In the weeks leading up to the announcement that the Texas Education Agency is taking over the Fort Worth Independent School District, parents and community members worried the district would roll out the same kinds of tightly scripted lessons leaders in Houston ISD implemented during a similar takeover there.

But Fort Worth ISD is already using scripted lessons in many subject areas, district officials told the Star-Telegram. District leaders developed a series of lessons over the summer and rolled them out at the beginning of the current school year.

Fort Worth ISD officials say the move is designed to relieve overburdened teachers of some of their responsibilities, allowing them more time to focus on students. But some teachers say the change strips them of autonomy and doesn’t allow them the flexibility to give students the personalized instruction they need.

Fort Worth ISD rolls out scripted lessons

The new scripted lessons are a part of Fort Worth ISD’s new instructional framework. Each lesson includes a slide show presentation and a script teachers are expected to follow. The script is detailed, teachers told the Star-Telegram — it outlines words teachers are expected to emphasize and time markers they’re expected to meet.

At the end of each lesson, students take a short quiz that’s intended to gauge whether they understood the material. The framework includes a second script for teachers to follow to re-teach the lessons to students who don’t pass the quiz.

MJ Bowman, Fort Worth ISD’s executive director for literacy, said the district began developing scripted lessons over the summer, after Superintendent Karen Molinar asked district leaders to find a way to take the responsibility of writing lesson plans off of teachers’ plates. Especially in elementary schools, where teachers get one planning period per day, it’s important that central office leaders do everything they can to help teachers maximize their time, she said.

Kim Axtell, the district’s director for mathematics, said the re-teach portion of each lesson is designed to give students a second look at material they didn’t understand the first time. In addition to the re-teach session, each instructional block includes 20 minutes for teachers to give targeted support to students who need extra help, she said.

Rosa Rojas, a fifth-grade math and science teacher at Alice Contreras Elementary School, said her experience with the new framework has been positive. In a joint interview with the two executive directors, Rojas said she uses the scripts as suggestions for how she structures her instruction.

Before teachers deliver the lessons, they meet in collaboration groups to go over what they’ll be discussing, Rojas said. That gives them a chance to anticipate anything that students might find confusing and come up with other strategies for explaining those concepts, she said. And when students don’t understand the material the first time, she can pull them aside in small groups to go over the material differently, she said.

“I have had a very positive experience in the classroom,” Rojas said. “This is my 12th year teaching in Fort Worth ISD, and it really has helped me, as far as setting me up for success daily.”

Scripted lessons mean lack of autonomy, some FWISD teachers say

But not all teachers’ experiences have been so positive. During a community meeting held last week to discuss the upcoming state takeover of Fort Worth ISD, Edriana Cofer, an English teacher at Dunbar High School, said the scripted lessons leave her without any autonomy in how she does her job. That means teachers can’t make changes when the scripted lessons don’t serve their students well, she said. The scripted curriculum also doesn’t allow space for English teachers to read an entire book with their classes, she said. It only allows for short reading passages and excerpts from longer works, she said.

Another high school English teacher, who asked not to be identified because of concerns about retaliation, said her school rolled the scripted lessons out last summer, after Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath notified the district that it could be subject to a state takeover.

“I cried,” she said. “I cried mostly because … I know the amount of work and effort my colleagues and I have put into building things that we know are tailored for our students, with good results.”

One of the problems with the framework is that the assessments students take at the end of a lesson aren’t always aligned to the lessons they’re paired with, the teacher said. That means teachers go over one set of material in their lessons, then give students an assessment that often is unrelated to what they just taught them, she said. In other cases, the assessments are worded poorly enough that students answer incorrectly because they misunderstand the questions, she said.

When students don’t pass the assessment, teachers are supposed to go back and cover the material again using a “re-teach” module that’s also included in the framework. But the teacher said the language in the re-teach script is often almost identical to what was included in the original lesson. There’s no room for her to explain the material differently for students who didn’t understand it the first time, she said.

🚨 More top stories from our newsroom:

→ Off-duty cop drove over 100 mph on motorcycle: warrant

→ These candles made in North Texas fight sex trafficking in a ‘really dark world’

→ Parents of 15 girls who died in Texas flood sue Camp Mystic

→ After suffering tragic death, former Star-Telegram sportswriter leaves gifts

[Get our breaking news alerts.]

Before Fort Worth ISD rolled out the new scripted lessons, the district’s literacy curriculum needed a revamp, the teacher said. What the district had before was “just thoughts and prayers of a curriculum,” she said, and she watched many early-career teachers get burned out trying to turn it into something that they could use in their classrooms.

But the problem with the new instructional framework is that it demands every teacher adhere to a prepackaged script, the teacher said. The use of rigidly scripted lessons is frustrating for a number of reasons, she said, including the fact that it doesn’t consider the individual needs of each student and allow teachers to tailor lessons to those needs. But some of those feelings of frustration would be mitigated if teachers could see any indication that the curriculum was working and teachers were doing good work, she said.

“But it’s not working, we’re not doing good work, and our experience is being completely devalued,” she said.

Teachers’ descriptions of the scripted lessons being rolled out in Fort Worth ISD are similar to those that have been in use for a few years in Houston. TEA officials and leaders in Houston ISD have pointed to the district’s growth on the state test as an indication that their turnaround strategy, including the use of scripted lessons, is working. But the district has also seen a large amount of teacher turnover under the state takeover there.

Based on what she’s seen in her classroom, the Fort Worth ISD teacher said she’d be “completely shocked” if the district’s STAAR scores improve this year. The teacher, who has more than a decade of experience in the classroom, said she’s weighing the decision of whether to stay in Fort Worth ISD or look for a job elsewhere.

Parents worry about Houston ISD-style lessons during FWISD takeover

Parents and community members who are worried about the state takeover of Fort Worth ISD have named scripted lessons as one of their chief concerns. At a community meeting on Nov. 6, Zach Leonard, leader of the organization Families Organized Resisting Takeover, or FORT, asked Steve Lecholop, TEA’s deputy commissioner for governance, if the agency would implement Houston ISD-style scripted lessons and PowerPoint presentations in Fort Worth. Lecholop said TEA wouldn’t make any decisions regarding curriculum and instruction. Those decisions will be left to the state-appointed board of managers, once it’s in place, he said.

Leonard told the Star-Telegram that the fact that Fort Worth ISD has already rolled out scripted lessons leaves him concerned. Houston ISD has seen widespread teacher turnover since the state takeover began, and Leonard said he worries the move to scripted lessons could lead to the same thing in Fort Worth.

“If we boil down education to just scripted worksheets and hyper-focus on STAAR testing, it reduces the amount of autonomy that our talented and veteran teachers have,” he said.

Staff writer Lina Ruiz contributed to this report