the NPS phonics curriculum, he noted that Grade 1 students in the pilot group of 147 students saw a +12% average student growth percentile gain in STAR Early Literacy scores and a +14% gain in average student growth percentile in STAR Reading scores, compared to their 604 grade-level peers who were not in the pilot group. In the UFLI pilot group for Grade 1, there were also 4% more students who scored at or above benchmark on DIBELS decoding assessments. In the May 18 School Committee meeting, Dr. Nolin additionally stated that NPS is currently seeing fewer than 50 Kindergarten students needing reading intervention.
As stated in the memo and during the May 11 School Committee meeting, an additional reason to switch to UFLI is that it is better aligned with the EL Education literature and reading comprehension curriculum that was recently adopted for the elementary schools. Dr. Kloker wrote, “EL Education, like many other reading curricula, assumes that decoding is primarily taught between kindergarten and 2nd grade, with necessary interventions happening in more individualized (not whole group) settings starting in 3rd grade.” The Scope and Sequence guides for UFLI are available by grade on the NPS website: Kindergarten, Grade 1, Grade 2.
According to Dr. Kloker’s memo, more than two-thirds of the elementary school Literacy Specialists in the district voted in favor of implementing the UFLI curriculum, with dissenters citing the desire to minimize new initiatives, rather than expressing qualms about the curriculum itself. In School Committee meetings, district leaders repeatedly emphasized that they are working to create a staggered timeline of new initiative adoption that will not “drown these educators,” as Dr. Nolin put it. This means that at the elementary school level, the district has chosen to prioritize the adoption of UFLI while doing a soft-launch of the math curriculum and starting pilots of the social studies curriculum. Regarding the UFLI adoption, Dr. Kloker’s memo states that “Formal training and supplying of materials to all Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade teachers…will occur during the summer of 2026, either immediately following the 2025-2026 school year or immediately prior to beginning of the 2026-2027 school year. Any teachers who are not able or willing to attend the optional summer training will still be given the materials and then trained on UFLI in the Fall of 2026.”
This recommendation was unanimously accepted by the present School Committee Members at their May 18 meeting.