Time to get serious about Kentucky’s reading instruction problem - 1

It’s not a new problem. It’s something we’ve written about numerous times before. 

Very simply, a lot of Kentucky’s teachers just don’t know how to teach reading properly.

One set of evidence of this serious problem includes results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Figure 1 shows the overall Grade 4 and Grade 8 NAEP Reading Assessment results for Kentucky for the first and latest years of testing.

When we examine the NAEP reading results, progress for Kentucky’s fourth graders over the three decades that KERA has been in place has been pretty unimpressive. As of 2019, only 35% of the state’s public school fourth grade students could read proficiently, up just 12 percentage points in 27 years from the proficiency rate way back in 1992.

Figure 1 shows the reading proficiency rate for Kentucky’s eighth graders in 2019 was even lower than the fourth grade proficiency rate.

The inset table in Figure 1 shows the estimated number of additional years required after 2019 before Kentucky reaches 80% reading proficiency for each grade based on the demonstrated rate of progress so far shown so far. It will take Kentucky another century to get fourth-grade reading proficiency up somewhere near where it should be and it's going to require a truly dismal three centuries plus to do the same for the eighth-grade scores.

For Kentucky’s Black students, the NAEP reading picture is far more depressing, as Figure 2 shows.

Put bluntly, Black reading proficiency in Kentucky is a major embarrassment. Essentially, there has been virtually no notable improvement so the Bluegrass State’s Black Student reading proficiency rates remain about where they were in the 1990s – abysmal.

Worse, based on NAEP performance to date, Black reading in Kentucky isn’t going to get anywhere close to where it should be for a number of centuries into the future. That’s just not acceptable.

The good news is that we can fix this. And, Senate Bill 9 in the 2022 legislative session is aimed at doing some things that have produced dramatic improvements in reading in Mississippi and even right here in Kentucky in a few places like the Clay County School District. So, stay tuned for more about what can be done.

https://bipps.org/blog/time-to-get-serious-about-kentuckys-reading-instruction-problem-1

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