SE Oakland News

Birmingham Public School District’s assistant superintendent for learning and inclusion gave a curriculum presentation at the April 18 board meeting.

April Imperio was joined by secondary and elementary curriculum coordinators Amber Davis and Sara Cibor.

Their presentation was centered on a proposed new K-8 math curriculum for the district to adopt. The process began in 2021 with a review and led to the creation of a curriculum design team last year to develop outlines for the district to examine.

The community has been afforded resources to review the proposals, along with teachers and students. The final two proposals were presented to the school board and curriculum board, who decided to pilot them for a semester at the schools to determine which would be better suited for their students.

“We timed the pilot to be able to look at beginning-of-year data and then look to see how students were responding by mid-year,” said Imperio.

The district utilized a 13-criteria-point evaluation process for their pilot trial to determine if the curriculum had the desired impacts on their students and teacher. The curriculum was developed to be easy to plan lessons and teach lessons, effectively communicate information to students, have beneficial and effective professional development, and have quality usable assessment data to help teachers adapt and address achievement gaps.

The committee felt that the data and results from the pilot program were enough to give their recommendation for the board to adopt Illustrative Mathematics by Imagine Learning for implementation in all of their K-8 math classes, starting in the fall of the 2023-24 school year.

“We know that in a pilot situation when you're piloting for about a semester, it's virtually impossible to see dramatic school improvement or student achievement outcome improvement,” said Imperio. “But you do look for indicators, you look to see how are the kids responding, Are the kids growing as much and maybe more? Are they growing more in some grade levels? Are we seeing signs of what might be an implementation dip, which you can see sometimes when implementing anything new in the industry or in education? And that data was looked at and we were able to determine that actually our students were responding very positively to both of our pilot materials.”

The board discussed the proposed adoption with the curriculum members, sharing some concerns over the lack of data from recent years due to covid canceling assessments, but feeling confident in the recommendations from stakeholders.

Despite concerns from some of the board members concerning state assessment data, the board did get a majority vote to adopt the new curriculum.