ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) is an organization founded in 1973 to promote free-market ideas throughout society. ALEC has about 2,000 members who belong to state legislatures. It is funded by major corporations. Its purpose is to write model legislation that members can bring back to their state, to spread the gospel of ALEC. It supports charters, vouchers, online charters–all forms of privatization. It opposes collective bargaining. It does not believe in due process rights for teachers or any form of job security for public employees. It does not support local control, as it promotes laws that allow state commissions to override decisions by local school boards if they deny charters to private groups.
Among its proposals is the third grade reading guarantee, in which children are flunked if they don’t pass the third grade reading test. What this has to do with free-market capitalism is beyond my understanding. It is punitive towards little children, putting more faith in a test than in teachers’ judgement. There is no research to support this policy, but we know already that zealots are unimpressed by research or evidence.
Here is a comment by faithful reader Chiara Duggan of Zohio:
“This is the ALEC model bill on high stakes testing in third grade.
“It’s nearly identical to Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee:
“C) Beginning with the 20XX-20XY school year, if the student’s reading deficiency, as identified in paragraph (a), is not remedied by the end of grade 3, as demonstrated by scoring at Level 2 or higher on the state annual accountability assessment in reading for grade 3, the student must be retained.
“Just shameful that adult lawmakers were purchased by this lobbying group, and third graders will be paying the price.
http://www.alec.org/model-legislation/the-a-plus-literacy-act/”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
the alec link doesn’t work. As far as I can tell the proposal is embedded in their broader proposal for all schooling, called the A+ Literacy Act, found here: http://www.alec.org/model-legislation/the-a-plus-literacy-act/
The quoted section is in this longer segment:
Chapter 7: Student Promotion to a Higher Grade
Section 1. {Title} The Reading is Fundamental Literacy Program
Section 2. {Intent} It is the intent of the Legislature that each student’s progression to be determined, in part, upon proficiency in reading; that district school board policies facilitate such proficiency; and that each student and his or her parent be informed of that student’s academic progress.
(A) “Reading Deficiency and Parental Notification” — It is the ultimate goal of the Legislature that every student read at or above grade level. Any student who exhibits a substantial deficiency in reading, based upon locally determined or statewide assessments conducted in kindergarten, grade 1, grade 2, or grade 3, or through teacher observations, must be given intensive reading instruction immediately following the identification of the reading deficiency.
(B) Each student’s reading proficiency must be reassessed by locally determined assessments or through teacher observations at the beginning of the grade following the intensive reading instruction. The student must continue to be provided with intensive reading instruction until the reading deficiency is remedied.
(C) Beginning with the 20XX-20XY school year, if the student’s reading deficiency, as identified in paragraph (a), is not remedied by the end of grade 3, as demonstrated by scoring at Level 2 or higher on the state annual accountability assessment in reading for grade 3, the student must be retained.
(D) The parent of any student who exhibits a substantial deficiency in reading must be notified in writing of the following:
(1) That his or her child has been identified as having a substantial deficiency in reading.
(2) A description of the current services that are provided to the child.
(3) A description of the proposed supplemental instructional services and supports that will be provided to the child that are designed to remediate the identified area of reading deficiency.
(4) That if the child’s reading deficiency is not remediated by the end of grade 3, the child will not be promoted to grade 4 unless he or she meeting a good cause exemption.
(5) Strategies for parents to use in helping their child succeed in reading proficiency.
(6) That while the state annual accountability assessment is the initial determinate, it is not the sole determiner of promotion and that additional evaluations, portfolio reviews, and assessments are available.
(7) The district’s specific criteria and policies for midyear promotion. Midyear promotion means promotion of a student at any time during the year of retention once the student has demonstrated ability to read at grade level.
(E) Elimination of social promotion — No student may be assigned to a grade level based solely on age or other factors that constitute social promotion.
Thank you for posting this.
Two ALEC posts. The first is a survey of ALEC model legislation for education. DIane posted this one a while back:
It’s like these people have never bothered surveying what the typical American parents thinks about their children’s schools….
Daniel, I think the first survey results we’re getting are from the ballot boxes. Legislators who promulgated ALEC’s hateful, anti-child law will be held accountable, and in Oklahoma they are trying to back the whole thing down.
This particular law literally churns my stomach. Here’s a story about a Texas parent, who was trying to opt her little daughter out of this year’s tests:
“Forced to repeat third grade after failing the standardized test, Wells’ daughter still cries over missing her friends who went on to fourth grade without her.
“It’s been a very difficult process for her,” Wells said.
“If I pull her out for that whole week without a doctor’s note, I’ll be charged with truancy,”
http://www.kcentv.com/story/25228589/more-controversy-over-staar-testing
I don’t think the effect on parents and kids was even on ALEC’s radar, when they put their corporate sponsors’ heel on this little girl by force of law. But the spineless creeps who promulgated ALEC’s third grade child abuse abuse mandate in their own state legislatures will face parents when they stand for reelection. Our job is to see that every single one of them is exposed.
The ballot box will definitely have its say, but it was also predictable. We’ve had three decades of consistent “failure” narrative, and people are widely convinced that our schools are a disaster. But throughout that same period, parents have consistently said that they like and appreciate the work their kids’ schools are doing — up to 3/4 of them.
Now the failure narrative is being pushed into communities that are the most heavily invested in their schools and the parents are getting a taste of what urban parents have had for twenty years and they don’t like it. The backlash will ne significant, but I worry that when it is over, we will just go back to ignoring poverty.
This second post is on ALEC’s “lobbying” nonprofit, the Jeffersonian Project:
Also, Jeb Bush is in the news for being the “lone Republican out” for his fervent promoting of Common Core. In this post, one can read that former ALEC Education Task Force Director David Myslinski now works for Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education:
It would be interesting to know how many of these types are working for Cuomo…
We need to start a betting pool to see when the first edu-pundit refers to the “courage” Jeb is showing by going to the wall for CCSS.
My guess is that we’ll see it, or something like it, within a month.
David Brooks is already drafting that column.
North Carolina has also been following the ALEC playbook and has a similar law in effect. As Diane posred a while back?, third grade teachers are gicing students up to 36 in class reading tests so students can demonstrate proficiency should they not pass the EOG reading test. What a colossal waste of time and energy.
Here’s the Kansas version:
http://gameonforkansasschools.com/issues/third-grade-retention/
Why is Jeb Bush running Ohio’s state education policy? Because he was once the Florida governor? Because his last name is “Bush”?
“Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush spent today in meetings with Ohio Republican leaders discussing education policy.
Yup, the guy who’s on a shortlist for the 2016 presidential election spent four hours in off-the-record meetings in Columbus talking about Ohio’s schools. (And then he went to a GOP fundraiser. Minimum ticket price: $1,000.)
The intent of the education meetings was to have “an open and honest dialogue with leaders across the state,” said Leanne Goodman, a spokesperson for the Foundation for Excellence in Education, an education advocacy group founded by Bush.
Since Bush left office in Florida, the former governor and the foundation he started have been pushing a national education reform agenda with six main points, as our colleagues at StateImpact Florida report”
They rubber-stamped nearly every public school policy Jeb Bush sells, including his failing, online for-profit charters:
“If those policies sound familiar, it’s because Ohio GOP leadership has successfully pursued similar policies. In fact, officials from Bush’s foundation have traveled to Ohio several times in the past couple years to lobby for those policies.
The Ohio Department of Education unveiled a new A-F school report card system this year. Last year, Ohio lawmakers approved the third grade reading guarantee, which basically requires students to past the state’s third grade reading test to be promoted to fourth grade.
State law now requires teachers’ job evaluations to be based in part on their students’ performance–and policymakers have encouraged districts to tie teacher pay to their performance. Laws passed during the past two years have made it easier for people who didn’t graduate from colleges of education to become teachers.
And the legislature has lifted limits on online charter schools; and repeatedly expanded Ohio’s private-school voucher programs.”
I have a crazy idea. Maybe they could start meeting with people who actually live in this state and use the public schools. This whole thing is run by a huge cadre of national lobbyists and consultants. It’s identical in state after state. How is this lock-step rubber-stamping “innovative”?
http://stateimpact.npr.org/ohio/2013/09/24/why-jeb-bush-cares-about-ohio-schools/
State law now requires teachers’ job evaluations to be based in part on their students’ performance–
Yep, but the “part” is 50%.
Also, of course, ed reformers have cut Ohio public school funding while they have put in every gimmick and mandate and scheme under the sun, just to really ensure that public schools fail:
http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2014/02/dennis-spisak-john-kasich-is-hurting-ohio-public-education/
This game is rigged.
Legislators who vote to enact this law ought to be arrested for child abuse
They passed this in NC too. It’s called “Read to Achieve” and it is the thorn in the side of 3rd grade teachers.
There have been constant changes in how it will actually play out at the end of year (mostly due to parent push back) AND our G.A. wanting it to be budget neutral (as in, they don’t want to pay for the summer reading “camp” that those who don’t pass will need to attend). At this point nobody knows much at all about the camps (except some schools do know they will host them). Our state supe and the main ALEC dude who proposed the bill (Phil Berger) have sparred over why so many children were expected to not be on grade level (him saying she set the bar too high, I suppose her presuming the law is silly to begin with).
Things have calmed down regarding it, somewhat, but our 3rd grade teachers are not happy about these high, high stakes for their students.
You beat me to it. Many of our legislators in NC are bought by ALEC.
Retention is a sure-fire way to tell a child, you are a loser. But Ed Deformers are OK with that. They have an extrinsic punishment and reward model of education. They don’t understand that our prime directive is to meet kids where they are, encourage them, and help them to become intrinsically motivated, self-directed, lifelong learners on their unique paths.
This proposal will do incalculable damage to little children. It is child abuse. Sometimes I really, really hate this sick ___________.
And there I observe Diane’s request that certain language not be used in her living room.
We should probably eliminate the notion of grade levels altogether before the age of 14 or 15.
Of course, with normed tests you have guaranteed failure. “Grade level is determined by median scores, half of all students automatically fall behind this standard. I feel a violent visceral reaction in my bowels when I hear “all children will read at grade level.” By current definition of grade level that is not possible. The ignorant and malicious are leading us. Hmmm, that sounds like a new soap opera. Maybe we can syndicate that and use it to fund our schools.
I think they are envisioning criterion-reference tests here, though I might be wrong. They could be thinking of using results from stuff like the Stanford Achievement Test, in which case, yes, a bunch would fail. I share your visceral reaction. This is just awful.
yes! Exactly! It’s like someone pointed out the other day, when you mandate that 100% of students score above the average, you have now altered the average… how is it possible to keep getting 100% of scores over an overage of said scores? DOH Logic is no friend of Deformers…
Egads…how to fail our children. But then, ALEC has no clue and doesn’t really care. ALEC has it’s own agenda and it ain’t good for our young and this country.
So many problems in this country is because of the HUGE amounts of $$$$$ spent on political campaigns. Money talks in D.C. Just look…it’s everywhere.
This will lead to punishing children who were born into homes where the parents did not read to them starting at least by age three (like parents do in Finland). Children who had parents who do not read to them, for any reason, will be punished for the environment they were born into.
Condemned at birth for what their parents did not do.
Most of these kids are born into poverty. There are more than 16 million of them.
Teachers are also being found guilty and losing their jobs for the same situation that teachers have little influence to change. For instance, how does any teacher go to the homes of three year old children and influence the parents to read to them—parents who are often also illiterate and who may not even speak English or read in their native language.
Schools with high poverty ratios are also being closed and those same children are then being turned over to corporations to teach that continue to punish the children for something they have no control over.
This is an endless chain of punishment being controlled by the wealthiest Americans.
The message from the Bill Gates of America is clear: “You were born into poverty, so we will torment you and treat you as if you are a criminal. To get ready for you as an adult, our corporations will start building new prisons and we will profit from your crime of being porn into poverty.
The billionaire oligarchs have already decided that if you are born into poverty and/or your parents are illiterate, then you must pay for their crimes and teachers must pay a price for struggling to teach these children. Give these oligarchs enough time and one day there will be a law that makes it a crime to live in poverty and if you dare to help anyone who lives in poverty, you will go to prison too.
Lloyd, I am halfway through your your novel about
Vietnam, and it’s absolutely gripping. Superb! It’s so vivid, that I am seeing the movie in my head as I read it. And packed full of those details that only someone who was there would know. Awesome.
Thank you. I’m glad you’re enjoyed it.
Writing that novel, which started as a memoir while I was earning an MFA in 20th century American literature/creative writing at Cal Poly Pomona and then converting that finished product to fiction out of UCLA’s writing extension workshops, helped me face the PTSD that followed me home from Vietnam in December 1966. After I finished the manuscript, instead of the PTSD haunting my vivid flashbacks and driving me to drink, I learned how to manage it—somewhat. I stopped drinking too.
Writing is great therapy. As far as I’m concerned, better than going to a shrink who never experienced combat. For instance, the skinning incident was real but under different circumstances. Instead of Thai smugglers, the guy with the knife who did the skinning was an officer in the South Korean Army. I was in the field on that operation.
As an English teacher working with many kids who lived in poverty in a community dominated by violent street gangs, I used essays linked to themes in literature as a way for them to gain a better understanding of their world. I hope all that writing helped them.
Well, it’s brilliantly done, Lloyd. Really fine work. The big publishers are idiots. This thing would really sell. It’s gripping, and there are HUGE markets for fiction like this. Look at the Tom Clancy of Hunt for Red October (which was actually well written, unlike the later drek he produced). Really, really well done. And it would make a great film. It’s very cinematic.
Maybe you’ll change your mind by the conclusion. :o)
Thank you, once again.
We shall see, Lloyd. I know that if I were in a publishing house again and over on the trade side, I would want this. I see a ready and large market for it.
It’s time we started getting tough with these fetuses. A lot of them have been lolling around in the womb, mooching, not contributing, and even after birth, that’s all they do. Ask them to do the simplest thing–diaper themselves, feed themselves. It’s time we instituted some accountability.
Accountability!!!!
Tests for tots!!!
Don’t indulge them when they are inappropriately gritful!
The reasoning behind this 3rd-grade retention policy makes about that much sense to me.
Yes, I think third grade is much too late to be holding kids back who can’t read. I don’t think any child should be allowed out of the crib room at the nursery until s/he can read. Ulysses.
lol
Many years ago there was a district in southern California, I believe the name was South Bay Union, that gave parents a “guarantee’ that their child would read on level. It was a signed document by the school. As I remember, it required that parents were responsible for working with their children on certain things as well that would specifically help the child. There was however, never a mention of retaining the child if they didn’t achieve at a certain level. The guarantee was that the school would provide remedial services above and beyond for the child if they didn’t reach the desired level. I guess you could call it RTI, only it was ahead of it’s time. The district bordered Mexico and the ocean and had a very high LSES. parents lined up to get the guarantee. It was truly a partnership between parents and school and it worked. It was certainly something the district would have provided the students anyway, but the guarantee was a symbol of commitment for both parties and it worked. Achievement was far higher than the general public thought it could be and it didn’t take a threat to make it happen.
Leaving aside the issues about ALEC, if that’s possible: I get the sense that people here generally don’t think students who can’t read by third grade should be held back. Is that right? Is the problem with such a rule that it would be mandated from afar and inflexible? Or that third grade is too early? The pros and cons of “social promotion” have been well-argued over the years, and I don’t remember hearing any easy answers.
There’s always so much grifterism in these things. The Ohio law has a provision where the parents have to be offered “services by an outside provider” (like a menu option) and I’m afraid it’s going to turn into a rip-off tutoring debacle like that of NCLB:
The No Child Left Behind provision that created the “supplemental educational services” (SES) program was the result of a standoff between the bill’s two Democratic co-authors and congressional Republicans who wanted to include a voucher provision that allowed parents to use public money to send their children to private schools. The compromise resulted in a program that preserved the essence of a voucher but was confined to a specific area: tutoring. Low-performing schools would be required to set aside a portion of their federal funding to allow parents to hire tutors for their children.
“These organizations in many cases were fleecing school districts, charging hourly rates comparable to expensive lawyers,” said state Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio. “While this law was well intended, the provision that required school districts to purchase these services ultimately created a quasi monopoly for tutoring companies to have a guaranteed customer base to sell at nonmarket prices.”
I guess it could be done well, but it won’t be done well, because they’re doing 50 ed reform mandates at once in Ohio and they set it up as a profit opportunity. It’s hard to continue to believe that this stuff is well-intended. The tutoring debacle was a decade ago. Why are they doing it again?
https://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/07/why-did-no-child-left-behind-tutoring-fail/
FLERP, in NC the issue was that the benchmark was too high. Over half of third graders were on track to be held back. Parents shouted and they lowered it and changed some of the other ways to formulate passing (which uses the various software like MClass and others). Also, if they are on track to not pass, a PDP must be developed for that child, which is sort of like an IEP, but not legally binding like an IEP (and not as cumbersome to generate). I think the problem is it takes away principal and teacher and parent discretion and says “NO! This is the cutoff with the new NC Standard Course of Study (read: Common Core) so deal with it. . .” and it was set to keep that many back (more than half). But they had loose language, like they would attend a summer reading camp and then be in a 4th grade class but labeled a third grader. Also, teachers tell me they have to reassess so often in keeping with the data collection schedule that is part of the mandate, that there’s not actually time to work with the child on the skill before they’re back at the I-Pad having another assessment.
I don’t hear as much about it lately, which probably means things have calmed down a little (they reset the benchmark and reorganized some of the qualifiers to be less like a trap). On the one hand, it certainly keeps everyone working hard to be sure the kids are reading, but on the other it is using passages that are sometimes not appropriate for decoding that then they are expected to answer comprehension, but they can’t yet decode (because they are ELL or on IEPs and the like—–and also, the Common Core has taken things to new places, good bad or indifferent).
In NC the problem was/is being caught between this ALEC legislation, which it no doubt was ALEC legislation (modeled after Jeb’s Read Florida or whatever it was), and the fact that we have our Democrat state supe who refuses to accept that the new Common Core Standards and aligned tests might have set benchmarks too high. She has been totally on board with the “prepare for lower scores” bandwagon (using New York as the model) and unapologetic about Race to the Top. So the pride of the Democrats and the tenacity of the Republicans we have in our General Assembly (the most forceful being ALEC members) made for a pretty bleak situation for several months. But at the end of the day, we have to have a realistic situation and we are getting towards one in baby steps (I think—-and it has definitely been a plane being built in mid-air). One third grade teacher also told me they were continuously handed new things to do and work with and were never trained on them.
More often than not, as I think you pick up on, there are so many regulars on this blog who have accepted some norms and undertones and therefore when they write statements it seems they are making blanket statements and overwhelming assumptions. . .but I think it’s because they assume (perhaps) that everyone knows as much about everything that has been happening in and from both parties to put public education in a precarious position that there is a lot of anger (anxiety’s twin sister), grief and frustration that simply gets vented here, sometimes more than thoughtful conversation. I take it with a grain of salt and go do some research myself if I am confused by generalities I read in comments. I think, though, that in this case the regulars have simply already had these conversations and are already reflecting on those (which seems like jumping to conclusions or something if you have just joined the conversation). For me, this Ohio situation is NC deja vu.
??
Can’t read? As in they are illiterate? Or can’t pass the cut score of the 3rd grade reading test?
FLERP, the issue is indeed whether individual decisions about how best to meet any particular 8-9 year-old’s needs can or should be mandated by legislation. Screw the “cut score” drivel.
The answer is no. If you really feel the need to hold forth about “social promotion” when a little girl “can’t read”, you need to have a specific little girl in mind for every single discussion, and OF COURSE every child is entitled to such specific consideration. The caring adults right in the room with her must make decisions in her interest, considering all needs, adaptations, and resources available to make a path for her to literacy. Teachers and parents have been doing that for about two centuries in this country, with no supervision from ALEC or from you, and if Western civilization is going to collapse from such a burden, the sooner the better.
And if the child, indeed, “can’t read”, then by God she does have a mandated, legal right to be educated in the least restrictive environment, among her peers, to the greatest extent possible.
As a parent member of my state’s original Lanterman Act Commission, I once helped a little fourth grader go into her public school classroom, in fact, with her court order in her hand.
All fair points.
Who said anything about students who can’t read by third grade? This is about students who can’t pass the state standardized “reading” test which has little to nothing to do with the ability to read.
The tests do one thing very well: measure household income and property values. They are rigged for the privileged to pass.
One year in NYC we had a passage about farmers and milk cows and another about frogs in ponds, neither of which are common in the South Bronx where I taught.
The next year there was a passage about playing tennis at the country club, again, not a common occurrence in the South Bronx.
My poor Florida students got a passage about building snowmen, an impossible occurrence in Southwest Florida, where I moved from NYC, and another passage about riding the subway. Hmmm. Not exactly fair for rural Floridians where no subways exist, eh?
Guess who did well on those state tests? Why, the wealthy white children in Westchester County and the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Amazing! But nothing at all to do with whether children can read. I reject and refute the very idea that standardized tests measure anything of use at all while you seem to accept it as a given. Nope.
I don’t accept it as a given and I made no attempt to suggest it was a given. You’re reading that into my comment. (No biggie, I’ve done it myself to others many times in the past.) I’m assuming that there are other ways besides standardized tests to determine whether someone can read. I would even hazard to guess that “the wealthy white children in Westchester County and the Upper East Side of Manhattan” have higher “literacy” rates — as measured by non-standardized assessments and without reference to subways and snow — than poor, rural Floridians. But I certainly take your point, and agree with your point, that the cut score of a standardized test is not necessarily the threshold of third grade literacy.
BTW, how’s the change from NYC to Florida? At a minimum, I’m sure the barbecue’s better.
First, Flerp, NO ONE is saying that we shouldn’t be doing everything in our power to diagnose and treat reading problems at this age. No one sane, that is.
This is not the way to go about this. It’s has really damaging consequences that have been studied to death. but the voluminous research on this simply confirms what teachers already know.
Kids are on different schedules. And they have very, very different issues with reading. The poor ones come into school with a HUGE gap in internalized linguistic competence, and the Matthew Effect sets it, and that just gets worse, commonly. The real-world consequences of this legislation are that millions of poor kids, mostly black, will be told at an even earlier age, you are not what anybody here wanted. You were an error. A mistake. Kids learn that lesson very well indeed from such a policy.
And, the instruments being used–the state and now national standardized tests–are breathtakingly invalid as measures of reading ability and breathtakingly useless for diagnosis of the extraordinarily varied issues that can be holding the kid’s reading progress back.
One whole set of issues is the lack of internalized syntactic and morphological competence for processing SPOKEN language–a competence that is transferred, and I mention this one because IT IS A SERIOUS ISSUE THAT IS ALMOST UNIVERSALLY IGNORED because of widespread ignorance among reading researchers of the linguistic research on early language acquisition.
This is not the way to deal with the problem. It is absolutely the case that this approach will make the problem A LOT WORSE.
do away with grades levels in primary school. do very finely grained diagnostics. for kids who need it, way back in preschool, create alternative immersive spoken language environments that expose them to sophisticated syntax and vocabulary. Create a lot of different kinds of interventions for different kinds of kids. A lot of good work is being done. Such laws will set a lot of that good work WAY back.
SIX members of the Ohio House Education committee are ALEC members. TWO of them (Stebelton – the chair & Roegner) are on ALEC’s “Education Task Force.” Disgusting.
There are many people fighting hard against this in Ohio – THANK YOU!! Many more, including many of my colleagues, are in denial, think “this too shall pass,” or are not aware that we are under attack. Many districts are not subject to OTES ( our version of APPR) until next year. I pray more will join the fight when they realize what a nightmare this truly is if you love kids and teaching.
Here you go Elyce, this will solve all of 3rd grades’ problems:-)
Wasn’t this done in NYC and LA during the past 10 years? I’m sure the children were offered summer school and another try at the test. Does anyone know what happened to those who were left back in 3rd grade?
Florida has been doing this for years. Third graders can be retained twice for not passing the FCAT (unless they are ESE, in which case they can be retained once). It really warps the decision making process in relation to student retention in other grade levels as well as where to allocate resources. In short, it forces you to make decisions that you wouldn’t otherwise make.
I’m amazed that there is funding to hold students back once, let alone twice. This would never fly in Utah, because the extra cost to have a child in school a year longer would be prohibitive in a state with the lowest per pupil expenditure already.
I understand Michigan is also considering such a law. Is there any data on the effects of this law in Florida or anywhere else? My concern is mostly in killing the desire to read, but I’m also concerned about students not being able to read as well as they should, especially in poor, minority schools. We need alternatives, not just bashing Alec and Republicans. We should also remember Diane’s great book, The Language Police. What our kids are reading should be expanded, not restricted.
You’d think by now that there would have been some research on the effects of this, but I’m not aware of any. We do know that kids who have been retained have much higher drop-out rates, but we knew that before they instituted this craziness.
To be fair, the concern was that kids who weren’t even close to mastering grade level skills were just moving onward and upward til they graduated without know how to read. That should be a concern, but this is a case of applying an easy answer to a problem that doesn’t have easy solutions. It’s also another example of taking away power and autonomy away from teachers, administrators, and parents.
You say, “To be fair, the concern was that kids who weren’t even close to mastering grade level skills were…”
Nah. ALEC’s concern was for control of an abject captured market of LITTLE KIDS crying themselves to sleep. The legislators who supported it were concerned with the payoff. Shame on you for pretending otherwise.
I can’t speak for ALEC, politicians, and others who co-opt, distort, and turn to their own ends the thoughts and feelings of others, but to say that that concern over students graduating without the ability to read was not a part of the equation is to indeed be pretending. It’s why ALEC and their ilk are effective; they use the legitimate concerns of the populace to further their own ends.
You are quite right about access to books and recreational reading and about the fact that both are being sacrificed. For many years we had a full time librarian, a librarian assistant, and a tech specialist who all worked together. We are now down to a librarian assistant and a part time tech specialist whose job description has been drastically altered. And there is little if any time for recreational reading in the classroom anymore. Officially anyway. Most teachers I know still sneak it in.
It’s kind of heartbreaking. We with certainty from a zillion studies that access to appealing books raises reading proficiency in the primary grades. I remember the finding that recreational reading programs, where kids accumulated rewards for reading books, turned out to be the ONLY reward-for-performance interventions that gave results in one big study.
I looked for new research, and found a plethora of well-funded calls for “raising the bar” for third graders (thanks, corporate reformers), but scarce research on how to actually improve reading! What research there is is test-based, but it links advances in scores to – wait for it – increased recreational reading and access to many books.
I found this sad inquiry into the poor collections and the restrictions on access to library books poor children encounter.
http://www.academia.edu/2403328/Reading_by_grade_three_How_well_do_school_library_circulation_policies_support_early_reading
And, as we know, librarians are being fired, libraries shut, and reading for pleasure curtailed.
It’s down to this. Our chief hope to support effective third grade reading intervention is to STOP ALEC. I’m going back to my own book now. It’s Capital in the Twenty First Century.
Here is some research since this has been going on sicne 2003 in Florida. This article is pro-retention. (Brookings Institute) and still shows that whatever initial gains are made go away by 7th grade. They use some interesting ways to make it look like there are as many pros as cons and that the effects going away are not a big deal since the same can be said for some other early intervention programs (which is old news- newer studies show lasting effectiveness). You can see my views further down on this post. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2012/08/16-student-retention-west
Sorry for the typos. 🙂
I also found this, which looks like it says much the same thing (it’s also co-written by the same person who read the the article you found): http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG12-09_West.pdf
This research seems to only look at the academic gains, though, and not at any other possible side effects (drop-out rate, etc.).
If these legislatures passed laws saying that all kids in third grade who do not pass PARCC or sBAC reading will have to wear an I for Idiot sewed onto the front of their clothes until they do, then that law would achieve approximately the same effect.
This is not how to approach the problem. But it is guaranteed to make the problem a whole lot worse and to widen, dramatically, the achievement gap.
Agreed. What’s sad is that you now have situations where a parent has a child in kindergarten and wants to have him retained because he is behind his peers, mostly because he is much younger than they are (late birthday that landed just before the cut-off), but the parent is convinced to not do that because then the child could conceivably be retained again in 3rd grade. Now, whatever one’s views on retention might be, I think we can all agree that the decision is best left with the parents and the teacher, not with an unseeing, unfeeling law. That if someone is going to be retained, it’s better to do it in kindergarten than in third grade. That each case should be examined individually.
Many of these kids are still in the prime period in which the innate linguistic device for intuiting linguistic structures is fully operative, but they have been in linguistically extremely impoverished environments, and reacting to their situations in this way heaps the social stigma on top of the raw deal these kids have already been handed by life. It’s so evil and wrong. We need to do away with grade levels in primary school, and we need much more finely grained diagnostics than we now have and a much wider range of carefully calibrated interventions aligned with those diagnostics.
This is just obscene. It’s a policy of institutional child abuse that will have precisely the opposite of its intended effect. There is a great deal of this from the ignorant ed deformers–operating from complete ignorance and doing something really, really damaging. To children. Children.
The people pushing this are pushing an extreme form of child abuse.
i couldn’t agree more. The entire catalog of “reforms” is one wrong after another, but what they’ve done to K-3 is just evil. It doesn’t seem to me that the general populace is really getting it, though. Not in Florida anyway. There’s a propensity to think that more is better, that if knowing these skills in 4th grade is good, wouldn’t it be awesome in 2nd grade, and the “reformers” exploit that.
An op-ed we wrote for NC- still editing it.
Is Read to Achieve a Pathway to Failure?
Across North Carolina, this has been the worst third-grade year in memory for teachers, students and families. The state legislature’s requirement that third graders must pass the End of Grade reading exam in order to be promoted has drained countless third grade classes of the excitement that comes with reading and learning, turning them into a long slog of worksheets, test practice and stress.
At the end of the school year, the law will force many North Carolina third-graders to repeat the grade, even though retention is enormously expensive and has been shown to harm students more often than it helps them.
The legislators who supported this measure and the families enmeshed in its consequences should take heed. Read to Achieve is a perfect example of the dangers of enacting educational policies that fail to take into account the specific challenges that struggling students face, the evidenced based solutions, and the professional judgment of educators who know children as individuals, rather than simply as test scores.
In order to avoid such damaging consequences in the future, legislators and citizens need to pay far closer attention to education legislation before it is enacted.
Few question the significance of third grade reading. Research organizations, most prominently the Annie E. Casey Foundation, have made it clear that a child’s third-grade reading level is a useful predictor of later school achievement, graduation and adult success.
The question becomes how to help students reach proficiency.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation linked most of the reading problems it identified to the limited opportunities available to low-income children at early ages. It recommended actions that included supporting low-income parents, increasing access to high quality programs from birth to age eight and addressing the challenges of chronic absenteeism and summer learning loss.
North Carolina legislators, in contrast, enacted an unfunded mandate with punitive consequences. They required that the vast majority of North Carolina’s third graders pass the End of Grade reading test or be retained (a handful of exceptions were allowed). They imposed these new requirements at the same time that they reduced prekindergarten opportunities, eliminated class size caps, and cut the ranks of teachers and teacher assistants. The only funding attached to the proposal was a small per-student fund to pay part of the cost of summer school for students who did not pass the test.
The mandated solution – retention –flew in the face of considerable research which indicates that retention often sets a child on a path to dropping out of school. Retention also lacks a long-term track record of improving reading proficiency. In Florida – often touted as a model for North Carolina – third graders retained under a similar program showed initial reading gains over promoted peers, but those gains faded by the time students reached seventh grade.
Read to Achieve thus:
1. Fails to address the problem at its source.
2. Treats students as test scores, rather than individuals.
3. Imposes a solution – retention – that is enormously expensive, has clearly documented negative consequences and has produced no long-term track record as an effective reading intervention.
4. Further raises the stakes on standardized tests, which encourages teaching to the test at the expense of other, often more valuable learning activities.
5. Has done damage to many kindergarten-third graders’ interest in school and love of learning.
We see these problems because Read to Achieve is a political, rather than an educational program. It did not emerge from consultation with North Carolina educators and education experts. Instead, it and other recently enacted measures were copied from Jeb Bush’s highly controversial Florida education programs – programs that have been heavily promoted by Bush, and by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
If our legislators genuinely want to improve public education in North Carolina, they can do far better than copying problematic policies from states whose students perform less well overall than our own students. As the legislature reconvenes, and lawmakers begin to confront the problems their actions have created for North Carolina schoolchildren, we all need to hold them to a higher standard. For lawmakers who truly care about student early reading, please change this law to fund smaller class sizes, more reading specialists, effective early reading interventions which would all cost less than retaining and punishing students with reading delays.
Thank you, Janna.
Nicely done!
Wonderful analysis Janna. These laws are like zero-tolerance laws. They are simply unresponsive to reality and harmful to children. I addressed the issue in a blog piece here:
http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2014/04/attention-not-retention.html
AZ does everything Florida does so Arizona also has a 3rd grade retention law. AZ also has an abundance of legislators who are ALEC members. The Supt of Public Instruction advocates for public money to be spent for private tuition. AZ is ground zero for education “Choice.”
Hi everyone,
I’d like to share a talk I recently gave to the School Board of Palm Beach County, FL about the excessive testing going on in our public schools and who is profiting by it.
Not ONE MENTION OF DYSLEXIA! IM FLOORED. Yet again its ignored. Exactly what do people think illiteracy is? Its hereditary and on a continuum(mild, moderate, severe, profound )On a vacation with 12 family members 10 are dyslexic. …and the ones “identified ” are currently in school (with no help being identified by schools) Its up to the parents to research laws and go to due process to force the schools to use an EVADENCE BASED READING INTERVENTION (evadence based backed by science) not the currently used research based schools currently use. And whole language is a disaster. I advocate like hell for my dyslexic children because I too am dyslexic. But this Will not solve a damn thing. They dont need more of the same. Well intentioned teachers dont have a clue about dyslexia. ..1 in 5…its in EVERY SINGLE CLASSROOM. A literacy bill with no mention of dyslexia is a joke! Educate, Advocate and LEGISLATE # SAYDYSLEXIA
Loyd, NO AMOUNT OF A PARENT READING TO THIER CHILD WILL TAKE DYSLEXIA AWAY. This one makes my blood boil…
Dyslexia! !!!!