The walls of West Windsor-Plainsboro schools are covered with self-congratulatory banners and championship pennants (in everything from swimming and soccer to Academic Decathlon and Science Olympiad). WW-P students produce impressive standardized test scores, and its teachers win coveted academic awards. In the background, ignored by just about everyone, the language arts department wrestles with internal controversy.
In accordance with New Jersey regulations, the district routinely commissions external evaluations of each of its teaching departments. In 2012 the Public Consulting Group (PCG) published a 70-page report outlining the administrative inertia and faculty divisions that have gradually cultivated, as one principal puts it, “a culture of fear” in the language arts department.
The report identifies the department’s major weaknesses: “inconsistency of literacy instruction;” truncated class periods; and a polarizing commitment to Columbia University’s language arts teaching model.
In 1980 the Teacher’s College at Columbia hired Lucy Calkins, a British expatriate who would later design the Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP), which promotes a controversial classroom philosophy, widely known as the “Columbia model.” The model is intended for language arts classes in grades K-8. In its early years the TCRWP collaborated almost exclusively with New York City schools. Since then elements of its program have been included in schools around the world. The Columbia model is aligned with the Common Core, new standards in education that are gaining traction throughout the country.
The Teacher’s College has developed supposedly groundbreaking strategies that, according to the college’s website, enable “rigorous and joyful reading and writing instruction.” The model emphasizes small-group activities — at the expense of grammar sessions and structured, teacher-led discussions — and consists mainly of broad units (like “persuasive writing” or “narrative writing”) that teachers divide into 20-minute “mini-lessons.” After participating in a mini-lesson, students work individually or in pairs on assignments that range from drawing pictures and “free writing” to simply reading for pleasure. The program encourages teachers to focus on the fundamentals of storytelling and essay writing — not on adverbs and participle phrases.
In 2003 WW-P condensed two 40-minute middle-school language arts classes into one 52-minute Integrated Reading and Language Arts (IRLA) period and instructed teachers at both Community Middle School and Grover Middle School to adopt the Columbia model. The district organized mandatory “staff development days,” where educators fluent in TCRWP dogma conducted seminars and outlined lesson plans.
One district language arts teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, claimed that the new philosophy does not adequately prepare students for intensive high school language arts classes and that, despite this clear drawback, “there was absolutely pressure to conform.” Young, non-tenured teachers had no choice but to implement the Columbia model, lest they lose their jobs, the teacher said.
“When I taught in the middle school, many teachers retired five to seven years earlier than they originally planned,” this teacher said. “Not only had our subject been undermined, but it’s frustrating when you develop a teaching method you believe in your whole career and are told you can no longer teach that way.” In one of High School North’s staff workrooms, there is a bulletin board on which teachers have pinned articles with titles like “Teacher’s College Cult of Failure” and “Nightmare from Teacher’s College.”
On the other hand, sixth-grade English teacher Amy Meredith was “very optimistic” about the Columbia model. She said that it “will cause test scores to go up by holding teachers accountable for student growth” and that “the focus shouldn’t be on grammar and usage; that should come second to organization and the elaboration of ideas.” In her class, students participate in what she describes as “book clubs” — discussion groups that cater to each student’s needs. Meredith said that the Columbia model’s loose structure provides built-in support for weak students, many of whom would quickly fall behind in a traditional language arts classroom.
Martin Smith, who joined WW-P in 2011 as assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, said that the Columbia model “requires a tremendous amount of ability” and that “perhaps some teachers don’t feel capable of being able to follow through.” Smith said the district has “evidence to suggest that students who are in classes where teachers implement the workshop model show more significant levels of growth,” but he declined to share those statistics because they are “around individual teachers.”
In early 2012 PCG consultant Bethany Rice spent five days interviewing students and parents and observing language arts classrooms before drafting her report over the summer. Rice discovered that while some teachers carefully adhere to the Columbia model, others teach in more traditional ways. Rice lists this inconsistency among the district’s other major flaws.
In the report, an upper-elementary school principal refers to a “culture of fear,” in which teachers who reject the Columbia model harangue teachers who support it. The former middle school teacher said that the “culture of fear” works the other way around, with “administrators and proponents of the program” ostracizing the “rebel” teachers.
The report, presented at a school board meeting in January of this year, also recommends that teachers design longer, more complicated writing assignments. High school students now write 60-minute, five-paragraph in-class essays and virtually nothing else. This policy, which is separate from the Columbia program, has raised concerns among aspiring writers like Gabriel Yoder Shenk, a sophomore at High School North who participated in one of Rice’s focus groups: “I, along with other students, said that there should be more take-home essays,” Yoder Shenk said. “An essay restricted to a one-hour class period is, well, restricting.”
The district has yet to respond to Rice’s findings, mainly because the language arts supervisor who orchestrated the evaluation, Deirdre Bova, has since resigned. (She declined to comment for this article.)
Cynthia Mershon, a former language arts resource specialist at Millstone River Elementary School, helped compile a similar review in 2001. She believes that the district would have settled on changes by now had Bova stayed on. “Deirdre was responsible for the program review,” said Mershon (who recently left the district after 26 years of service). “Her replacement will be responsible for the follow-up and for the action plan. It takes time to write an action plan.”
A WW-P “action plan” details the ways in which the district intends to respond to an external critique. As of now, the language arts department has no such plan, though a new language arts supervisor will take over on July 1, and the report will be one of her “first tasks,” Smith said. (Since that interview the district named Cathy Reilly the new K-12 language arts supervisor.)
But whether the district will ever resolve these difficulties is another matter. Mershon is not optimistic: “Eleven years from now, when the next program review is finished, they’re going to be asking the same questions. Pretty much the same things will come up.”
History justifies Mershon’s outlook. The 2001 report, comprised solely of internal observations, called for the district to “design and implement an approach to redesign curriculum courses of study to ensure internal consistency” and increase the time devoted to language arts instruction. More than a decade later, Rice’s report makes identical recommendations.
Mershon said there’s “no excuse” for the district’s lack of action. “Sometimes we take a step forward and we take two steps backward. I don’t have a good answer why some of those problems haven’t been solved.”
According to some teachers, the report is symptomatic of a wider trend. “I worry that we don’t value it [language arts] enough,” Mershon said. “We value it as soon as our test scores come, but, no, I don’t think we value it as highly as we should.”
The middle-school teacher made similar accusations, all of which Smith flatly denied: “I think that the district values all disciplines and has made a commitment to all disciplines,” he said, pointing out that WW-P employs two language arts “resource specialists,” more than in any other area. Moreover, the district spends about $100,000 each year on Teacher’s College-run programs — “there’s no other content area in which we spend that kind of money,” Smith said. He admitted, however, that WW-P has responded more effectively to program reviews in math and world languages.
Smith said the Columbia controversy has more to do with the inherent difficulty of language arts instruction than with the district’s failings. Until the Common Core, “there hadn’t been very well-written standards that clearly set expectations in terms of what students need in order to be college and career-ready,” he said.
Mershon expressed similar sentiments. “Reading and writing is very political — no matter where you are, no matter how you teach it. Everybody’s been to school, everybody’s learned to read and write. Everyone has an opinion about it. It remains a highly charged area of education.”
Reporters Yaffe-Bellany and Knox will enter the 11th grade at High School North in September.
