Baltimore’s Schools Chief Says Curriculum Is Key To Education Equity

Until a few years ago, children in Baltimore’s public schools—like most American students—got a “content-anemic” curriculum, according to the system’s CEO, Dr. Sonja Brookins Santelises. The switch to rigorous content has been challenging, she says, but necessary to achieve equity.

Judging from statistics alone, Baltimore’s schools look much like those of any large city. Some 90% of its 80,000 students are Black or Hispanic, and slightly over half are low-income. Test scores have been low and stagnant, and the gap between more and less privileged students is wide.

In most American school systems that fit that description, teachers spend much of the day drilling kids in reading and math. Reading instruction consists largely of having kids read disconnected passages and answer comprehension questions of the type that appear on tests: find the main idea, make an inference about what this word means. Little or no time is devoted to history, science, or the arts, and students are generally limited to reading books at their individual levels, which are often years below their grade levels.

Classrooms used to look like that in Baltimore too. But the system is now in its third year of using a new kind of literacy curriculum in kindergarten through 8^th grade—one that puts rich content in the foreground, including history, science, and art. Called Wit & Wisdom, the curriculum is one of several developed in recent years premised on evidence that the key to boosting reading comprehension is not practicing “skills” year after year. It’s building academic knowledge and vocabulary in a coherent way.

On a recent virtual visit to three Baltimore classrooms organized by the Knowledge Matters Campaign as part of its school tour initiative, I watched first-graders analyze a book about the wind; fourth-graders unpack an engraving of the Boston Massacre as part of a unit on the American Revolution; and eighth-graders parse two World War I-era poems, “In Flanders Fields” and “Dulce et Decorum Est,” in conjunction with their reading of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front.

There were a few technical glitches—frozen screens and the like—but teachers took them in stride, keeping students focused on the work. The eighth-grade class had nearly 50 participants, all of whom stayed logged on.

Switching to a radically different approach hasn’t been easy. When a group of teachers and administrators were asked, during a roundtable discussion, how hard the first year of the new curriculum had been on a scale of one to ten, two responded “12.” But now, they said, teachers and students have adjusted, and the benefits are becoming apparent, even if they haven’t yet shown up in test scores.

In a remarkably candid conversation over Zoom, Santelises—now in her fourth year leading the district—reflected on the changes and what they mean for students and families. What she had to say has significance not just for Baltimore but for any district or school hoping to improve its game and make its offerings more equitable. Here are some highlights:

Building knowledge helps students discover who they are: Earlier in her career, Santelises said, the focus was on pedagogical “moves”—organizing students into small groups, getting them to “turn and talk” to a partner. That was combined with the idea that to boost test scores, schools had to strip everything from the curriculum but reading and math, especially for kids who were behind.

It was all well-intentioned, Santelises said, but in effect “we took out what you use to discover what it is you enjoy—what is your passion, what makes you human.” She used the example of her own daughters, one drawn to languages, another to literature, and the third to biology. Schools turned learning into “this really hard, arduous, almost painful activity, which is part of why we have so many kids disconnecting.”

Evidence-based, knowledge-building curriculum promotes equity: Students must learn mainstream history and culture along with content that more directly relates to their own experience, Santelises said. “Children from economically under-resourced communities,” she said, “need to have and feel the power of being able to tap into the collective knowledge base that drives academic success in this country as well as the knowledge of how they themselves and their communities contribute to that larger narrative.” Having both kinds of knowledge, she said, “reinforces the idea that you belong in the room. In a lot of ways you have a fuller knowledge, because you understand what the mainstream narrative has, and what the mainstream narrative is missing.”

No single ready-made curriculum can do all of that, she said. Wit & Wisdom has provided a crucial “backbone” of curriculum materials that build knowledge in a thoughtful sequence—and ideally teachers help students connect their own lives to whatever they’re studying. But the district has also supplemented Wit & Wisdom with a social studies curriculum it created called “BMore Me,” which highlights the role of Black and brown communities in Baltimore’s history.

One of the most gratifying results of the new curriculum, Santelises said, is hearing from parents who are impressed by what their children are learning: “Parents love knowing their children know something they don’t know. Particularly in communities that have been underserved by the institution of school, that ability to see that your child is moving further than you is a very human need.”

Under the previous curriculum, students often never even learned to sound out words, because teachers hadn’t been trained in the systematic phonics instruction that many kids need. Some teachers still resist phonics, but Santelises says it’s important to let them know that historically, some Blacks in the South were prevented from learning phonics as a way of ensuring their continued oppression.

Changing the roles of teachers can promote equity: Some teachers do a great job delivering a lesson to the whole class, while others are better at working with small groups to check and deepen their understanding of the material. And some teachers may know the nuts and bolts of the new curriculum but not yet have enough comfort with it to enable them to “turbocharge” their teaching. The experience of remote schooling, Santelises said, has suggested that it’s possible to have one teacher deliver terrific initial instruction to a large group—maybe 20 different classes—and then have other teachers follow up with small groups.

That approach, Santelises said, could help all parents gain access to the best teaching. As a Baltimore public school parent herself, she has had the time and resources to ensure her children were assigned to certain teachers—or to supplement their learning on her own. (During the pandemic, she bought a home-schooling grammar book to make up for her kids’ inadequate instruction under the old curriculum.) “I don’t want that just for my girls,” Santelises said. “I want it for the mama, for the uncle, who doesn’t know which website to go to, who doesn’t have 30 minutes in the day, because they’re stressed.”

The movement for knowledge-building curriculum needs to become more representative of communities of color. One of Santelises’ most sobering comments was that she doubts she could have adopted Wit & Wisdom if she’d tried to do it in the wake of George Floyd’s death last year, even though the curriculum is “more inclusive and representative than anything we had used before.” The ensuing anger over racial injustice—which Santelises, who is Black, says she understands—has dramatically sharpened the critique of mainstream curriculum content in some quarters.

What’s needed, she said, is to involve more educators of color in the discussion and creation of curriculum and elevate the voices of those already involved. To enable parents and other members of communities of color to make what Santelises called “an informed demand” on school systems on behalf of their children, they need to trust those who bear the information.