Ohio’s K–3 literacy scores: Is the third-grade
reading guarantee living up to its promise?
The first round of school report
card data came out in January (expect the second batch February 25), shedding
light on (among other things) how schools are doing in K–3 literacy. (Note that
ninety-six schools have appealed their K–3 literacy grades, and data is under
review for another seven schools, so take all of this with a cairn of salt.)
This year’s report cards are the first to include a letter
grade for K–3
literacy, a metric that measures the improvement that schools and districts
have made in moving students from ‘not-on-track’ to ‘on-track’ and eventually
proficient, according to Ohio’s third-grade reading assessments. Reading
ability by the end of the third grade is highly
predictive of later schooling (and life) success. Recognizing this, Ohio
adopted the third-grade
reading guarantee in 2013 in order to ensure that students are proficient
readers before moving onto the fourth grade.
Here’s what the 2014–15 data says:
Out of 609 school districts, 452 (74 percent) received a K–3
literacy grade. The rest were not rated (NR). It’s unclear why 157 districts didn’t
receive a grade. Unlike school building rating data, most districts in Ohio
serve students from kindergarten through third grade, so it’s not due to grade
configurations. Because K–3 literacy only gauges kids already “off track” in
reading, it’s possible that small districts have too few students to count and larger
but higher-performing districts simply have very small numbers of kids not
already reading on grade level (e.g., Beachwood City or Grandview Heights).
The grade breakdowns are as follows:
Out of 3,415 public schools (district and charter included),
only 1,384 (41 percent) received a grade. While some buildings obviously
received “NR” because they are high schools or middle schools, this doesn’t
account for over two thousand schools that went unrated. Many of these
buildings had too few struggling readers to receive a rating—though it’s
impossible to distinguish whether this is because of sheer small size or
because they simply don’t have
struggling readers (as is likely the case with higher-performing schools).
The grades are broken out as follows:
Jamie's Take:
The K–3 literacy grade is new this year, so we can’t track
progress over time to determine whether Ohio’s third-grade reading guarantee is
having an impact on early readers. I will say, however, that I’m less impressed
with the numbers than Stephen. He wrote
on his blog the day the data came out that “only 668 third graders weren't
deemed proficient in reading” and concluded that “having 99.5 percent of third graders
be proficient seems like as close to a third-grade guarantee as you can get
without getting to 100 percent.” If this is the case, then we may as well hang
up our hats and go home. Ohio’s reading guarantee has worked after only two
years.
Except it hasn’t. In parsing the data, 858 students
statewide failed the third-grade reading exams and were not on a Reading Improvement and Monitoring Plan (RIMP). This
means there were many more students who failed but were on a RIMP, and their failure rates aren’t yet being reported. In
other words, some of the data reported is not all that useful, and we should be
careful not to declare victory prematurely. According to ODE, the K–3
literacy measure “identifies
students who were never on or removed from a Reading Improvement and Monitoring
Plan but do not achieve proficiency by the end of third-grade.” So all that
number really tells us is the number of students who were not placed or kept on an improvement plan but probably should have
been. Reading proficiency scores released next month will better tell us
whether Ohio is headed in the right direction.
Moreover (and as my colleague Aaron Churchill noted
in his scorecard of Ohio’s report card), it seems problematic that the K–3
metric is premised on having readers (in any grades K–3) who are deemed “off
track.” Schools without off-track young readers end up receiving a “not rated” label.
K–3 literacy data is not calculated for a remarkable number of schools (not
just those schools without grades K–3). Thus, we essentially have no data about
how many schools’ kindergarten, first-, second-, and third-grade students are
faring. Struggling readers who happen to attend an otherwise high-performing
school (or a small one where there are too few students in each grade to
calculate a rating) aren’t reflected in the K–3 literacy metric at all. It
would be more useful to know how all kids
in the early grades are progressing. In sum, while it’s still a good idea to
focus on early literacy, the jury is still out on whether the third-grade
reading guarantee is “working” or not—and we may want to question exactly whom
it’s working for.
There is little question that starting when the Evidence
Based Model required Ohio school districts to offer free All-Day Kindergarten,
districts began adopting it more frequently. Story
after story
has noted how many more districts are offering ADK for their children, not just
in Ohio, but nationwide. The reason is very simple: ADK works. It helps
children learn more and catches
kids up who may have started their Kindergarten year behind.
The overwhelming evidence supporting ADK’s positive effect
on student achievement is the reason why, when I was the Chairman of the
Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee of the House Finance Committee, I
stripped out all the mandates from the Evidence Based Model … except the ADK
mandate. I did allow for waivers because I wanted districts to have to explain
why they were doing something other than ADK.
And while some districts gave up ADK
after Gov. Kasich and the General Assembly repealed the EBM in 2011, the
state’s adoption of the Third-Grade Reading Guarantee in 2013 led to more
districts adopting ADK. The thought was ADK would help kids catch up earlier so
more costly, later interventions would be avoided.
New K-3 Literacy data released by the State of Ohio seems to
validate districts’ investments in ADK. The new report card includes the number
of children who are behind in reading in each of the K-3 grades and how many
get caught up to grade level by the end of the year.
The two most significant improvements happen in Kindergarten
and 3rd Grade. The 3rd Grade result shouldn’t be surprising
– it’s the last time students have to be caught up for the Third-Grade Reading
Guarantee, meaning they can move on and not be held back a year. So there’s a logical
focus on 3rd Grade improvement.
However, the similarly huge improvement in Kindergarten is
less intuitive, which tells me that districts’ recent investment in ADK programming
has helped.
Buttressing this conclusion is the fact that in 1st
and 2nd Grade, the improvement rates drop by more than ½.
The lesson is simple: Invest in staff and children and kids
will thrive. There is no similar push to improve reading in 1st and
2nd Grade as there has been for ADK, and, not surprisingly, the
improvement isn’t nearly as stark in the later grades. Let’s hope policymakers
notice these data and step up investments in the intervening grades so kids
aren’t forgotten during those equally important times. Their decisions have
real impact for kids, as ADK and the Third-Grade Reading Guarantee demonstrate.
While I’m still reticent to read too much into the latest
report card data because of the inordinate number of appeals over the grades,
I think it’s helpful to look at the data trends. And one of the most
significant ones I see is that ADK appears to be a sound investment.
Steve and I are on common ground in supporting full-day kindergarten and high-quality early learning generally—especially targeted to low-income children. The latest rankings out about preschool are worrisome: according to the Dispatch’s coverage this morning only 4 percent of Ohio’s low-income four-year-olds are enrolled in pre-kindergarten. (Of course, ensuring that pre-K and K are high-quality is a whole separate conversation.)
ReplyDeleteI think Steve is right in observing that students in certain grades will see greater improvements because of the consequences attached at that particular juncture. Ohio schools have every incentive to emphasize third-grade reading and even to staff accordingly with the strongest teachers in that grade. And he’s right that we can’t forget kids in the other grades.
The kindergarten improvement seen in the latest data from ODE could be due to all-day kindergarten, or to the simple fact that kids have fewer skills to make up at such an early stage. Speaking anecdotally, I used to teach kindergarten and while it’s never easy to bring students up to speed when they come to school with missing skills, it was far easier to teach the alphabet, phonics, and basic decoding to a five-year-old than it was for my first- and second-grade teacher colleagues to do the same for seven- and eight-year-olds. Overall I’m glad to see the emphasis on K-3 literacy in Ohio but hope we can refine the metric so that it gauges learning outcomes for all children, not just those deemed “off track.”
Jamie
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWhile I appreciate Jamie’s concern about what the new K-3 Literacy report card data means for the Third-Grade Reading Guarantee, I want to address her critique of my prior blog post about the extraordinary low number of kids in Ohio who didn’t pass the third-grade reading proficiency test and don’t have a reading improvement plan.
ReplyDeleteI chose to see that if 99.5% of Ohio’s third graders were either proficient or had a plan in place to meet that proficiency target, then Ohio’s school districts were doing a pretty good job catching up these kids and not letting them fall through the cracks. Yes, a few did. But out of 123,000 third-graders, not even 700 fell through the cracks statewide. That’s not bad. That most of those issues occurred in districts where we would typically expect this to happen is concerning, as is the fact that Ohio’s charter schools let a higher percentage of kids falls through the cracks than districts.
But I think overall, these data are a good sign.
Just under 10% of Ohio’s third graders didn’t pass the reading proficiency test last year (though, as I mentioned, only a relative handful didn’t have an intervention in place to fix that). And that’s too high. In education and medicine, a 10% failure rate isn’t good enough.
As I said in my commentary, I’m reticent to read much into these results. And not just for Jamie’s concern that not many districts or schools actually received ratings under this K-3 Literacy rubric. But also because so many of these scores are being appealed. So we may be writing very different things depending on their outcome. However, I’m more encouraged by these pretty good Ohio results than Jamie seems to be.
Well written and interesting thoughts. Its amazing how sometimes we get inspiration from the most unexpected of quarters !
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