If you get reading right, other subjects can get better, too

If you haven’t seen our recent report about “Reading proficiency rates rising in some Appalachian schools”, you are missing out on some really exciting evidence that despite everything we’ve heard, with proper training Kentucky teachers can overcome high levels of student poverty and produce reading proficiency rates as high as 90%.

The data shows that’s what happened in Goose Rock Elementary School in Kentucky’s high-poverty Clay County Public School District. After a group from the Elgin Children’s Foundation came into Goose Rock and other schools in the district to show teachers what the science shows works best to teach reading, performance in KPREP Grade 3 reading improved dramatically.

In Goose Rock, for example, the school rose from just a 23.1% third-grade reading proficiency rate in 2012 KPREP testing to scoring an astonishingly high 89.7% proficient in 2019.

You can read more about these amazing results in our new report.

But, I was reading another report, this one from a team from Vanderbilt University titled “Breaking the Cycle, A Study of the Elgin Children’s Foundation Effort to Promote Early Literacy in Appalachia” issued in 2016.

The Vandy team researched teacher and principal reactions to the Elgin Children’s Foundation efforts. One issue, discussed in Pages 39 and 40, involves concerns that the time taken to teach reading in the schools has taken away from other subjects. There were comments that scores in the

other subjects had gone down in consequence.

That was concerning. So, I decided to see what happened in Goose Rock Elementary in the other KPREP subjects besides reading. The table below shows what I found.

Note that the proficiency rates shown in the table are for the entire school average for grades 3 to 5 combined. This is not the same as the Grade 3 only data discussed in the Appalachia report. The all

grades averages must be considered because subjects other than reading and math are not tested in each grade.

The first part of the table, shown in yellow highlighting, covers Goose Rock’s and Kentucky’s statewide average proficiency rates for the KPREP subjects tested in 2012.

As you can see by the light red highlighting (for emphasis) in the difference column for the 2012 results, Goose Rock scored way below the statewide averages in every academic area in 2012.

Now, look at the 2019 scores for Goose Rock and Kentucky statewide.

WOW!

That super increase in reading proficiency isn’t Goose Rock’s only achievement. Scores are way up across the board in every KPREP area. In fact, Goose Rock scored above the statewide KPREP proficiency rates in every area, and in all but one of them by a notable, double-digit amount.

So, the difference column for the 2019 data richly deserves its green highlighting.

Why might this make a lot of sense? Up through Grade 3, our school system is designed to teach kids how to read. But, that really changes in Grade 4. In Grade 4 and thereafter, the system is designed

around the philosophy that students can now read to learn. 

So, if students have really mastered reading by entry to Grade 4, they have a leg up on doing well in every other academic area.

On the other hand, if students arrive in Grade 4 with serious reading problems….

The data shown above just provide a real-world indication that principals the Vandy team interviewed about the loss of time to teach other subjects actually had it right. As the Vandy report says: 

“When principals were asked about this phenomenon, they acknowledged the loss of instructional time for other subjects, but reemphasized the urgency of students reading at grade level as most profoundly impacting students’ future learning.” 

And, the real-world example of Goose Rock just keeps looking better and better as emphasis on making sure every student reads well by the end of third grade is associated with remarkable achievement in every other subject area in higher grades.

Technical Note: You can access the Kentucky Department of Education School Report Card datasets used to obtain the proficiency rate data in this way:

For the 2012 data, log on to: https://applications.education.ky.gov/src/DataSets.aspx.

Next, click the 2011-2012 ribbon, then select the "Level" link under the Accountability section in the Achievement Cell.

For the 2019 data, log onto: https://openhouse.education.ky.gov/Home/SRCData.

Then, click the Assessments/Accountability link. Then click on " By Level" under the" Accountability Proficiency" section.

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