AV#217 - Any progress on reading? What do we know? Part 1 (Grades K-3 and the Read Act)

                                                                                                                                  

Part 1 – (K-3) - Reporting on the READ Act that has not proved helpful.

Part 2: Grades 3-6 – next issue

 

We all want to see that our students learn to read in the early grades. And we know this is not the case for far too many boys and girls. Laws pass, new efforts proliferate, dedicated teachers do what they can.

The Colorado legislature passed the Read Act in 2012. Since 2012-13 roughly 40,000 K-3 students each year have received extra support thanks to the READ Act, boys and girls who struggle mightily with words, phrases, and sentences. Over $250 million spent. Still, we seem unsure of its impact. Has the hard work of thousands of educators, many working closely with the parents of these boys and girls, paid off?

We wish we knew. The Colorado legislature would also like to figure this out. Senate Bill 19-199 called for “an outside evaluator … to measure the effectiveness of the READ Act in all districts.” CDE has contracted with WestEd for this purpose, and the evaluation is underway.

I offer a critique here of two “studies” that did not serve us well in gauging the effectiveness of this effort. I hope this will be useful to WestEd and to all who seek a sober, objective analysis. No more cheerleading, and no more ill-informed judgements. The issue is much too important for that.

1.       “The Colorado Read Act – An Evaluation of Implementation and Outcomes after Year One” (2015) 

A.                                AV #144  (March 2, 2016)                     Fulfilling the Colorado READ Act:                                   a steep climb ahead    “… we do not help matters by overstating our ‘success’—if success it is—in our implementation of the READ Act… it is imperative that we be honest about the challenge—and about evaluating progress.”     “What if school and districts that identify and serve a greater number of our struggling K-3 readers might actually be doing more to fulfill the purpose of the READ Act?”

The first assessment of students came in 2014, “An Evaluation of Implementation and Outcomes after Year One,” co-authored by the former Executive Director of Literacy for the Colorado Department of Education (CDE). The report, commissioned by Colorado Succeeds, along with a dozen other organizations, claimed success. “The READ Act is making an incredibly positive impact in the lives of thousands of Colorado kids after just one year,” we were told; “the number of students with an SRD [a significant reading deficiency] was reduced from 16% in 2013 from to 14% in 2014.” A dramatic drop in numbers, from 42,456 to 37,506 boys and girls, in one year.

 

My newsletter (AV #144-see Box A) criticized the report’s rosy conclusion. So identifying almost 5,000 fewer students was a success? Even when it was clear that there was great inconsistency in how our 178 districts tested and identified these students? 

That magical drop year one soon ended. The number of students identified as SRD in CDE’s annual report the past three years has climbed back up to 40,000, and the percentage of students with SRDs has exceeded 15% each year (see Box B). Those yearly reports open with a letter from the Colorado Commissioner of Education, Katy Anthes; they reveal how her concerns deepened over time. She wrote: 

2018 – “Results from the 2017 READ Act collection underscore the challenges in addressing reading deficiencies and are a call to a greater focus on early literacy skills for Colorado’s children.”

B.      READ Act – identified as SRD
Year	Eligible Students	% of K-3 students
2012-13	42,479	16.5%
2013-14	37,506	14.4%
2014-15	36,420	13.8%
Figures above used in AV #144, March 2016
2015-16	39,014	14.8%
2016-17	40,533	15.7%
2017-18	39,614	15.5%
2018-19	41,004	16.3%

2019 - “We know there is deep commitment of teachers, school leaders, and parents, yet we still need to see much better outcomes in reading. Nearly half of the kindergarteners who were identified with significant reading deficiencies in 2015 were still struggling to read in third grade.”

2020 – “During the 2019-20 school year, Colorado school districts and CDE worked to understand and implement substantial changes to the READ Act set forth by Senate Bill 19-199… At that time, legislators looked back at the six years of implementation of the READ Act, observing that schools and districts were not seeing the dramatic improvements in reading levels envisioned when the Act first passed….  statewide data shows only a 1 percent reduction in the number of students identified with a significant reading deficiency (SRD).”

No more talk of celebrating early literacy gains. Mission definitely not accomplished.

Furthermore, the report’s claim about “shrinking achievement gaps among students from various subgroups” was unfounded. When it was published in late 2015, Colorado had seen its first PARCC scores. AV #144 began to look for signs from our state assessments from TCAP (2013 and 2014) and PARCC (2015) of better results by our 3^rd graders. No evidence of “shrinking achievement gaps.” In fact, as I pointed out, the more rigorous expectations in the PARCC test indicated that our final TCAP test (in 2014), which told us over two-thirds of our third and fourth graders were proficient readers, had been far too generous. We were now learning that what the National Assessment for Educational Progress had reported for over two decades, that the majority of Colorado 4^th graders were not proficient readers, looked closer to the truth. 

Meaning we had a lot more work cut out for us than anyone imagined when the READ Act became law back in 2012. Made only tougher as we grew uncertain about its implementation across our 178 districts.

 

Specific examples of how fewer students identified as SRD led to the wrong conclusion The report recognized four schools “for their success in reducing the number of students with an SRD.” It praised Denver’s Cole Arts & Science Academy and its “revolution” towards literary success. A table displayed the remarkable drop in total SRD students from 2012-13 to 2013-14. Was it really impressive to identify 24% fewer Hispanic students, and 25% fewer ELL and 25% fewer Black students as SRD in one year? In retrospect, perhaps it was a sign of a failure to identify and meet the needs of its many struggling readers. The school’s academic performance declined rapidly in the years that followed. It has been on Priority Improvement or Turnaround for the past three years. A mere 29.6% points on the School Performance Framework in 2019. Does Not Meet in all categories on academic achievement.  The report also listed districts like Adams 14 as among “the top performers” for greatly reducing the percentage of students with an SRD, including the percentage of ELL students, free and reduced lunch students, and Latino students. Adams 14 received credit for cutting the numbers dramatically in all four categories–in total, from 685 students (30%) in 2013, to 420 students (18%) in 2012. The lower numbers probably meant Adams 14 had failed to identify hundreds of students who deserved extra support. More recently the district has identified 40% or more of its K-3 students (over 700) with an SRD—a step forward, except to those who tried to tell us that fewer kids identified equaled progress.

 

2.    “Colorado spent $231 million to help young children catch up on reading. But rates of kids with significant deficiencies only worsened,” by Christopher Osher, The Colorado Sun, Jan. 29, 2019.

If that first report failed to provide a sober and accurate analysis of the Read Act, The Colorado Sun’s in-depth piece in 2019 employed another kind of hyperbole. It used some of the same rising numbers in Box B, above—the higher rates of students identified with SRD—to smear the entire effort. “The READ Act still has not produced any significant improvement in the reading skills of the students it targeted.”

C.          2015-2019   English Language Arts/Literacy on CMAS – Grade 3
	Did Not Yet Meet Expectations	Partially Met Expectations	Approached Expectations	Met Expectations	Did Not Yet Meet Expectations
2015	19.6%	19.0%	23.2%	34.6%	3.6%
2017	18.6%	17.5%	23.8%	36.8%	3.3%
2019	17.3%	18.3%	23.2%	36.8%	4.5%

First, The Colorado Sun reflected an all-too-common misunderstanding of our new assessments by stating that “only 40 percent of third graders in the state are reading at their grade level now.” We had no evidence of that; CDE no longer provides this information (more on this next time in Part 2). The only statewide assessment of third graders since 2015 has been the Colorado Measures of Academic Success, which, unlike our state assessments from 1997 to 2014, has not given us the percentage of students reading at grade level. What the English Language Arts scores reveal (see Box C for ELA results) about reading skills versus writing skills is still unclear. 

Second, as those CMAS scores suggest, our lowest-performing students have, as I wrote in 2016, a steep climb to meet grade-level standards. Consider six-and seven-year-olds identified with—please stop for a moment and focus on this term—significant reading deficiencies. Consider that, as the 2020 Read Act report states, “approximately half of the students identified with an SRD also receive special education services for an identified disability.” When these boys and girls start so far behind, they can make significant improvement and still not read well by the end of third grade. Is anyone really surprised? Let’s create five “performance levels” for reading, much as Colorado does in scoring our state assessments. (Hardly a professional design, but it makes a point.) Put 15% to 20% of our K-3 students in that first box. 

1	2	3	4	5
Significant Reading Deficiency	Struggling to Read	Closer to Reading at Grade Level	Reading Meets Grade Level Expectations	Reading Exceeds Grade Level Expectations

Thousands of our K-3 teachers identify these boys and girls in kindergarten and grades 1-3 with an SRD, and then move mountains to help them climb from category 1, to 2, to 3 – and if possible, to 4: Meet Grade Level Expectations—before they leave 3^rd grade. Hard? Of course. But not impossible. The 2020 Annual Report found that of almost 3,000 kindergarten students identified with SRD in 2016, over 50% were no longer so identified at the end of 3^rd grade. How is that not producing significant improvement?

And many more students can begin to catch up without “meeting expectations” by a certain date. What of those students who move from category 1 to 3 between kindergarten and third grade, who are then well-served by their 4^th and 5^th grade teachers while keeping them on a READ plan, and head off to middle school now reading at grade level? Isn’t that a success? (CDE’s 2020 Read Act Report provides this kind of nuance that The Colorado Sun did not. See “Unpacking the State SRD Rate,” page 10.)

A nuance that WestEd, and all of us, must recognize in evaluating the READ Act, and especially in measuring progress for our K-3 students. Cheerleading and oversimplifying do not help.