In 2017, public interest lawyers sued California because they claimed that too many low-income Black and Hispanic children weren’t learning to read at school. Filed on behalf of families and teachers at three schools with pitiful reading test scores, the suit was an effort to establish a constitutional right to read. However, before the courts resolved that legal question, the litigants settled the case in 2020. 

The settlement itself was noteworthy. The state agreed to give an extra $50 million to 75 elementary schools with the worst reading scores in the state to improve how they were teaching reading. Targeted at children who were just learning to read in kindergarten through third grade, the settlement amounted to a little more than $1,000 extra per student. Teachers were trained in evidence-based ways of teaching reading, including an emphasis on phonics and vocabulary. (A few of the 75 original schools didn’t participate or closed down.)

A pair of Stanford University education researchers studied whether the settlement made a difference, and their conclusion was that yes, it did. Third graders’ reading scores in 2022 and 2023 rose relative to their peers at comparable schools that weren’t eligible for the settlement payments. Researchers equated the gains to an extra 25 percent of a year of learning.

This right-to-read settlement took place during the pandemic when school closures led to learning losses; reading scores had declined sharply statewide and nationwide. However, test scores were strikingly stable at the schools that benefited from the settlement. More than 30 percent of the third graders at these lowest performing schools continued to reach Level 2 or higher on the California state reading tests, about the same as in 2019. Third grade reading scores slid at comparison schools between 2019 and 2022 and only began to recover in 2023. (Level 2 equates to slightly below grade-level proficiency with “standard nearly met” but is above the lowest Level 1 “standard not met.”) State testing of all students doesn’t begin until third grade and so there was no standard measure for younger kindergarten, first and second graders.

The settlement’s benefits can seem small. The majority of children in these schools still cannot read well. Even with these reading improvements, more than 65 percent of the students still scored at the lowest of the four levels on the state’s reading test.  But their reading gains are meaningful in the context of a real-life classroom experience for more than 7,000 third graders over two years, not merely a laboratory experiment or a small pilot program. The researchers characterized the reading improvements as larger than those seen in 90 percent of large-scale classroom interventions, according to a 2023 study. They also conducted a cost-benefit analysis and determined that the $50 million literacy program created by the settlement was 13 times more effective than a typical dollar spent at schools. 

“I wouldn’t call the results super large. I would call them cost effective,” said Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the study, but attended a presentation of the working paper in November. 

The working paper, “The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms,” was posted to the website of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University on Dec. 4, 2023. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and may still be revised.

Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education who conducted the analysis with doctoral student Sarah Novicoff, says that the reading improvements at the weakest schools in California bolster the evidence for the so-called “science of reading” approach, which has become associated with phonics instruction, but also includes pre-phonics sound awareness, reading fluency, vocabulary building and comprehension skills. Thus far, the best real-world evidence for the science of reading comes from Mississippi, where reading scores dramatically improved after schools changed how they taught reading. But there’s also been a debate over whether the state’s policy to hold weak readers back in third grade has been a bigger driver of the test score gains than the instructional changes. 

The structure of the right-to-read settlement offers a possible blueprint for how to bring evidence-based teaching practices into more classrooms, says Stanford’s Dee. School administrators and teachers both received training in the science of reading approach, but then schools were given the freedom to create their own plans and spend their share of the settlement funds as they saw fit within certain guidelines. The Sacramento County Office of Education served as an outside administrator, approving plans and overseeing them.

“How to drive research to inform practice within schools and within classrooms is the central problem we face in education policy,” said Dee. “When I look at this program, it’s an interesting push and pull of how to do that. Schools were encouraged to do their own planning and tailor what they were doing to their own circumstances. But they also had oversight from a state-designated agency that made sure the money was getting where it was supposed to, that they were doing things in a well-conceived way.”  

Some schools hired reading coaches to work with teachers on a regular basis. Others hired more aides to tutor children in small groups. Schools generally elected to spend most of the settlement money on salaries for new staff and extra compensation for current teachers to undergo retraining and less on new instructional materials, such as books or curriculums. By contrast, New York City’s current effort to reform reading instruction began with new curriculum requirements and teachers are complaining that they haven’t received the training to make the new curriculum work.

It’s unclear if this combination of retraining and money would be as effective in typical schools. The lowest performing schools that received the money tended to be staffed by many younger, rookie teachers who were still learning their craft. These new teachers may have been more open to adopting a new science of reading approach than veteran teachers who have years of experience teaching another way. 

That teacher retraining victory may foretell a short-lived success story for the students in these schools. The reason that there were so many new teachers is because teachers quickly burn out and quit high-poverty schools. The newly trained teachers in the science of reading may soon quit too. There’s a risk that all the investment in better teaching could soon evaporate. I’ll be curious to see their reading scores a few years from now.

This story about the right to read settlement was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: ‘Right-to-read’ settlement spurred higher reading scores in California’s lowest performing schools, study finds appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Kids around the country are still suffering academically from the pandemic. But more than three years after schools shut down, it’s hard to understand exactly how much ground students have lost and which children now need the most attention.

Three new reports offer some insights.  All three were produced by for-profit companies that sell assessments to schools. Unlike annual state tests, these interim assessments are administered at least twice a year and help track student progress, or learning, during the year. These companies may have a business motive in sounding an alarm to sell more of their product, but the reports are produced by well-regarded education statisticians.

The big picture is that kids at every grade are still behind where they would have been without the pandemic. All three reports look at student achievement in the spring of 2019, before the pandemic, and compare it to the spring of 2023. A typical sixth grader, for example, in the spring of 2023 was generally scoring much lower than a typical sixth grader in 2019.

The differences are in the details. One report says that students are still behind the equivalent of four to five months of school, but another says it’s one to three months. A third doesn’t measure months of lost learning, but notices the alarming 50 percent increase in the number of students who are still performing significantly below grade level.

Depending on how you slice and dice the data, older students in middle school and beyond seem to be in the most precarious position and younger children seem to be more resilient and recovering better. Yet, under a different spotlight, you can see troubling signs even among younger children. This includes the very youngest children who weren’t school age when the pandemic hit.

The most recent data, released on Aug. 28, 2023, is from Curriculum Associates, which sells i-Ready assessments taken by more than 11 million students across the country and focuses on “grade-level” skills.*  It counts the number of students in third grade, for example, who are able to read at a third-grade level or solve math problems that a third grader ought to be able to solve. The standards for what is grade-level achievement are similar to what most states consider to be “proficient” on their annual assessments.

The report concludes that the percentage of students who met grade-level expectations was “flat” over the past school year. This is one way of noting that there wasn’t much of an academic recovery between spring of 2022 and spring of 2023. Students of every age, on average, lagged behind where students had been in 2019.

For example, 69 percent of fourth graders were demonstrating grade-level skills in math in 2019. That dropped to 55 percent in 2022 and barely improved to 56 percent in 2023. (The drop in grade-level performance isn’t as dramatic for seventh and eighth graders, in part, because so few students were meeting grade-level expectations even before the pandemic.)

“It’s dang hard to catch up,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates.

To make up for lost ground, students would have to learn more in a year than they typically do. That generally didn’t happen. Huff said this kind of extra learning is especially hard for students who missed foundational math and reading skills during the pandemic.

While most students learned at a typical pace during the 2022-23 school year, Curriculum Associates noted a starkly different and troubling pattern for children who are significantly below grade level by two or more years. Their numbers spiked during the pandemic and have not gone down. Even worse, these children learned less during the 2022-23 school year than during a typical pre-pandemic year. That means they are continuing to lose ground.

Huff highlighted three groups of children who need extra attention: poor readers in second, third and fourth grades; children in kindergarten and first grade, and middle school math students.

There’s been a stubborn 50 percent increase in the number of third and fourth graders who are two or more grade levels behind in reading, Huff said. For example, 19 percent of third graders were that far behind grade level in 2023, up from 12 percent in 2019.  “I find this alarming news,” said Huff, noting that these children were in kindergarten and first grade when the pandemic first hit. “They’re missing out on phonics and phonemic awareness and now they’re thrust into grades three and four,” she said. “If you’re two or more grade levels below in grade three, you’re in big trouble. You’re in big, big, big trouble. We’re going to be seeing evidence of this for years to come.”

The youngest students, who were just two to four years old at the start of the pandemic, are also behind. Huff said that kindergarteners and first graders started the 2022-23 school year at lower achievement levels than in the past. They may have missed out on social interactions and pre-school. “You can’t say my current kindergartener wasn’t in school during the pandemic so they weren’t affected,” said Huff.

Math achievement slipped the most after schools shuttered and switched to remote learning. And now very high percentages of middle schoolers are below grade level in the subject. Huff speculates that they missed out on foundational math skills, especially fractions and proportional reasoning.

Renaissance administered its Star tests to more than six million students around the country. Its spring 2023 report was released on Aug, 9. Like Curriculum Associates, Renaissance finds that, “growth is back, but performance is not,” according to Gene Kerns, Renaissance’s chief academic officer.** That means students are generally learning at a typical pace at school, but not making up for lost ground. Depending on the subject and the grade, students still need to recover between one and three months of instruction.

Math is rebounding better than reading. “Math went down an alarming amount, but has started to go back up,” Kerns said. “We’ve not seen much rebound to reading.” Reading achievement, however, wasn’t as harmed by school disruptions. 

Kerns generally sees a sunnier story for younger children and a more troubling picture for older students.

The youngest children in kindergarten and first grade are on par with pre-pandemic history, he said. Middle elementary school grades are a little behind but catching up. 

“The older the student, the more lingering the impact,” said Kerns. “The high school data is very alarming. If you’re a junior in high school, you only have one more year. There’s a time clock on this.” 

Seventh and eighth graders showed tiny decreases in annual learning in math and reading. Kerns says he’s “hesitant” to call it a “downward spiral.”

The third report come from NWEA, which administers the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Assessment to more than 6 million students. Its spring 2023 data, released on July 11, showed that students on average need four to five months of extra schooling, on top of the regular school year, to catch up. This graph below, is a good summary of how much students are behind as expressed in months of learning.

Spring 2023 achievement gaps and months of schooling required to catch up to pre-COVID achievement levels

Like the Renaissance report, the NWEA report shows a bigger learning loss in math than in reading, and indicates that older students have been more academically harmed by the pandemic. They’ll need more months of extra schooling to catch up to where they would have been had the pandemic never happened. It could take years and years to squeeze these extra months of instruction in and many students may never receive them.

From my perspective, Renaissance and NWEA came to similar conclusions for most students. The main difference is that Renaissance has additional assessment data for younger children in kindergarten through second grade, showing a recovery, and high school data, showing a worse deterioration. The discrepancies in their measurement of months of learning loss, whether it’s four to five months or one to three months, is inconsequential. Both companies admit these assumption-filled estimates are imprecise.

One of the most substantial differences among the reports is that Curriculum Associates is sounding an alarm bell for kindergarteners and first graders while Renaissance is not.

The three reports all conclude that kids are behind where they would have been without the pandemic. But some sub-groups are doing much worse than others. The students who are the most behind and continuing to spiral downward really need our attention. Without extra support, their pandemic slump could be lifelong. 

* Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that more than 3 million students took i-Ready assessments.

** Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Gene Kerns’s last name.

This story about pandemic recovery was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

The post PROOF POINTS: Three views of pandemic learning loss and recovery appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Many education researchers have warned that summer school doesn’t have a strong track record of helping students catch up academically. That’s because it’s hard to convince families to show up. In the wake of the pandemic, school leaders spent billions more on it anyway. In a 2022 national survey, 70 percent of school districts said they had launched new summer programs or expanded existing ones. Los Angeles Unified District superintendent Alberto Carvalho called summer school “critical” to addressing learning loss. 

But now, in a scientific version of “We told you so,” a group of 14 researchers from Harvard University, the American Institutes for Research and the assessment company NWEA found miniscule gains in math and no improvement in reading at all after scrutinizing how much 2022 summer school helped children in eight large school districts around the nation. A separate study in Tennessee, also looking back at the summer of 2022, found the same tiny learning gains in math but none in reading. 

There are two big reasons for the disheartening results, according to Emily Morton, a researcher at the American Institutes for Research, and one of the lead researchers on the multi-state summer school study released in August 2023: the summer school programs were very short and there was too little participation.

“It would have been misguided to expect that summer school would have enormous effects,” said Emily Morton, “And that’s what we see. It doesn’t have enormous effects.”

Sadly, the academic gains for children were a fraction of what even pre-pandemic studies of summer school had indicated. What kids learned in math during the summer of 2022 was less than a third of the small gains seen in previous research. Earlier research had sometimes found gains for summertime reading programs, particularly for younger elementary school students using a well-regarded reading curriculum. But reading achievement generally didn’t improve after attending summer school in 2022.

Based on the tiny amounts of academic recovery and participation rates in the eight districts studied, summer programs were estimated to have offset only 2 to 3 percent of the learning losses in math and none in reading. “It’s really making quite a small dent,” said Morton. “It’s just such a small amount compared to the amount of recovery that’s needed.”

Most of the summer programs lasted only 15 to 20 days, shorter than programs in the pre-pandemic research. Students also missed many sessions. On average, enrolled students received only between 10 and 14 days of instruction. Participation in these optional summer school programs was generally low. Depending on the district, between 5 and 23 percent of students in kindergarten through eighth grade signed up.

Reading has always been less responsive to summer school than math. This is partly because many children who don’t attend summer school still read during June, July and August and they are also improving their vocabulary and comprehension skills. By contrast, kids are less likely to solve math problems on their own and there’s a bigger advantage for children who receive summertime instruction. But it could also be that reading instruction isn’t high quality in many summer schools.

The eight districts in the study were Dallas; Portland, Oregon; Alexandria, Virginia; Guilford County, North Carolina; Richardson, Texas; Suffern Central, New York, and Tulsa. One additional district was unnamed. 

Morton and her colleagues tracked the academic performance of more than 16,0000 children who attended school during the summer of 2022, and compared them with similar children who didn’t attend summer school. For children who had the same baseline spring 2022 test scores, summer school didn’t help them to score much higher on a fall 2022 assessment, known as Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) tests, which is sold by NWEA.

If every child had participated in summer school in the eight districts that the researchers studied, the catch-up gains in math would have been enough to recover 10 percent of how much students fell behind, on average, during the pandemic. But because enrollment was so low, summer programming closed only about 2 to 3 percent of each district’s estimated learning loss in math.

Most students still need the equivalent of an extra four to five months of instruction – above and beyond regular school year instruction – to catch up to a pre-pandemic student; some students, especially low-income students, need much more, according to NWEA’s July 2023 learning loss update.

The district with the highest summer school enrollment rate, 23 percent, offered families of elementary school children an extended day, beginning at 8 a.m. and ending at 5:30 p.m.. Those hours appealed to working parents and summer school in 2022 doubled as free child care. However, this district, which was not identified in the study, curtailed hours for the summer of 2023 because it ran out of money. 

More common across the districts were half-day programs. Academic instruction ranged from 45 minutes to two hours in reading and math each. The remainder of the time was filled with “enrichment” activities, from robotics to dance, often led by community groups. 

Despite the dismal results, educators said they learned a few lessons. Online sign ups were a barrier and paper enrollment forms remain necessary for many families. Location matters too. Families were far more inclined to sign up for summer school at their children’s school. Sending a child to an unfamiliar building in a different neighborhood wasn’t as popular. 

School administrators told Morton they had intentionally marketed summer school as a “summer camp,” full of fun activities, to make it more appealing to families and children. Administrators said they were very careful with their language, not wanting to single out students, stigmatize them or make them feel that they were behind. 

“Maybe that is not always in the best interest of the student,” Morton said, concerned that a soft sell approach didn’t attract children who need extra instruction the most. She thinks that clearer messaging – telling parents directly that their kids were behind and needed extra summer support  – would have been more convincing.

That might be good advice – but it carries a risk for educators. Parents could end up blaming schools for allowing their children to fall so far behind. Confidence in public education is near a record low, according to a recent Gallup Poll. The global emergency stage of the pandemic may be over, but now the nation’s students and public schools are in need of intensive care. 

This story about summer school programs was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

The post PROOF POINTS: Summer school programs too short and not popular enough to reverse pandemic learning loss, researchers say appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In early April 2023, I started getting emails and messages urging me to take a look at a fresh reading study in Colorado. The study, a working paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed, came to two dramatic conclusions. The first was that elementary school students who attended “Core Knowledge” schools – which teach young children a broad core curriculum in many subjects – were better readers. Their reading scores in third through sixth grades indicate that these children were not only above average at deciphering the words on the page but were better at understanding and analyzing what they were reading. Even more surprising was the finding that the reading gains were so large for low-income students that they would eliminate the achievement gap between rich and poor children. 

The nine authors, most of whom hail from the University of Virginia, issued a press release trumpeting it as the first long-term study of a knowledge-rich curriculum and the first to show outsized gains on state assessments. They said the gains were large enough to catapult U.S. reading achievement from 15th place among 50 nations on an international reading test of fourth graders to the top five. Robert Pondiscio, writing on the website of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called it “compelling evidence” for the theories of University of Virginia English professor emeritus E.D. Hirsch, who developed the curriculum used in these schools and whose 1987 book Cultural Literacy inspired the common core standards movement in American education. Journalist Natalie Wexler, author of the 2019 book The Knowledge Gap, said the study ought to spark a re-evaluation of the usual approach to reading comprehension in schools, which frequently focuses on skills, such as asking students to find the main idea and make inferences. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum teaches skills too, but it places more emphasis on expanding children’s knowledge of the world, from Greek mythology to the solar system.

For advocates of building children’s general knowledge, the study is certainly positive news and an indication that this type of instruction may be beneficial. But from my perspective, it falls far short of convincing proof or vindication. For starters, the study took place at nine charter schools in Colorado, stretching from Denver to Fort Collins. It’s impossible from the study design to distinguish whether the Core Knowledge curriculum itself made the difference or if it could be attributed to other things that these charter schools were doing, such as teacher training or character education programs.

The schools catered to middle and upper income families; median family income exceeded $114,000 at three of the suburban schools. Only one of the schools had a somewhat lower income population, but median family income still exceeded $50,000 and fewer than a third of the children were living below the poverty line, not nearly as poor as many city schools. The claim of closing the achievement gap is based on only 16 students who attended this one charter school.

Researchers have long found correlations between a child’s knowledge and reading scores, but that’s not the same as proving that building knowledge first is what causes reading comprehension to flourish later. The theory – widely accepted by education researchers –  is that what we grasp from what we read depends on whether we can hook it to concepts and topics that we already have some knowledge about. Laboratory studies have found that children who are familiar with a topic are better able to comprehend a new reading passage on it. In one 1987 experiment, kids who were familiar with baseball were better able to retell a story they had read about a baseball game than children who had stronger reading abilities. 

However, U.S. schools, especially those that serve low-income children, have moved in the opposite direction. Educators have felt pressure to cut time for science, social studies and the arts in order to carve out more time for reading and math, the two subjects that are tested annually by every state and by which schools are judged. During reading class time, many schools emphasize skills over content, asking children to practice comprehension strategies on short reading passages, rather than reading a whole novel. Critics say this has hampered the ability of children to build a strong foundation of background knowledge at school and has impeded their reading comprehension.

“The major factor that’s the cause of achievement differences in low and high income students turns out to be their level of general knowledge,” said David Grissmer, a research professor at the University of Virginia and one of the lead authors of the study. “It’s geography; it’s history; it’s science; it’s cooking; it’s athletics, whatever that broad knowledge is about the world we live in. It comes from lots of different sources, sometimes from families, sometimes communities, sometimes from school. It’s the experiences kids have that build that general knowledge, which really provides the particular advantage that we see for higher income kids. I don’t think it completely accounts for it, but it accounts for more of that difference than I think most of us ever thought.”

It’s nearly impossible to test different instructional approaches in real classrooms. Teachers can teach only one curriculum at a time – often after years of training and practice to implement it correctly – and so it’s not practical to randomly assign some children to learn a different way in the same school. One can study the students at schools that have adopted the Core Knowledge curriculum, but it’s hard to know if the students who attend these schools would have scored just as high in reading if they had been taught the usual way at a traditional public school. 

In this study, the researchers copied a method used by charter school researchers. They identified nine charter schools in Colorado that had adopted Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum. They were popular schools with more applicants than seats and so the schools conducted lotteries to admit students. Researchers tracked students who won kindergarten seats in 2009 and 2010, and monitored their test scores through sixth grade, comparing them with students who also wanted to attend these schools but lost the lottery. The lottery losers attended a variety of other schools, from traditional public schools to private schools to other charter schools. Some postponed starting kindergarten that year. Students who attended one of the Core Knowledge charter schools for at least four years had much higher reading scores than lottery losers who did not attend, and the advantage lasted through at least sixth grade. 

A huge complication in this study was that Colorado families had applied to many schools as part of the state’s school choice system. Half of the approximately 1,000 lottery winners chose not to claim their kindergarten seats and opted to attend other schools. In other words, researchers lost half of their study subjects. We don’t know how these children would have fared had they attended the Core Knowledge schools. The results might have been different. 

In theory, knowledge building and reading achievement ought to be a virtuous circle, where children with greater background knowledge should be able to grasp more of what they are reading, which, in turn, helps them learn more and build more background knowledge and become even better readers. However, in this study, researchers detected the full benefit of the Core Knowledge curriculum immediately in third grade, the first year that children are tested at schools. The advantage for Core Knowledge students did not increase further in fourth, fifth and sixth grades.

More than 600 schools across the United States have adopted all or parts of the Core Knowledge curriculum, according to the Core Knowledge website, and, what we all want to know, is how well it’s working in low-income public schools. As those results come in, it will be a welcome addition to the debate on how to teach reading, which, in my opinion, has been excessively focused on teaching phonics to children in kindergarten and first grades. That’s important, but becoming a good reader, with strong comprehension skills, takes a lot more. What kids need to know may prove to be critical. Of course, it will open up a whole new political debate of what content knowledge kids should be taught, and in our political times, that won’t be easy for communities to sort out. Procedures and strategies are easier. Content is hard.

The study, “A Kindergarten Lottery Evaluation of Core Knowledge Charter Schools: Should Building General Knowledge Have a Central Role in Educational and Social Science Research and Policy?” was funded by the Institute for Education Research (an arm of the U.S. Department of Education), the National Science Foundation and two private foundations. One of them, Arnold Ventures, is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.  

This story about reading comprehension was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

The post PROOF POINTS: Inside the latest reading study that’s getting a lot of buzz appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Education researchers have been urging schools to invest their $120 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds in tutoring. What researchers have in mind is an extremely intensive type of tutoring, often called “high dosage” tutoring, which takes place daily or almost every day. It has produced remarkable results for students in almost 100 studies, but these programs are difficult for schools to launch and operate. 

They involve hiring and training tutors and coming up with tailored lesson plans for each child. Outside organizations can help provide tutors and lessons, but schools still need to overhaul schedules to make time for tutoring, find physical space where tutors can meet with students, and safely allow a stream of adults to flow in and out of school buildings all day long. Tutoring programs with research evidence behind them are also expensive, at least $1,000 per student. Some exceed $4,000. 

One organization has designed a different tutoring model, which gives very short one-to-one tutoring sessions to young children who are just learning to read. The nonprofit organization, Chapter One (formerly Innovations for Learning), calls it “short burst” tutoring. It involves far fewer tutors, less disruption to school schedules and no extra space beyond a desk in the back of a classroom. The price tag, paid by school districts, is less than $500 per student. 

The first-year results of a four-year study of 800 Florida children conducted by a Stanford University research organization are promising. Half the children in 49 kindergarten classrooms were randomly selected to receive Chapter One’s tutoring program during the 2021-22 school year. Almost three-quarters of the students were Black and more than half were low-income – two groups who are more likely to be held back in third grade because of reading difficulties. 

To keep younger children on track, the Broward County school district, where the study took place, wanted all kindergarteners to be able to sound out simple three-letter words by the end of the year and be able to distinguish similar words such as hit, hot and hut. After one year of this short burst tutoring, more than double the number of kindergarteners hit this milestone: 68 percent versus 32 percent of the children who didn’t receive the tutoring in the same classrooms. Tutored students also scored much higher on a test of oral reading fluency. 

“These results are big,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford professor of education who was a member of the research team and heads the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford research organization that studies tutoring and released this study in February 2023. “What’s so exciting about this study is it shows that you can get a lot of the benefits of high impact tutoring – relationship-based, individualized instruction with really strong instructional materials – at a cost that is doable for most districts in the long run.”

Loeb said the reading gains in this study were at least as large as what has been produced by more expensive tutoring programs. But it remains to be seen whether these short-term benefits will endure, and whether kids without tutoring will eventually catch up. Researchers especially want to learn if these tutored children will become proficient readers at the end of third grade, a crucial marker in academic development. By one measure, a third of U.S. third graders are currently far behind grade level in reading and in need of intensive remediation. 

The 400 children who received the short-burst tutoring in kindergarten in this study are continuing to receive tutoring in first grade during the current 2022-23 academic year. Researchers are tracking all 800 children, with and without tutoring, for an additional two years through third grade.

Loeb cautioned that this short burst model would be unlikely to work with middle or high school students. It might be that short bursts of one-to-one help are particularly suited to the littlest learners.

“We realized at that young age that their attention span runs out somewhere around six or seven minutes if you’re really doing things intensively with them,” said Seth Weinberger, the founder of Chapter One. 

Weinberger stumbled into tutoring after a foray into educational video games. He was originally a lawyer representing video game makers, and collaborated with academics to develop phonics games to teach reading. 

“After about 20 years of honing these computer games, we came to the conclusion that computer games by themselves are just not going to be enough,” said Weinberger. “You really need some combination of computer-assisted instruction and actual real live humans in order to make it work for the kids.”

Weinberger’s tutoring-and-gaming model works like this: a tutor sits at a desk in the back of the classroom during the normal English Language Arts (ELA) period. One child works with a tutor for a short period of time, typically five to seven minutes, rejoins his classmates and another child rotates in. Children work with the same tutor each time, but a single tutor can cycle through eight or more students an hour this way. 

Though it might seem distracting to have an audible tutoring session in the same classroom, kindergarten classes are often a hubbub of noise as children work with classmates at different activity stations. Tutoring can be another noisy station, but I imagine that it can also be a distraction when the teacher is reading a picture book aloud. Weinberger considers it a strength of his program that kids are not pulled out of the classroom for tutoring so that they are not missing much instruction from their main teacher. In disadvantaged schools, children are frequently pulled out of classes for extra services, which is also disruptive.

Technology plays a big role. Behind the scenes, Chapter One’s computers are keeping track of every child’s progress and guiding the tutors on how to personalize instruction. The tutor’s screen indicates which student to work with next and what skills that student needs to work on.  It also suggests phonics lessons and activities that the tutor can use during the session. 

The computer guidance takes the usual guesswork and judgment calls out of reading instruction and that has enabled well-trained laypeople to serve as tutors as well as experienced, certified teachers. (The Stanford team is currently studying whether certified teachers are producing much larger reading improvements for children, but those results are not out yet. In the current study I am writing about here, both laypeople and certified teachers served as tutors.)

Chapter One’s technology also determines how much tutoring each child should get each day and how many times a week. Dosage ranges from a two-minute session every two weeks to as much as 15 minutes a day. More typical is five to seven minutes three to five times a week. Children in the middle who are making good progress get the most. Children at the very top and the very bottom get the least. (Children who are not making progress may have a learning disability and need a different intervention.)

Technology is also used to reinforce the tutoring with independent practice time on tablets. Chapter One recommends that every child spend 15 minutes a day playing phonics games that are synced to the tutoring instruction and change as the student progresses. The researchers did not yet have data on how much time children actually spent playing these educational games, and how important this independent practice time is in driving the results.

A federal survey of principals estimates that half of U.S. students are behind grade level, far higher than before the pandemic, when a third were behind. But it’s really hard to expand high-dosage tutoring programs rapidly to serve the millions of children who need it. Most of the effective programs are rather small, reaching only a tiny fraction of the students who need help. What’s heartening about this Chapter One study is that the organization is already tutoring 25,000 students in U.S. schools (plus 1,000 students in Canada and the United Kingdom). Now we have a well-designed study – as close as you get in education to the kinds of tests that we do on vaccines and pharmaceuticals – showing that it is effective. 

“It’s not that it has the potential to scale,” said Stanford’s Loeb. “Already 10,000 kids are receiving it in this one district, so we know that it’s actually possible.” 

This story about alternatives to high-dosage tutoring was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: Trial finds cheaper, quicker way to tutor young kids in reading appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

As the coronavirus pandemic ravaged communities and shuttered schools, many educators and parents worried about kindergarteners who were learning online. That concern now appears well-founded as we’re starting to see evidence that remote school and socially distanced instruction were profoundly detrimental to their reading development.

Children in kindergarten when the pandemic broke out in the spring of 2020 are now roughly eight years old and in third grade this 2022-23 school year. A new report by the nonprofit educational assessment maker NWEA documents that third graders are currently suffering the largest pandemic-related learning losses in reading, compared to older students in grades four to eight, and not readily recovering. 

Learning to read well in elementary school matters. After children learn to read, they read to learn. Poor reading ability in third grade can hobble their future academic achievement.  It also matters to society as a whole. Students who fall behind at school are more likely to be arrested, incarcerated and become teen mothers. A separate December 2022 analysis calculated that if recent academic losses from the pandemic were to become permanent, it would add up to $900 billion in lower lifetime earnings for the 48 million students in public schools.   

That’s why NWEA’s findings for third graders are alarming. The results emerged from an analysis of fall 2022 test scores of seven million elementary and middle school children across the nation, in which the reading abilities of third graders remained far behind what children used to be able to do in third grade before the pandemic. The differences between pre- and post-pandemic reading levels are smaller in older grades. While it’s good news that third graders are learning at a typical pace again and no longer falling further behind, they are also not gaining much extra ground. Their learning recovery is the smallest among students in grades three through eight. (See the purple reading graphic below.)

Third graders in 2022 are the furthest behind in reading, as depicted by the bar on the far left. So far they’ve recovered only 10 percent of their pandemic learning losses, which were at their greatest in the spring of 2021. Older grades are making better progress in catching up. 

Karyn Lewis, a researcher at NWEA who led this analysis of test scores, said that current third graders are “a group that we really need to pay a lot of attention to” because the pandemic disrupted their kindergarten and first grade years when they were supposed to learn foundational reading skills.

Slightly older students in fifth, sixth and seventh grades, who were in second grade and above when the pandemic hit, are making much better progress in reading. If their current pace of learning continues, they’ll be on track to recover in two or three years, Lewis calculated. By contrast, it’s unclear when, if ever, current third graders will even catch up to pre-pandemic norms in reading. Lewis said there is a “long road to go” and that she estimates it will be “five plus years” for these third graders to catch up. That would be after eighth grade for this class of children. (See recovery graphic below.)

Estimated years to reach recovery by subject and grade

It’s worth noting that pre-pandemic reading levels weren’t spectacular and had been deteriorating; most children were not proficient in reading for their grade level, as measured by a national yardstick. So, it’s an estimated “long road” to return to a rather low level of achievement that was already a subject of consternation and hand-wringing.

The NWEA research brief, Progress towards pandemic recovery: Continued signs of rebounding achievement at the start of the 2022-23 school year, was released on Dec. 6, 2022. It analyzes scores on its Measures of Academic Progress (MAP)  assessments that are purchased by more than 22,000 schools to measure student progress in both reading and math twice a year, in the fall and the spring. These are in addition to mandatory state assessments taken by students each spring.

This latest NWEA report describes how student achievement deteriorated in 2020 and hit a bottom in the spring of 2021, after which student learning stabilized – a sign that students were once again learning at a typical pace as schools reopened. 

Though the report delves into both math and reading, I chose to focus on reading, a subject in which students didn’t fall as far behind during the pandemic, but are now making weaker catch-up progress. Interestingly, the report was able to detect that reading recovery among older students in grades four through seven isn’t happening at school.  They’re learning at a typical pre-pandemic pace during the school year but avoiding some of the usual deterioration of reading skills during the summer. Typically, students forget a lot over the summer, a phenomenon known as “summer slide” or “summer learning loss.” It is unclear from this report why students retained more than usual during the summer of 2022 and returned to school in the fall with better-than-expected reading levels. 

I was more concerned about the alarm bells for third graders and why they’re struggling so much more than older students in reading. Timothy Shanahan, a literacy expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that younger elementary school kids rely on classroom instruction in school to learn to read. In older grades, much of the learning that accrues in reading is due to the students’ own reading and writing activity. 

“Those [early] grades are particularly sensitive to educational disruptions,” Shanahan explained by email.  “A fourth grader may have read for some number of minutes per day during those missed school days, while a kindergartner or first grader may not have been able to do that at all (since they wouldn’t know how yet).”

The early elementary years are critical because that’s when most children learn how to read words, what educators call “decoding.”  Teachers in older grades don’t necessarily have the specialized training to backfill what students missed.  A second grade teacher, for example, would likely not know much about teaching students how to identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words, an important step in learning to read called “phonemic awareness,” because it’s a skill that is the province of kindergarten and first grade teachers, Shanahan explained. 

“I didn’t hear of lots of schools that were making explicit efforts to deal with that problem though certainly some individual teachers or schools might have,” said Shanahan.

Callie Lowenstein, a second grade teacher at a bilingual elementary school in Washington D.C., said that teachers feel “pressure” to stay on track with grade level lessons that don’t “accommodate or plan for the kinds of gaps we’re seeing.”

“Many curricula include an extremely cursory review of previous skills — so students who didn’t master earlier grades’ content are just left in the dust,” Lowenstein said. For example, the second grade reading lessons her school uses review the entire alphabet in one day and move quickly on. Many students need more practice.* 

Catlin Goodrow is a reading specialist who works with third, fourth and fifth grade students who need extra help at a charter school in Spokane, Washington. She said she is working daily with a small number of third graders on basic first grade phonics. In some cases their parents kept them out of school for a full two years. But most students aren’t this far behind. 

More common are random gaps because children didn’t receive enough reinforcement or weren’t taught topics during quarantines. One child might not understand how a silent “e” at the end of a word affects pronunciation. Another child might not understand how to sound out words with “ough” in them. 

“It’s not as simple as being a year behind,” Goodrow said. “That would maybe be easier. It’s that they each have these really specific things that they didn’t pick up on. They each missed crucial bits and pieces.” Discovering them and filling them in for each child isn’t easy.

Goodrow is hearing from third grade teachers that even children who can read words are having a much harder time paying attention to what they are reading than in previous years. Third graders are having greater trouble absorbing the meaning, identifying the main character or explaining what the story is about.

“The comprehension piece can be something they’re having challenges with,” said Goodrow.  “I often think about, ‘Did they get those experiences where they were having their teacher read aloud to them and think aloud, and they’re on the carpet nearby?’  A lot of times, even when they were back at school full time, they were distanced. So they might not have had some of those early literacy experiences that built their ability to focus on the text that they’re reading.”

Because third grade is so critical, 16 states plus the District of Columbia require children to repeat the year if they cannot read at a basic level. Based on this NWEA test score report, states could be facing an avalanche of held-back children if those retention rules are enforced later this school year. That’s something I’ll be watching.

*Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Callie Lowenstein as a New York City teacher. She now teaches in Washington D.C.. In addition, Lowenstein does not follow the curriculum used in her school and gives her students more review when needed. 

This story about third grade reading was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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In 2019, a grassroots campaign led by parents succeeded in passing a wave of dyslexia legislation. Many states mandated hallmarks of the Orton-Gillingham method, specifically calling for “multisensory” instruction, to help students with dyslexia read and write better.*  In New York, where I live, the city spends upwards of $300 million a year in taxpayer funds on private school tuition for children with disabilities. Much of it goes to pay for private schools that specialize in Orton-Gillingham instruction and similar approaches, which families insist are necessary to teach their children with dyslexia to read.

But two recent academic papers, synthesizing dozens of reading studies, are raising questions about the effectiveness of these expensive education policies. A review of 24 studies on the Orton-Gillingham method, published in the July 2021 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Exceptional Children, found no statistically significant benefit for children with dyslexia. Instead, suggesting a way forward, a review of 53 reading studies, led by University of Virginia researcher Colby Hall and published online September 2022 in Reading Research Quarterly, found that much cheaper reading interventions for children with a variety of reading difficulties were also quite effective for children with dyslexia.

There’s no litmus test for dyslexia and education experts say the diagnosis covers a range of reading problems. Orton-Gillingham is one of the oldest approaches to help struggling readers, dating back to the 1930s, and it explicitly teaches letters and sounds, and breaks words down into letter patterns. It also emphasizes multisensory instruction. For example, students might learn the letter “p” by seeing it, saying its name, and sounding it out while tracing it in shaving cream.

“We have this approach that’s so deeply rooted in legislation and in policy and practice, but we don’t have the evidence base to support it,” said Elizabeth Stevens, an assistant professor at Georgia State University, and the lead author of the 2021 Orton-Gillingham study. “The thinking is that OG [Orton-Gillingham] is the magic bullet, the thing that these students need. But Colby [Hall]’s paper says, ‘No, these other reading interventions that explicitly teach these foundational skills significantly improve their reading outcomes.’ These students can benefit from these other interventions.”

The implication is that maybe children diagnosed with dyslexia don’t need something that is substantially different from children with other reading struggles. This theory still needs to be tested. No well-designed research study has compared a dyslexia-specific remedy, such as Orton-Gillingham, head-to-head with more general interventions for children who struggle in reading.

More than 2 million children, nearly 3 out of 10 who receive special education services in the United States, have been diagnosed with dyslexia or a closely related reading disability. Getting the solution right is important, not only to help these children read and write, but to spend taxpayer funds on helping them efficiently.

Monica McHale-Small, director of education at the Learning Disabilities Association of America, and previously with the International Dyslexia Association, said there’s a “growing consensus” that Orton-Gillingham approaches aren’t necessarily what all children with dyslexia need.  “The research is there,” she said. “You can’t deny the findings of multiple studies.” 

Many dyslexia advocates remain loyal to Orton-Gillingham, McHale-Small said, because so many parents have kids whom they believe were helped by Orton-Gillingham tutors. Meanwhile, it remains out of reach for many low-income families. Orton-Gillingham involves very expensive teacher training, she said, which many schools cannot afford. McHale-Small experienced the costs first hand when she was superintendent of the Saucon Valley school district in Pennsylvania and participated in a pilot study of Orton-Gillingham in 2016-17.** The American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research group, found no statistical benefits for these multisensory interventions in a 2018 report.

“Science evolves. Science has to be taken seriously,” said Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice at UCLA and author of Proust and the Squid, a book about how the brain learns to read. “We don’t need emphasis on ‘multisensory’; we need emphasis on being explicit, systematic and after all of the components of language in our interventions.”

The researchers in both the 2021 and 2022 studies all cautioned that the jury is still out on Orton-Gillingham. Better quality studies may still prove the method to be effective with children with dyslexia. Stevens had to throw out more than 100 of the studies she found; many were poorly designed, didn’t compare children who didn’t receive the treatment and didn’t measure outcomes well. In the end, she reviewed only 24 of the better Orton-Gillingham studies and just 16 had enough numbers to include in her calculations. Several of these were rather small, as few as 10 or 12 participants. That’s such a small number of children that it makes it hard to derive any meaningful conclusion from them.

“The corpus of studies included in our meta-analysis were not very high quality,” said Stevens. “We need to do more high-quality research to fully understand the effects of that approach on the reading outcomes for students with dyslexia.”

The larger 2022 analysis of 53 reading interventions had a higher bar for study quality and only one Orton-Gillingham study made the cut. Several of the reading interventions that marketed themselves as “multisensory” also made the cut, but the researchers didn’t detect any extra benefits from them. 

“They weren’t more effective than the ones that didn’t market themselves as multisensory,” said Hall. 

The good news is that most of the 53 reading interventions were effective and they had more similarities than differences. They were administered to children as either one-to-one tutoring sessions or in small groups. And they tended to provide direct, explicit step-by-step reading and writing instruction which includes not just traditional phonics but practice with clusters of letters, tricky vowel patterns and sounds. This is in sharp contrast with a teaching approach based on the belief that children can learn to read naturally if they are surrounded by books at their reading level and get lots of independent reading and writing time.

“Systematic instruction works for kids,” said Emily Solari, a prominent reading expert and a professor at the University of Virginia, who was part of the 12-member research team on the 2022 study. “That is what we need to do for kids with dyslexia and for word reading difficulties.” 

Researchers noticed good outcomes for several commercial interventions, such as Lexia Core5,  Sound Partners, and Rave-O. Many non-commercial interventions were effective too, including Sharon Vaughn’s Proactive Reading intervention and Jessica Toste’s Multisyllabic Word Reading Intervention + Motivational Belief Training. Toste’s method isn’t sold commercially, but the University of Texas associate professor gives it away free to teachers upon request.

In the meta-analysis, there were hints that spelling instruction may be especially beneficial to students with dyslexia. Frequency appeared to matter too. 

“There’s been decades of research to show that we actually need to do really intensive intervention with these kids, not just two days a week for 20 minutes,” said Solari. “They need evidence-based core instruction, and then they need more. And often it’s a lot more.” 

The researchers could not ascertain a minimum threshold or dosage for effectiveness. That still needs to be studied. 

One of the trickiest things about studying dyslexia is defining it and determining who has it. Experts disagree. Some insist it is a genetic condition, but there is no genetic test. Others say a child’s environment can cause it. Others believe it is neurobiological, but it is difficult to determine whether a reading difficulty is neurological in origin. The belief that children with dyslexia see letters backwards is a debunked myth of the past, but there is little agreement on what it is exactly. 

When I interviewed the researchers behind the 2022 meta-analysis on reading interventions, they explained to me that dyslexia, or word reading difficulty, falls along a continuum. “People think of dyslexia like a broken leg, you either have it or you don’t,” said Hall. “But dyslexia and word reading difficulties are more like high blood pressure. It still needs to be addressed, but it’s a different way of thinking about it.”

In the 2021 and 2022 studies, researchers defined dyslexia as having “word-level reading difficulties.” Some children were formally diagnosed with dyslexia and others hadn’t been diagnosed, but they scored in the bottom 25 percent in basic word recognition, reading fluency and spelling. Dyslexia is generally distinguished from comprehension difficulties, but there is often overlap. Some children with word reading difficulties also have comprehension problems but some have excellent comprehension.

Both McHale-Small at the Learning Disabilities Association and Wolf at UCLA believe that there are various types of dyslexia and each may need different interventions. Not every child diagnosed with dyslexia struggles to sound out words, for example.  “The minute you see reading fluency problems, that is beyond phonics,” said Wolf. “Over time, some of those kids just don’t need that decoding emphasis.”

“We need more research,” said McHale-Small. “We know a lot about dyslexia but we need to know a lot more.”

Millions of children and their parents are waiting for an answer.

*Correction: Because of a mischaracterization of her research by Elizabeth Stevens, an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that at least seven states require teachers to be trained in the Orton-Gillingham teaching approach and to use it to help students with dyslexia read and write better.

** Clarification: Saucon Valley school district was not part of the pilot study, but McHale-Small served on the study’s advisory committee and decided to implement an Orton-Gillingham intervention in her district.  

This story about children with dyslexia was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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There’s a lot to like about digital books. They’re lighter in the backpack and often cheaper than paper books. But a new international report suggests that physical books may be important to raising children who become strong readers.

An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study across approximately 30 countries found that teens who said they most often read paper books scored considerably higher on a 2018 reading test taken by 15-year-olds compared to teens who said they rarely or never read books. Even among students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those who read books in a paper format scored a whopping 49 points higher on the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA. That’s equal to almost 2.5 years of learning. By comparison, students who tended to read books more often on digital devices scored only 15 points higher than students who rarely read  – a difference of less than a year’s worth of learning. 

In other words, all reading is good, but reading on paper is linked to vastly superior achievement outcomes. 

It’s impossible to say from this study whether paper books are the main reason why students become better readers. It could be that stronger readers prefer paper and they would be reading just as well if they were forced to read on screens. Dozens of previous studies have found a comprehension advantage for reading on paper versus screens. But these studies are usually conducted in a laboratory setting where people take comprehension tests immediately after reading a passage in different formats.  This report is suggesting the possibility that there are longer term cumulative benefits for students who regularly read books in a paper format. 

It’s noteworthy that the 2018 PISA reading test was a computer-based assessment in the vast majority of countries. Paper book readers are correctly answering more questions about what they have read on screens than digital readers!

Strong readers who had higher scores on the PISA reading test also read on screens at home, but they tended to use their devices to gather information, such as reading the news or browsing the internet for school work. When these strong readers wanted to read a book, they opted to read in paper format or balance their reading time between paper and digital devices.  

Every three years, when 600,000 students around the world take the PISA test, they fill out surveys about their families and their reading habits. Researchers at the OECD compared these survey responses with test scores and noticed intriguing relationships between books in the home, a preference for reading on paper and reading achievement. The report, “Does the digital world open up an increasing divide in access to print books?” was published on July 12, 2022. 

In the United States, 31 percent of 15-year-olds said they never or rarely read books, compared with 35 percent worldwide. Meanwhile, 35 percent of American students said they primarily read paper books, almost matching the international average of 36 percent. Another 16 percent of Americans said they read books more often on screens and 18 percent responded that they read books equally on both paper and screens. 

Digital books have become extremely popular among students in some regions of Asia, but students who read books on paper still outperformed even in cultures where digital reading is commonplace. More than 40 percent of students in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand reported reading books more often on digital devices. Yet in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan, students who read books mostly on paper or read in both formats scored higher than those who primarily read digital books. Both Thailand and Indonesia were exceptions; digital readers did better. Hong Kong and Taiwan are two of the highest performing education systems in the world and even after adjusting for students’ socioeconomic status, the advantage for paper reading remained pronounced. 

Teens around the world are rapidly turning away from reading, according to OECD surveys. Fifteen-year-olds are reading less for leisure and fewer fiction books. The number of students who consider reading a “waste of time” jumped by more than 5 percentage points. Simultaneously, reading performance around the world, which had been slowly improving up until 2012, declined between 2012 and 2018.  Across OECD countries that participated in both assessments, reading performance fell back to what it had been in 2006.

OECD researchers wonder if the presence of physical books at home still matters in the digital age. In the student surveys, students were told that each meter of shelving typically holds 40 books and were asked to estimate the number of books in their homes. Both rich and poor students alike reported fewer books in the home over the past 18 years, but the book gap between the two remained persistently large with wealthier students living amid twice as many books as poorer students.

The influence of books at home is a bit of a chicken-egg riddle. The OECD found that students who had more books at home reported that they enjoyed reading more. Logically, students who are surrounded by physical books may feel more encouraged by their families and inspired to read. But it could be that students who enjoy reading receive lots of books as presents or bring more books home from the library. It’s also possible that both are true simultaneously in a virtuous two-way spiral: more books at home inspire kids to read and voracious readers buy more books. 

OECD researchers are most worried about poorer students. Low-income students made huge strides in access to digital technology well before the pandemic. Ninety-four percent of students from low-income families across 26 developed nations had access to the internet at home in 2018, up from 75 percent in 2009. “While disadvantaged students are catching up in terms of access to digital resources, their access to cultural capital like paper books at home has diminished,” the OECD report noted. 

As one gap closes, another one opens. 

This story about digital readers was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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AUSTIN, Texas — Most years, by the third week of first grade, Heather Miller is working with her class on writing the beginning, middle and end of simple words. This year, she had to backtrack — all the way to the letter “H.”

“Do we start at the bottom or do we start at the top?” Miller asked as she stood in front of her class at Doss Elementary.

“Top!” chorused a few voices.

“When I do an H, I do a straight line down, another straight line down and then I cross in the middle,” Miller said, demonstrating on a projector in a front corner of the classroom.

Her 25 students set to work on their own. Some got it right away. One student watched his tablemate before slowly copying down his own H’s. Another tested her own way of writing the letter: one line down, cross in the middle, then another line down. “Your paper is upside down, let’s turn it,” Miller said to a student who was trying to write letters while leaning sideways, almost out of her seat.

In classrooms across the country, the first months of school this fall have laid bare what many in education feared: Students are way behind in skills they should have mastered already.

Children in early elementary school have had their most formative first few years of education disrupted by the pandemic, years when they learn basic math and reading skills and important social-emotional skills, like how to get along with peers and follow routines in a classroom.

While experts say it’s likely these students will catch up in many skills, the stakes are especially high around literacy. Research shows if children are struggling to read at the end of first grade, they are likely to still be struggling as fourth graders. And in many states with third grade reading “gates” in place, students could be at risk of getting held back if they haven’t caught up within a few years.

40 percent — The number of first grade students “well below grade level” in reading in 2020, compared with 27 percent in 2019, according to Amplify Education Inc.

First grade in particular — “the reading year,” as Miller calls it — is pivotal for elementary students, when their literacy skills “really take off.” Kindergarten focuses on easing children from a variety of educational backgrounds — or none at all — into formal schooling. In contrast, first grade concentrates on moving students from pre-reading skills and simple math, like counting, to more complex skills, like reading and writing sentences and adding and subtracting numbers.

By the end of first grade in Texas, students are expected to be able to mentally add or subtract 10 from any given two-digit number, retell stories using key details and write narratives that sequence events. The benchmarks are similar to those used in the more than 40 states that, along with the District of Columbia, adopted the national Common Core standards a decade ago.

“They really grow as readers in first grade, and writers,” Miller said. “It’s where they build their confidence in their fluency.”

But about half of Miller’s class of first graders at Doss Elementary, a spacious, bright, newly built school in northwest Austin, spent kindergarten online. Some were among the tens of thousands of children who sat out kindergarten entirely last year.

More than a month into this school year, Miller found she was spending extensive time on social lessons she used to teach in kindergarten, like sharing and problem-solving.  She stopped class repeatedly to mediate disagreements. Finally, she resorted to an activity she used to use in kindergarten: role-playing social scenarios, like what to do if someone accidentally trips you.

“My kids are so spread out in their needs … there’s so much to teach, and somehow there’s not enough time.”

Heather Miller, first grade teacher

“So many kids are missing that piece from last year because they were, you know, virtual or on an iPad for most of the time, and they don’t know how to problem-solve with each other,” Miller said. “That’s just caused a lot of disruption during the school day.” 

Her students were also not as independent as they had been in previous years. Used to working on tablets or laptops for much of their day, many of these students were also behind in fine motor skills, struggling to use scissors and still working on correctly writing numbers.

Related: What parents need to know about the research on how kids learn to read

Instead of working on first grade standards, Miller was devoting time on this Friday morning in early September to forming upper- and lowercase letters, a kindergarten standard in Texas and the majority of other states. As students finished practicing the letter H, they moved on to the assignment at the bottom of the page: Draw a picture and write a word describing something that starts with an H.

“H-r-o-s” one student wrote next to a picture of a horse standing on green grass in front of a light blue sky. “H-e-a-r-s” another student wrote next to a picture of a strip of brown hair, floating in the white picture box. “You should draw a face there,” suggested his tablemate, pointing at the blank space under the hair.

Miller’s first graders are a case study in the scale, depth and unevenness of learning loss during the pandemic.  One report by Amplify Education Inc., which creates curriculum, assessment and intervention products, found children in first and second grade experienced dramatic drops in grade level reading scores compared with those in previous years.

In 2020, 40 percent of first grade students and 35 percent of second grade students  were scoring “well below grade level” on a reading assessment, compared with 27 percent and 29 percent the previous year. That means a school would need to offer “intensive intervention” to nearly 50 percent more students than before the pandemic.

Data analyzed by McKinsey & Company late last year concluded that children have lost at least one and a half months of reading. Other data show low-income, Black and Latinx students are falling further behind than their white peers, leading to worsening achievement gaps.

Experts say it’s now clear families who had time and resources to help their children with academics when schooling was disrupted had a tremendous advantage.

“Higher-income parents, higher-educated parents, are likely to have worked with their children to teach them to read and basic numbers, and some of those really basic early foundational skills that kids generally get in pre-K, kindergarten and first grade,” said Melissa Clearfield, a professor of psychology who focuses on young children and poverty at Whitman College.

“Families who were not able to, either because their parents were essential workers or children whose parents are significantly low-income or not educated, they’re going to be really far behind.”

What Miller has observed in the first few weeks of the school year is likely taking place in classrooms nationwide, experts say. In April, researchers with the nonprofit NWEA, which develops pre-K-12 assessments, predicted how the pandemic’s disruptions would manifest among the kindergarten class of 2021: a wider range of ability levels; large class sizes with more diverse ages because some parents held children back a grade; and students unfamiliar with in-person classroom routines.

“We predicted that there would be a lot of diversity in skills,” said Brooke Mabry, strategic content design coordinator for NWEA Professional Learning. That includes skills related to academics, social-emotional learning and executive functioning, she added.

The varying experiences children had with school last year also impacted fine motor skill development, independence, ability to navigate conflicts and the “unfinished learning” teachers are now observing, she added.

Related: Remote learning a bust? Some families consider having their child repeat kindergarten

While switching to remote learning was hard on many students, younger students were generally unable to log themselves on to a computer independently and focus on virtual lessons for extended periods of time. Teachers, who usually rely on small, in-person groups for  early literacy skills, instead had to teach letters, sounds and sight words via online platforms.

Miller had the unwieldy task of teaching kids both in person and online, spending her year pivoting between students in front of her and students on her computer screen, using her projector to display books to students at home and teaching reading skills via virtual groups.

Now, with students in front of her again, Miller was finding that those online lessons weren’t as useful as many had hoped.

Miller, 30, is a calm, confident teacher who is in her eighth year of teaching and her second at Doss. She usually has students with a wide range of ability levels at the beginning of the year, although Doss is relatively affluent. Nearly 62 percent of students at the school are white, and fewer than 20 percent are economically disadvantaged, compared with the district average of nearly 53 percent. In 2019, 95 percent of Doss’ students passed the state reading assessment.

But this year, Miller saw larger gaps in reading skills than ever before. Usually, her first graders would start with reading levels ranging from mid-kindergarten to second grade. This year, the levels spanned early kindergarten up to fourth grade.

“My kids are so spread out in their needs,” Miller said. “I just feel like — and I’m sure every teacher feels like this — there’s so much to teach, and somehow there’s not enough time.”

She’s also seen higher literacy levels for kids who went to school in person last year. To her, it speaks to the immense benefits kids get from all aspects of in-person learning. “It just shows how important it is for these kids to be around their peers and just have normalcy,” she said.

Related: Summer school programs race to help students most in danger of falling behind

To catch kids up, Miller is relying on, among other things, one of the staples of the early elementary classroom: center time. For two hours a day, she works with small groups of students on the specific math and reading skills they are lacking.

On a recent October morning, Miller divided her class into five groups to rotate through various activities around her room. She gave her students a few minutes to finish a writing assignment as she pulled out several sets of small books at various reading levels; colorful plastic, hollow phones so her students could hear themselves read; and for a group of struggling readers, a matching game featuring cards showing various letters and pictures.

“I feel like I’m teaching four grades,” Miller said as she arranged the materials on her desk.

Several minutes later, seated at a table in the back of the room with five of her grade-level readers, Miller handed them each a phone, a small book and a green witch’s finger to help them point at the words in the book. “Today we’re going to talk about our reading tools,” Miller said, holding up a blue plastic phone. “These are called whisper phones. You whisper so you can hear yourself sound out the words,” she said. “Do these go on our heads?”

“No!” the students said, giggling.

“You know what these are for?” she said, holding up a rubber finger.

“Um, they’re for reading,” one student said. “’Cause I had them in kindergarten.”

“Very good. Are these for picking your nose?” Miller asked.

“No!” the students said, laughing.

She placed a book in front of each child and walked them through a series of exercises, including looking at the cover and predicting what the book would be about.

Then, they opened their books and began to read in a whisper. Miller turned from one side of the table to the other, listening as students read to themselves, pointing at each word with their green rubber fingers. She helped them sound out challenging words, like “away.” One by one, the students finished the book. A few read it several times in the minutes allotted.

Miller’s next group, all of whom were reading far below grade level, required a different activity. Rather than handing out a book, Miller pulled out a letter-matching game at the table, using materials she had from her days as a kindergarten teacher. She placed two small laminated cards on the table, one showing the letter D and a picture of a dog, and one with the letter B and a picture of a ball.

“We’re going to do your letters today,” Miller said to the group. “What letter is this?” she asked, pointing to the B.

“Ball!” one student responded.

“What letter?” Miller asked again. There was a pause.

“B!” another student responded.

“What sound does it make?”

“Buh,” a third student said.

The students ran through the activity, looking at pictures of items starting with B and D like a doll, ball, dog and dolphin, and sorting them into piles based on the starting letter.

Experts like Clearfield say finding new or different strategies to help students learn grade-level content after the last 18 months will be critical, even if that means pulling out activities typically used by lower grade levels, as Miller did with her lowest reading group.

It also may mean recruiting help from outside the classroom. Miller said Doss already had a strong team of interventionists to rely on, and several of her students receive extra reading help during the day.

Miller has also found it helpful to work with her fellow first grade teachers to solve a shared academic challenge. This fall, the first grade teachers all discovered that many of their students were behind in reading sight words. They began meeting regularly to share tips and strategies to combat this.

Despite the obvious need to catch kids up, Miller has been mindful of not coming on too strong with remediation efforts. “I don’t want to push them so hard where they get burned out,” she said on an October evening. “They’ve been through so much.”

Related:  We know how to help young children cope with the trauma of the last year— but will we do it?

Mabry, of NWEA, said while catching students up is important, society needs to view the recovery process as a multiyear effort. “In previous years, when looking at unfinished learning and finding ways to get students to accelerated growth, we never expected that we would get students who need support to meet those accelerated goals in one year. We would never approach it that way,” Mabry said. “Now, we’re so frantic. I think we’re frantic because we feel it’s this larger population.”

It’s a daunting task, but experts say there is hope.

“Kids will catch up eventually,” said Clearfield from Whitman College. But to get there, society may need to re-evaluate expectations, she added. “If most children in our community are behind by, like, a year or two, then our expectations for what is typical, it’s going to have to match where they are,” Clearfield said. “Otherwise, we are going to be constantly frustrated … we’re going to have expectations that don’t match their skills or abilities.”

By mid-autumn, Miller was heartened by what she was seeing in her classroom. Students were becoming more confident and independent. Their writing was stronger. There were fewer conflicts.

One morning, Miller stood by her desk as students effortlessly transitioned from one activity to the next during center time. They quietly buzzed around, cleaning up activities and putting their notebooks away in cubbies as she prepared to work with a new group of students at her desk.

“It kind of gives me hope that we’ll be OK,” she said. “Even after last year, we’ll be OK.”

This story about reading skills was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.  

The post ‘The Reading Year’: First grade is critical for reading skills, but kids coming from disrupted kindergarten experiences are way behind appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Summer school may seem like a common sense way to help children make up for the months of lost school time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg urged President Joe Biden to push every school in the country to stay open this summer in a March 2021 Washington Post opinion piece. Governors around the country from Virginia to California are endorsing summer school, as has the powerful teachers union leader Randi Weingarten. More than $1.2 billion of the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package signed into law on March 11 is specifically earmarked for summer school and many policymakers are urging that billions more in federal and state funds be spent to open schools this summer. 

There’s just one problem. Research studies done before the pandemic show that summer school usually doesn’t accomplish its purpose of raising reading or math achievement. 

 “Generally, summer programs are not effective because they don’t really engage young people and they’re not run well,” said Jean B. Grossman, an economist at MDRC, a nonprofit research organization, and Princeton University, who has evaluated summer school programs. “It looks like summer school should help but the research is a mixed bag.”

In a 2020 synthesis of summer school studies, researchers calculated that the benefit to students tends to be close to zero in math or reading. This meta-analysis is a draft paper, meaning it has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but is the most recent review of the evidence.

Summer school is “boring” and it’s not productive to force kids to learn when they don’t want to, said Robert Slavin, an education researcher at Johns Hopkins University and one of the meta-analysis authors. “Nobody wants to be sitting in school while their friends are out playing,” Slavin said.

When there were initial achievement gains from the extra summer instruction, they were often fleeting and disappeared by the next spring, Slavin added.

One of the biggest summer school studies was conducted in five cities: Boston; Dallas; Jacksonville, Florida; Pittsburgh, and Rochester, New York. Researchers at RAND observed how students did over four years, beginning with third grade in 2013, and found no lasting academic benefits to summer school because of poor attendance. Twenty percent of the kids never showed up and the kids who did come skipped an average of one out of every four days. Many kids skipped more. Academic benefits from summer school were only seen in the fraction of kids who attended faithfully for two summers in a row.*

Summer school programs that resembled camp, including sports and arts, didn’t have any better attendance than those that resembled ordinary school. Attendance prizes for families helped, RAND reported. One district spent almost $70,000 in supermarket gift cards for parents and small treats for kids, such as pizza and ice cream.

One of the most rigorous summer school studies looked at an unnamed Northeastern city that made summer school mandatory to elementary school children who failed year-end tests. Economist Jordan Matsudaira of Teachers College, Columbia University compared what happened to students who scored just below and just above the cut off for being sent to summer school. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.) Third graders who went to summer school did slightly worse than those who didn’t. Meanwhile, fifth graders benefited from summer school, in both reading and math. Attendance remained a problem. Many of the students who were supposed to go to summer school refused to or didn’t attend regularly.

One can find individual studies that show strong results for summer school. But scholars told me that these positive studies often involved small numbers of children and compared the performance of students who attended summer school with different types of students, which is not an apples-to-apples comparison. In other words, there’s a lot of shoddy research on summer schools out there. 

One review of almost 100 older studies of uneven quality, published in 2000, generally found positive results from summer school. In the underlying studies, middle-class children benefited more than disadvantaged children — a disappointment for policymakers who are keen to focus on the neediest cases. And just to point to an example of how muddy the research is, this older meta-analysis found that the gains were strongest for early elementary and high school students. In the mandatory summer school study, which I described above, it was the opposite, with fifth graders benefiting much more than third graders.

Unfortunately, there are few randomized control trials, the gold standard in research, for summer school. Grossman conducted one in 2011-14 in which middle school students were randomly assigned to a five-week summer program with trained instructors using good curricula for reading and math lessons in the mornings and fun afternoon activities such as sports, music, theater and art. Again, persuading kids to enroll was a problem.

Even though attendance for those who did enroll was rather good in this study, the academic results were still disappointing. The program was billed as a way to “accelerate” learning but students learned at the same pace as they did at school. The gains for the five-week summer program were small and not statistically significant compared to kids who didn’t attend.

“My takeaway,” said Grossman, “is, if you’re lucky, for every week of summer school, you get what you get in a week of regular school. And if the summer school is not done as well, you get less than that.”

Often summer programs don’t train the instructors well or adhere to a proven curriculum.  In a separate review of summer reading programs, positive results were seen only when instruction was “research based,” according to an analysis of studies that took place between 1998 and 2011 for children in grades kindergarten through eighth grade.

What do the researchers suggest for schools that want to proceed with summer school? Grossman’s advice is to focus on social-emotional skills and relationships to help re-engage students in learning. She thinks the best summer programs don’t make kids sit in a math class for an hour every day in the summer, replicating the structure of traditional school, but engage kids in topics that they’re interested in, such as social justice. “Maybe they have to calculate disproportionality in school discipline and they sort of inadvertently do math while they’re learning about this cool subject,” she said. 

Slavin advocates fusing summer camp with intensive, daily tutoring. He noted that two studies in his summer school research review proved to be exceptions to the pattern of ineffectiveness. One is a Los Angeles study, published in 2005, and the other is a study in a small city in the Pacific Northwest, published in 2013. Both summer school programs focused on teaching young children to read in kindergarten and first grade. In both cases, children received group phonics instruction followed by reading practice in very small groups that resembled tutoring. To Slavin, tutoring is the secret sauce that made both summer school programs work, echoing the strong, more definitive evidence seen in the research literature on tutoring. 

Unfortunately, even Slavin points out the gains for students in the Los Angeles summer school experiment faded out by spring; the students who had attended the summer program were no better off than similar students who hadn’t. No one followed up with the students in the Pacific Northwest study to see how long those gains lasted. And no one has studied whether Slavin’s summer idea of alternating soccer practice, say, with math and reading tutoring would actually be effective.

What all this shows is that helping kids catch up after the pandemic won’t be easy. And pushing students into summer school isn’t the answer — as appealing as it might sound.  

*For more details on this randomized-control trial of summer school, see Hechinger coverage in 2020.

This story about summer school studies was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletters.

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