Will obstruction of better reading instruction continue in Kentucky?

Discussion of Kentucky’s long-term failure to teach hundreds of thousands of kids to read was included as Item III.E. during the December 1, 2021 meeting of the Kentucky Board of Education. This discussion was badly needed.

To be sure, the widespread failure of reading instruction in Kentucky isn’t news. BIPPS has been discussing poor reading performance for a long time (see here, here and here for examples).

Most recently, the institute provided updated information on the subject this summer in our What Milton Wright knew about reading instruction, but lots of teachers apparently don’t report. Using a presentation of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) similar to that in Figure 1 below, the Milton Wright report discusses how Kentucky’s fourth graders’ reading abilities over time have not only been very disappointing, but several years before COVID hit had already started to decline.

Figure 1 shows Kentucky’s white students’ NAEP Grade 4 Reading proficiency rate in 2019 isn’t statistically significantly different from the rate more than a decade earlier back in 2007. Even worse, the Black students’ reading proficiency rate in 2019 isn’t statistically significantly different from the rate way back in 1992.

Clearly, despite years of expensive reform efforts under KERA, Kentucky’s K-12 community hasn’t come even close to fixing the problem. Fad (often expensive) education ideas about teaching reading have certainly been chased, but there is no evidence of those fad ideas producing the sort of major improvement that is clearly needed.

To its credit, the Kentucky Department of Education’s presentation to the board on December 1 was candid. What’s happening now isn’t acceptable. Something more, something different, needs to happen. Possible suggestions, including ideas coming from the notable reform effort in Mississippi, which BIPPS has discussed before, were offered.

But, what’s led to success in Mississippi doesn’t mesh with some folks’ agendas in Kentucky. Comments during the state board meeting provided a stunning case in point, as board member Claire Batt provided interesting insights into why change hasn’t already happened in Kentucky and is far from certain going forward.

It was clear Batt doesn’t like hearing about Mississippi. 

In fact, Batt was so eager to discredit Mississippi’s reading improvement that she even got some information just plain wrong regarding NAEP results in Grade 4 Reading.

Let’s look at some of Batt’s assertions and what the NAEP data actually shows. At 1 hour 57 minutes and 8 seconds into the morning webcast of the meeting, Batt said she would like to see Kentucky look for examples of how to teach reading better in states with top NAEP performance, not in one with performance at the “bottom.”

Batt needs to catch up to the times. Her characterization of Mississippi’s current status for reading is just wrong.

Figure 2 was generated with the NAEP Data Explorer web tool.

Figure 2 shows how white Grade 4 students in the 50 states compared to Mississippi’s whites in 2019. In 2019 only five states had white NAEP Grade 4 Reading Scale Scores statistically significantly higher than Mississippi’s while 16 scored statistically significantly lower.

Clearly, Mississippi’s no longer at the bottom for white student scores. Mississippi’s 2019 performance also shows remarkable improvement once you realize no state had statistically significantly lower scores for white students in the 1992 NAEP Grade 4 Reading Assessment than Mississippi posted. Now, the Magnolia State is definitely ahead of 16.

In 2019, Kentucky’s white fourth graders statistically significantly outscored their counterparts in just two other states. As of 2019, as Kentucky’s light blue shading in Figure 2 shows, the Bluegrass State scored statistically significantly LOWER than Mississippi for white students’ scores.

Figure 3 shows that for Black students in 2019, no state posted a NAEP Grade 4 Reading Scale Score statistically significantly higher than Mississippi’s while 10 states performed statistically significantly worse. Mississippi isn’t on the bottom anymore for Black student scores, either.

Figure 3 tells us Kentucky’s Black students also scored statistically significantly lower than Mississippi’s.

Regardless of whether we look at white or Black student scores, Mississippi is clearly no longer at the bottom of the pile. It’s made made some remarkable progress recently, just as mentioned by the department’s presentation team during the state board meeting. The briefing team also pointed out that Mississippi was the only state to show progress on NAEP Grade 4 Reading between 2017 and 2019, as well.

Shouldn’t Kentucky’s educators at least be open to consideration of a state that faced similar challenges to those we have in Kentucky like high poverty and did notably better in finding what might work better for our students? Why would Batt out of hand want to dismiss this, getting her first “fact” wrong in the process.

Batt got more wrong.

At 1 hour 57 minutes and 16 seconds into the board’s webcast, Batt admitted Mississippi has made gains but said the state made similar gains before reforms were adopted.

Let’s look at the data in Figure 4. This shows how the overall student average NAEP Grade 4 Reading Scale Scores moved over time in Kentucky and Mississippi.

The NAEP data shows Mississippi’s gains in these two periods are nowhere close to similar. Between 1992 and 2013, a period of 21 years, Mississippi’s NAEP Grade 4 Reading Scale Score rose from 199 to 209, a gain of 10 points. But, in just the first six years after Mississippi began passing its major education reform bills, 2013 to 2019, the Scale Score rose another 10 points.

Doing a little math shows that from 1992 to 2013 Mississippi only improved at a rate of 0.48 NAEP Scale Score point per year. Between 2013 and 2019 the improvement rate shot up to 1.67 NAEP Scale Score points per year. That more recent time period’s improvement rate is 350% of the slower rate for the earlier time period.

As a note, Figure 4 also shows that Kentucky’s NAEP Grade 4 Reading scores started to drop after 2015, before COVID hit.

As a result, as of 2019 Mississippi’s overall average “all student” score is not statistically significantly different from Kentucky’s. However, Mississippi is obviously improving while Kentucky is now in decline. Can it really be Mississippi has no answers worth investigating?

However, only comparing “all student” NAEP scores across states can be misleading. We’ll expand on that with the discussion of Batt’s next comment. At 1 hour 57 minutes and 33 seconds into the webcast, Batt says the achievement gaps are still there in Mississippi.

No state has fixed gap issues overnight. A much better question is: are the gaps getting better in Mississippi?

The NAEP Data Explorer tells us that back in 1992 the white minus Black NAEP Grade 4 Reading Scale Score gap in Mississippi was 31 points. By 2013, the gap had decreased to 25 points. That makes the rate of reduction of the gap 0.28 point per year between 1992 and 2013.

In 2019 the white minus Black NAEP Grade 4 Scale Score gap in Mississippi was further reduced to 21 points (four points less than Kentucky’s 2019 gap, by the way). This makes Mississippi’s rate of gap reduction equal to 0.67 point per year between 2013 and 2019.

So, the rate of reduction in the white minus Black achievement gap in Mississippi also accelerated notably after that state’s 2013 reforms started.

Once more, Batt didn’t give us the right picture. Mississippi’s reform is definitely correlated to positive changes in NAEP performance.

At 1 hour 57 minutes and 50 seconds into the board meeting, Batt said Mississippi had the highest third grade retention rate of any state, implying this was a really bad thing.

First of all, how can it possibly be a good thing to promote a student out of the third grade if that student cannot read? After all, from Grade 4 on, the curriculum is designed around the assumption that students can now read to learn. In this system, a non-reader leaving the third grade is in serious trouble for the rest of his or her K-12 experience.

As discussed in our blog, “Some more food for thought on the Mississippi NAEP situation,” there is evidence in Mississippi’s Grade 3 and Grade 4 enrollment data by year that a very notable rise in retention did occur in 2016, the year after Mississippi enacted its tougher policy on promotion to Grade 4. Comparing Grade 3 enrollment in 2015 to Grade 4 enrollment in 2016, it looks like 1,989 students were held back. That is indeed much larger than the 725-student differential between 2013 Grade 3 and 2014 Grade 4 enrollment numbers. But, after 2016 Mississippi’s retention situation improved, rapidly. By the time the 2019 NAEP came around, the differential between Mississippi’s enrollment in Grade 3 in 2018 and enrollment in Grade 4 in 2019 was only 680 students. That’s even less than the Grade 3 to Grade 4 differential before the reform’s retention program started!

So, the enrollment data actually indicates that by 2019 teachers were really teaching a higher proportion of students well enough to meet the promotion gate to Grade 4. That’s exactly what should happen if Mississippi’s reform is working.

If you didn’t follow this discussion, you can get a more detailed explanation in the “more food for thought” blog. But, the bottom line is that actual enrollment data from Mississippi indicates Batt’s assertion about retentions doesn’t look right, either.

All of this raises a question: Why might Batt want to discredit what has happened in Mississippi?

Is she being influenced by the same group of teachers that fought hard to kill Senate Bill 115 in the 2021 Regular Legislative Session (another subject covered in the Milton Wright report)? That legislation would have reformed a number of things including the Bluegrass State’s Read to Achieve (RTA) program that’s been running, expensively, for more than a decade without making even a dent inthose chilling NAEP Grade 4 Reading proficiency rates shown in Figure 1.

Batt certainly challenged a program mentioned in the department’s presentation called Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS). That program, used in Mississippi, stresses teaching phonemic awareness and phonics early in reading instruction, something generally disliked by a lot of teachers who continue to cling to fad ideas about teaching reading found in what is currently called “Balanced Literacy” but is mostly just a warm-over of the “Whole Language” reading philosophy.   

Elements of the Balanced Literacy/Whole Language approach are now being discredited by host of scientific research (A few of those fad ideas are discussed in the Milton Wright report [See Pages 6 and 9]).

Batt asserted LETRS has no research behind it, but the department’s briefing team mentioned that aside from evidence from Mississippi, there are favorable reports from Colorado and Louisiana as well. Certainly, the NAEP data for Mississippi looks pretty compelling, as well.

By the way, there has been a lot of criticism of Balanced Literacy lately. In fact, Lucy Calkins, the lead creator of one of those programs, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP), announced the program would be rewritten to remove those problems following criticism that the program wasn’t doing phonics and phonemic awareness properly (a problem with Balanced Literacy approaches),

To finish up, a message from the recent board meeting seems very clear: fad ideas about teaching reading, including some that RTA remedial instructors and many of Kentucky’s regular reading teachers in general have been using, are being seriously challenged for lack of agreement with the scientific research on reading. However, some of our educators – apparently more than a few of them – are having a real problem accepting that what they have been doing for years wasn’t the best approach – or maybe even was actually damaging to many students.

Such denial is a real problem. Certainly, as of the board meeting last week, it’s clear the reading war in Kentucky is still on. And, unless and until other Kentucky Board of Education members come to grips with what science really shows works for reading instruction, the war isn’t likely to be won, either.

In fact, as long as entrenched teachers have total control over curriculum through School Based Decision Making Councils, the Kentucky Board of Education simply lacks the authority to really make change. Thus, despite sentiments expressed during the board meeting against it, legislation is clearly going to be needed if Kentucky is to ever keep pace with the dramatic improvements in reading now going on in Mississippi and in other states that are also bringing their reading instruction in line with what scientific research shows works best.

RICHARD INNES DECEMBER 6, 2021

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