According to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, about 32 million adults in the United States can’t read.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 50 percent of US adults struggle with a book written at an eighth-grade level.
From a Colorado Department of Education (CDE) press release from November 19, 2020:
The State Board of Education agreed today to provide educators an additional six months to complete the teacher training required by the READ Act. Kindergarten through third-grade teachers will now have until January 31, 2022 to complete their training requirements on evidence-based reading instruction.
The board directed districts to communicate the requirement to all K-3 teachers by December 1, 2020, and ensure teachers meet the new January 2022 deadline. Districts, BOCES and charters that do not meet the requirements will be ineligible for READ Act funds for the 2022-23 school year.
Only 40% of Colorado’s third graders are meeting expectations on the Colorado Measures of Academic Success tests in English language arts, yet research shows that students need to learn to read at grade level by the end of third grade so they can read to learn in fourth grade and beyond.
Colorado’s READ Act (Reading to Ensure Academic Development) was passed in 2012 — almost nine years ago — with the goal of “dramatically improving reading for our youngest learners.” The legislation required schools to identify students with “significant reading deficiencies” and create an individual intervention plan — a READ plan — for each “SRD” student. The READ plans were required to be implemented with parental involvement, and allows schools to hold back struggling students. Schools were required to report on their progress, and the state government invested about $230 million in the program between 2013 and 2018.
As the result of years of planning and tracking effort, and millions of dollars spent, Colorado’s third graders improved their reading scores on the annual CMAS (Colorado Measures of Academic Achievement) standardized test by a mere 2%. The number of students identified with SRD declined by a mere 1%. As mentioned in the CDE press release, only four out of ten of Colorado third graders currently meet test benchmarks in English Language Arts.
Here’s a graph from the Colorado Sun.
State tracking of READ Act student performance shows that only 6 percent of children identified with a significant reading deficiency in kindergarten were reading at their grade level by third grade.
I can imagine that a private company that had spent eight years and nearly a quarter of a billion dollars on a program designed to improve their production process, and saw a 2% improvement… well, I can imagine such a company would be looking for a different program. But it appears that CDE, instead of realizing that the READ program is pretty much an utter failure, has decided to double down and require all school teachers to be better trained in the program. From the CDE press release:
The READ Act aims to ensure all students can read at grade level by the end of third grade. In 2019, the legislature made several changes to the READ Act to help educators support reading success among our state’s youngest learners. Not all of Colorado’s educators have had the opportunity to learn the science of teaching reading in their teacher training programs, so one of the changes to the READ Act required training on the latest evidence-based reading instruction strategies for all K-3 teachers.
Teachers have a variety of avenues to complete the training, including no-cost options provided by the Colorado Department of Education.
But it’s not just third graders who are struggling in a failed system. The failure of the education industry to imbue a significant number of children with meaningful academic skills is also evident at our universities and colleges. Statewide, more than one-third of students who entered higher education in 2017 were flagged by their college as being behind in math, English or both. Data from the 2018 school year isn’t available yet, but Colorado’s overall remediation rate has fluctuated between 33% and 40% since 2009.
For a long time, the colleges believed it beneficial to catch students who were behind and send them through remediation — require them to take e ‘basic skills’ courses before allowing them to start regular coursework. But schools that require students to take remedial classes have shown a higher dropout rate that schools where students who are allowed to move straight into standard courses.
A new law, getting rid of remedial college courses in Colorado won’t take effect until 2022, but schools are already shifting away from a traditional sequence of lower-level classes that students have to pass before they can start earning credits.
How could an education system that relies heavily upon reading comprehension, starting in elementary school and continuing through graduate school, have dropped the ball?
We don’t know. And CDE doesn’t know. From a 2019 Colorado Sun article:
“While we’re sitting here discussing this, we have kids in K through third grade and right on up that are still not learning to read,” state Sen. Dennis Hisey, a Republican from Fountain, said during a recent budget briefing with state education officials. “So when are you going to get back to us with, ‘This is what we need?’”
The answer to that question from Education Commissioner Katy Anthes, nearly seven years after the READ Act was signed into law, is that what to do remains under review. The Colorado Board of Education still hasn’t weighed in, she said.
“We usually don’t ask you for more money until we talk to the board about it,” Anthes added.