Not lost on any teacher at Hartford Public Schools will be the irony in the name of the district’s new K-5 ELA curriculum, Wit & Wisdom.  While school leadership and the board of education too often ignore the experienced wit and wisdom of teachers in their decision making, teachers will now be trained on Wit & Wisdom, which is the first time the district has used the word teachers and the words wit and wisdom in the same sentence under the tone-deaf reign of Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez.

In her monthly report to the BOE (read the report here), the superintendent states that teacher training on the new curriculum will begin this summer in preparation for implementing the Wit & Wisdom curriculum in the fall.  Teachers will be paid for their participation in the training, it may take months to receive payment, but supposedly they will be paid.

The Wit & Wisdom curriculum is brought to you by  the folks from Great Minds, which chooses to call itself a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) rather than a non-profit organization, which is how they are registered with the IRS.

Great Minds is the same company which produced what they state is the “most widely used math curriculum” in the nation, Eureka Math (“You Do the Math”), which has been HPS’ K-5 math curriculum since 2021.  Across the nation, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reports that between 2019 and 2022, not one state showed an increase in 4th grade math scores, while 43 states showed a decrease in grade 4 math scores.  Here in Connecticut, EdSight, “Connecticut’s official source for education data,” shows that in Hartford, 67 possible grade 3-5 classes scored an average of 52.4 on the states District Performance Index (DPI) in math for the school year 2018-19.  For the school year 2022-23, after 2 years with Eureka Math, that average had dropped to 46.6.

Perhaps after acquiring some wit and wisdom about elementary school curricula, the great minds at Great Minds have come up with a more effective ELA curriculum.

Forbes reported in 2022 that folks right and left of moderation had their criticisms of Wit & Wisdom.  On the right, folks such as a group called Moms For Liberty in Tennessee, claim that the required reading for the curriculum amounts to “critical race theory.”  While the school board found that claim to be baseless, Moms For Liberty sued to have Wit & Wisdom banned.  Previous to this suit from the right, in 2020, folks on the left, such as a group of educators from Boston, said that the curriculum was too favorable to white folks and was “severely lacking in cultural relevance” for black and brown folks.  Boston’s school leaders dumped Wit & Wisdom.

These sort of attacks on our BOE should not be a problem however (many others are justified), as Policy 6100 (read the policy here) leaves them out of curriculum design, development, or adoption, pitifully, a game plan fully embraced by the current board in all aspects of the school system.

Thus, Wit & Wisdom is coming to Hartford Public Schools.  Unfortunately, it will be in the classrooms and not in central office or on the board of education.  And did I mention that there is no World Language curriculum for elementary and middle school students at Hartford Public Schools?