NYC Families and Educators for Responsible Instruction is focused on the NYCDOE school community, specifically on the impact of curriculum mandates in early childhood classrooms. In the name of efficiency and rigor, NYCDOE is implementing a variety of curriculum mandates, including the Creative Curriculum in Pre-K classrooms and HMH’s Into Reading in most Kindergarten classrooms across the city. Administrators are being pressured to ensure each classroom has fully implemented the scripted curriculum, even if that means removing play time and choice time from Kindergarten classrooms.
Our group was formed over several months and began as a “WhatsApp group” concerned about the NYCReads mandates and has grown over that time. Our group has written petitions, initiated large planning meetings, attended PEP meetings (the NYC equivalent of a Board of Education), and advocated in their various school districts and schools. Our group evolved to a point where it became evident that we would benefit from a shared identity, a place to share our research and opinions, and a method to organize city members who share our concerns. We felt that a website is an efficient medium to help spread our campaign.
We planned to launch a website in Fall 2024, but underestimated the time it would take for the group to solidify our group’s identity and goals. We launched the website in late December 2024/ Early January of 2025. Our goal is to provide information to parents and to survey parents about these mandates and how they are impacting the classroom in ways that are not developmentally appropriate as well. In addition to providing context and information, we will be using the site to mobilize parents to attend local and city-wide education council meetings across NYC and advocate for culturally responsive and developmentally sound curricula through testimonials, letter-writing campaigns, and telephone campaigns to local officials as the situations unfold.
We are focused on sharing information with families of children in early childhood about the new curriculum mandates being rolled out across NYCDOE schools. The website we are developing will share examples of how scripted curricula are not developmentally appropriate and do not reflect best practices. We will provide families with contact information for their local, state, and federal elected officials and information about when and where their local Community Education Council (CEC) meetings are, as well as the city-wide Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) meetings. The website will mobilize parents and teachers to advocate at the local, state, regional, and federal level for developmentally appropriate practices in early childhood classrooms.
As of January 15th, we have had 232 discrete visits to the site. We have recently sent our site to 1400 individuals who signed our petition, and we hope that this will increase the traffic to our site. We also are experiencing some challenges to get a unique email up and running, and are currently in contact with the web browser help desk to resolve this issue.
The website https://www.nycferi.org/ will be updated regularly to reflect upcoming advocacy opportunities, our growing toolkit, and updates on how the campaign is progressing.