The Tennessee Alliance for Equity in Education (TAEE), convened by EdTrust-Tennessee, is a collective effort of 85 civil rights, social justice, and education organizations and advocates working to promote educational equity for underserved students across the state. A subset of TAEE is The Tennessee Coalition for Truth in Our Classrooms, a group of students, education advocates, and over 25 organization leaders who believe in honoring and valuing the diversity of our state’s students, staff, and communities and promoting the teaching of truthful, honest history.
Through the Tennessee State Board of Education’s English Language Arts (ELA) Standards review process, we hope to see the following values reflected in the revised ELA standards:
Promote Students’ Cultural Awareness and Understanding of Others’ Perspectives
Across Tennessee, our public schools serve approximately one million students with unique backgrounds and growing racial and ethnic diversity. At all grade levels, it is important for students to have meaningful opportunities to reflect on their own cultures, identities, and values and appreciate others’ unique perspectives.
Children gain immense benefits from representationally diverse curricula that allow students to see themselves and others in complexity. Students are more engaged from representative curriculum, which leads to improved learning outcomes. Academic outcomes also include benefits like sharpened critical thinking skills, increases in standardized test scores, higher rates of course completion, graduation, and school attendance. Students also gain non-academic benefits, including improved self-esteem, socioemotional well-being, empathy, and appreciation of cultural difference. Moreover, intrinsic reading motivation is positively influenced by students’ relevancy to reading text because of the ability to draw upon existing connections, influencing skillful reading development.
To ensure students receive the benefits of a diverse curriculum and our schools promote cultural awareness, Tennessee’s ELA standards need to include language that explicitly includes reading, comparing and analyzing texts and narratives with a variety of perspectives from different cultures. One consistent opportunity in Tennessee’s ELA standards is to incorporate the multiple perspectives and values is under Integration of Knowledge and Ideas standards RL.IKI.9.
Some standards already include multiple perspectives. For example: 2.RL.IKI.9 – Compare and contrast two or more versions of the same story by different authors or different cultures.
However, there were some standards that should be revised to be more intentional to include different cultures and perspectives. For example: 8.RL.IKI.9 – Analyze how contemporary texts are shaped by foundational texts or literary archetypes and how authors allude to traditional works, myths, or religious texts; describe how traditional elements are rendered anew.
In 8.RL.IKI.9, there is an opportunity to ensure that the traditional works, myths, and religious texts are from contrasting cultures and perspectives. Naming cultural differences is vital because representation is predominantly White, and over 40% of Tennessee public school students are students of color. Lack of diversity and inclusion harms students including academic performance and willingness to pursue challenging academic pathways.
Prepare Students For Opportunities and Demands of an Increasingly Complex and Diverse World
In addition to cultural understanding, we recommend keeping standards in the craft and structure RI.CS.6, all of the comprehensive and collaboration standards SL.CC.1 – SL.CC.3, and the research standard W.RBPK.7. These standards, across all grades, were important to ensure that students engage in critical inquiry, evaluate speakers’ point of view, and integrate multiple sources of information. These holistics standards support representational balance in curriculum and are a necessary component of high-quality instructional material, positively impacting student learning.
Overall, comprehensive ELA standards will be fundamental to increasing literacy across all grades. Only 39% of Tennessee students are meeting grade level expectations in ELA according to the 2023-24 TCAP scores. To continue literacy growth, ELA standards that include texts with multiple cultures and different perspectives will help all students’ achievement. Culturally relevant texts with various perspectives help all students activate prior knowledge, enabling effective comprehension.
We appreciate TN State Board of Education’s thoughtful process to review ELA standards, and the opportunity for stakeholder engagement. We hope to see the TN Alliance for Equity in Education and the TN Coalition for Truth in our Classrooms’ recommendations reflected in the revised ELA standards.
Sincerely,
The undersigned Organizations
Share This Story
