In my experience, you can’t drive change in a local school or district without those closest to kids behind the wheel: parents. But when it comes to the push for better quality instructional materials, we often talk past or around parents rather than meaningfully engaging them in our work. Enter Amanda Aragon, Executive Director of NewMexicoKidsCAN, a state chapter of the 50CAN network dedicated to building a better education system for all children. Amanda is one of the most passionate and effective advocates for children I’ve ever encountered. Here’s what she recently had to share with me about her work to invite parents along on the journey to improve literacy instruction.
You are a fierce advocate for improving literacy for children in New Mexico. Why is this so important in your state?
Amanda: Our literacy results are the worst in the country. Just looking at NAEP data, we are at 21% in 4th-grade reading and 18% in 8th-grade reading – and our state assessment results aren’t much better. That is unacceptable to me and should be unacceptable to all New Mexicans. And this has implications outside education. We want our state to thrive, and none of the goals we have around economic development or quality of life are possible if we aren’t teaching our youngest learners to read so they can be successful through the rest of their lives.
Q: On a recent episode of the Route K-12 podcast, you described your work on your Literacy Action Center as helping take parents on a journey to understand the need for better literacy instruction. Why did you land on this approach for engaging families in curriculum advocacy?
Amanda: In today’s political environment, everyone is looking for a sound bite or a way to make a set of words good or bad. We were thinking about ways we could prepare parents to see past the “good” or “bad” phrases and better understand the meaning of the key terms that we hear in the conversations around reading: balanced literacy, whole language, the science of reading. Our hope is that with more context and opportunities to develop deeper knowledge, parents will feel more confident in engaging in conversation about their child’s literacy development. Rather than recreate the wheel, our Action Center and Literacy Toolkit encourage parents to further their understanding of effective literacy instruction through the best resources that exist outside New Mexico, including the Sold a Story podcast and the Right to Read documentary.
Q: What do you hope parents will do once they complete all your action steps?
Amanda: We want to utilize parents’ experience on this journey to help us build our knowledge as an advocacy organization. For one thing, we need a clear understanding of the curricular materials that are used in every district across New Mexico. It’s crazy to me that we do not know which materials are currently being used in our schools – so we are trying to problem-solve around that. The next step we plan to add to the Action Center will ask parents to explore which materials are being used in their local district and share it with us so we can start to understand what our “curriculum map” looks like as a state. If we can understand which districts are using which materials, we can start to help parents identify opportunities to push for better curriculum and teacher training, where needed.
Q: What tools or other forms of support would be helpful to groups like yours in working with educators and families for improvements to quality curriculum?
Amanda: EdReports does a great job laying out rigorous, objective curriculum program reviews. Building from this, we also need a list of the most highly recommended suites of early literacy materials – including core, supplemental, and intervention resources. Some states have their own recommended or required lists, but anything already affiliated with a particular state can be viewed as political, so other states won’t want to “borrow” them. We need to make it easier for anyone – from parents to policymakers – to see which sets of materials meet a high bar of quality and are recommended because they have shown results for kids, regardless of the state.
My money is on Amanda making New Mexico an example for other states to follow, by galvanizing parents to demand transparency around curricular choices and the impact of those choices on kids. Check out the Literacy Action Center and Literacy Toolkit for more on the work of NewMexicoKidsCAN.