Read to Achieve, part of the Excellent Schools Act of 2012, was recently put into place in all of North Carolina's public school classrooms.
Under Read to Achieve, the path to promotion requires current third-grade students to pass the new End of Grade exam. If unsuccessful, students will then have to pass a Read to Achieve assessment or complete a portfolio that shows mastery of at least 36 reading comprehension passages. Students who are not successful will be given an option to attend a summer reading camp or repeat the third grade.
My husband and I both struggled with reading as children. I am afraid our children were unfortunate to inherit our reading genes. While both of my children struggled initially, learning to read well represented an even steeper challenge for my second child. By the end of fourth grade, I realized our shared reading time at home was no longer fun or comforting but exhausting and frustrating for both of us. Not wanting him to hate reading, I decided to seek professional help. Four years and a lot of professional tutoring later, he is a proficient reader.
The new law's intent is to assure that all students are reading on grade level by the end of third grade. This is a worthy goal as research shows that most third-graders who are proficient readers tend to have successful educational futures. However, research also reminds us that children develop at their own unique pace. Artificially putting a deadline on a developmental stage and setting up punishments for failure won't make children mature faster or improve teacher's instructional practices. Retaining students after third grade will not be any more successful than social promotion unless and until we are able to provide the right intervention for struggling readers and ensure students read more, both at home and at school. Strong remediation is the key whether we move them forward or hold them back!
I know that my second son made a two on his third-grade EOG and it would have been disheartening for him and me to know that even though we worked really hard, he was going to be retained. My son is smart. He was finally diagnosed with dyslexia. Would holding him back have been the right decision? Absolutely not.
Because of the disappointing number of third-graders not making proficiency on the first round of new reading tests aligned with the higher standards embedded in the Common Core, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction has created another well-intended, but ill-conceived mandate. This new mandate requires all students to take the mini assessments that are part of the alternative portfolio students and teachers can compile in order to avoid retention or summer school. Students took their first assessments in January. Students will take three assessments a week until the middle of May.
The assessments are four to seven pages with five questions per passage. To pass, a student can only miss one question. On average the test takes 30 to 45 minutes. Now, instead of learning how to read in their classrooms, these students are in test mode three times per week, losing an average of 90 to 180 minutes of instructional time every week.
I go back to when my children were in third grade. I know that forcing them to spend 30 to 45 minutes testing three times a week for four months would have been cruel. This kind of testing is a sure fire way to make children hate reading.
Blanket assessments and over-testing are tedious, not just for the child but for the teaching staff as well. Testing does not grow a child's reading skills.
We need less testing and more classroom instruction. Instead of relying solely on standardized tests and over-testing our students, I would ask the following: What is the remediation plan? What funding was put in place for additional tutoring or a reading specialist who could actually assess student needs and provide reading strategies to help students struggling to read? In essence, all the good intentions at the state level are increasing student and teacher frustration in our classrooms and schools. The State Board of Education has Read to Achieve on the Feb. 4 agenda to review the current implementation. Contact State Superintendent of Public Instruction June Atkinson to voice your concerns about how Read to Achieve has been implemented.
Linda Welborn is a member of the Guilford County Board of Education, representing District 5, and the mother of two GCS students.
