District Streamlines Grammar Curriculum

Smithtown Central School District has implemented a more streamlined and sequential K-12 grammar curriculum to improve assessment scores and better prepare students for college, according to Superintendent Ed Ehmann.

"A lot of what we were doing was redundant grade level to grade level and there were huge gaps, things that were being left out,"said Tina Mangano, director of Language Arts for the Smithtown District. "Our resources K - 11 did not spiral one grade level to the next and in some cases teachers were developing their own instruction, which was fine, but it left gaps. The third thing we looked at was that we were not holding kids accountable."

After analyzing assessments like the PSAT and SAT a few years ago, the district realized that students were missing national merit semifinalist status because of questions in the grammar section.

To fix this, Ehmann and Mangano organized several committees made up of teachers at the different grade levels and the committees identified topics that should be mastered by each level.

From there, the district developed resources that are consistent throughout the system.

"We put resources in place that are uniform," Mangano said. "Whether you are a fifth grade teacher or a ninth grade teacher you are working from the same resource, speaking the same language to kids."

Another major component of the grammar initiative are the new ways of holding students accountable. District teachers will do is through the new grammar grade students will receive on every writing assignment and through district-wide assessments.

"All of their major writing assignments have two grades, a content grade and a grammar grade," Mangano said. "There will also be an eight grade grammar exit exam, a culmination of topics taught grades K-7, in addition to other assessments along the way."

Very specific guides were created for teachers, which detail which grammar concepts should be introduced, applied and mastered at each grade level.

"By breaking it down the teachers now have a chart now where they can see what the teachers prior to them did and what the students were required to learn," Ehmann said. "Teachers now just have a piece of the linear puzzle instead of feeling like they had to do everything."

Ehmann informed every department of the initiative, so students are held accountable for writing skills in all subject areas.

"By doing this students lose the compartmental feeling of 'oh this is not English class therefore my grammar and syntax doesn't count.' In the real world there are no barriers," Ehmann said. "We are trying to work on that departmental mindset."

This initiative comes after the New York State Department of Education retroactively raised the proficiency standards on the 2010 state ELA and Math exams given to grades three to eight, causing passing rates to drop by 15 percent in Smithtown and 25 percent statewide. Smithtown still scored 13 percent higher than the Suffolk County average.

"We are hoping to see some differences," Ehmann said. "We are hoping to see them perform better on the SAT, not miss questions that teachers say that they taught that kids can't remember learning and we are hoping to bridge those gaps with this program."