Why aren’t our kids better readers?
Most people guess that poverty is the culprit, but as The 74’s Chad Aldeman reported last month,
”According to the latest national results, low-income fourth graders read an average of two to three grade levels below their higher-income peers.”
“It’s not new that students in poverty have lower scores on reading tests than more affluent students. Housing prices, parent perceptions and online school ranking websites all focus on those raw, unadjusted scores, which ignore the fact that some schools and districts simply have a harder job.”
“But poverty is not destiny, and some schools and districts hugely outperform what might be expected of them based solely on which students they serve.”
“Working with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, I set out to find districts around the country that succeed with the students they actually serve. We calculated each district’s expected reading proficiency rate, based on its local poverty rate, and compared it to its actual third grade reading scores. This methodology helped us identify districts that are beating the odds and successfully teaching kids to read.”
“Steubenville City, in the Rust Belt along with very eastern edge of Ohio, topped our rankings. It has a very high poverty rate – greater than 96% of districts nationally – yet 99% of its third graders were proficient in reading last year.”
“Every state has its own pockets of success…. These ‘exceptional districts’ are in the top 5% of their state, in terms of outscoring their expected reading proficiency rate. For example, Worcester County in Maryland serves about 7,000 students along with Atlantic coast. Worcester falls in the middle of the pack in terms of poverty, but it has by far the highest third grade reading proficiency rate in the state.”
“We found positive outliers in every state. Among these are some higher-income districts like Maryville, Tennessee; Mountain Lakes, New Jersey; and Bainbridge Island, Washington, that are exceeding already lofty expectations. They also include lower-income communities, like Dearborn, Michigan, and Neshoba County, Mississippi, that are helping students achieve results that – although maybe not high in absolute terms – should still be considered achievements, given the poverty the schools and students are facing.”
“In some states, poverty has more of an effect than it does in others. Given the correlation between income and test scores, readers might assume that every state’s graph looks like Rhode Island’s, where poverty is highly correlated to district reading scores and districts are tightly bunched around those expectations.”
“…After Rhode Island, Connecticut, Alabama, Massachusetts and Alaska have the strongest relationship between a district’s poverty rate and its third grade reading proficiency.”
But not every state has such a tight relationship. For example, …[in] Virginia, the relationship between poverty and reading scores is much weaker.”
“States like Nebraska, West Virginia, Kentucky, North Dakota and especially Nevada have weaker relationships between district-level poverty and reading outcomes. The number of districts a state has, how students are sorted across districts and differences in the state tests themselves can all affect this relationship.”
“But without controlling for poverty, a ‘good’ school districts may receive credit for student learning that it actually had little part in. This issue is especially misleading in reading. Unlike math, where learning is more closely tied to school-based instruction, reading skills are multi-faceted, and they’re more closely tied to language skills and background knowledge that children acquire at home.”
“As a result, some wealthier districts may show high (raw) reading scores even though their students are picking up their skills at home – or, worse, from private tutors that families with means are able to afford out of their own pockets. Meanwhile, districts doing a good job serving low-income students have a harder time showing the same proficiency rates. But some truly are beating the odds at helping kids learn to read, and their leaders deserve praise and celebration.”
After 35 years of working with public schools, here’s why some schools and school districts excel at reading instruction while others struggle and fail:
- Strong reading schools identify, hire, and support adult learning leaders who possess talent making their students smarter and stronger when it comes to reading mechanics and comprehension.
- Strong reading schools assign large chunks of time for their young learners to practice their reading skills, sometimes at the expense of other coursework, at least until their students exhibit reading proficiency.
- Strong reading schools align curriculum, instruction, and assessment, so that evaluation is aligned to what is taught and how it’s taught.
- Like winning a football championship, strong reading schools celebrate their young learners as they learn to read, and then read to learn.
Most American schools can’t or won’t do one or two of these, let alone all of them. So, our country suffers from kids who don’t know how to read at the level necessary to navigate through the world.
So the question is this: are we content with how we teach reading in this country, or is it time for a new model?
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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