On Tuesday, Superintendent Ed Graff will recommend two curricula to help Minneapolis Public Schools kids learn core literacy skills.

He'll suggest to the school board that the district purchase Benchmark Education's curriculum for kindergarten through fifth-graders and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's curriculum for pre-kindergartners. The kindergarten through fifth-grade program contract rings up to nearly $10.8 million, and the pre-K program would cost $460,665.

Graff started advocating for a districtwide literacy curriculum soon after taking the helm of the state's third-largest school district last year, and he mentioned it as a priority for his first 100 days in office in October. The school board will discuss the curriculum at a special meeting Tuesday and is slated to vote June 13.

The curriculum review and feedback process included steering committees, teachers, specialists, principals, parents and community members, Graff wrote in a recommendation. The district hopes "students will become productive, inspired and literate global citizens through the development of effective reading, writing, speaking and listening skills," according to a presentation planned for Tuesday's board meeting.

Graff wrote in the recommendation that the fresh curriculum would hone skills such as phonics and fluency.

The district did a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade literacy core adoption in 2008, and since then, "there have been multiple shifts in content standards," according to the Minneapolis Public Schools teaching and learning website.

The Minneapolis schools' reading curriculum was in the news in 2015, when the board scrapped a contract with Reading Horizons after teachers found cultural and racial stereotypes in the books it had supplied, including a story with a black girl titled "Lazy Lucy."

After the vote, the district would begin training pre-K through fifth-grade teachers before putting the curricula into pre-K through fifth-grade classrooms in August.

Beena Raghavendran • 612-673-4569