Education Week - November 2, 2022 - 19

... The Slide in Reading Achievement
By Sarah D. Sparks
Students' reading achievement in both 4th
and 8th grades fell three points during the
pandemic, according to the tests known as the
Nation's Report Card.
The decline put the nation's students
roughly on par with students' reading
achievement in the first state-level National
Assessment of Educational Progress in 1992.
The main NAEP, administered by the
National Center for Education Statistics, takes
a snapshot of national and state-level student
achievement in reading and math every
two years, but was delayed by the pandemic
from 2021 to spring 2022. It provides a
representative sample of reading performance
based on more than 108,000 4th graders
and more than 111,000 8th graders in every
state.
" Reading is foundational to success in
school and life, " said Nardi Routten, a
4th grade teacher in New Bern, N.C., and
a member of the National Assessment
Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, in
a statement. " Schools need to take evidencebased
action, aligned with the science of
reading, and work closely with teachers to
ensure that elementary and middle school
students become strong readers and can
access more complex work as they progress
through their education. "
Here's what you need to know.
1 Reading results are grim,
but not as bad as in math.
No state improved in reading in either grades
4 or 8, but 8th graders in the Los Angeles
Unified school district and in the Department
of Defense schools, which serve children
of military families, made gains from 2019
to 2020. Maine had the sharpest reading
decline in 8th grade, falling eight points, while
Virginia's 4th graders fell 10 points since 2019,
the largest reading decline of any state in that
grade.
However, NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr
pointed to urban school districts' reading scores
as " bright spots, pockets of resilience, amidst
all the chaos of the pandemic. "
Most of the country's largest districts
participating in NAEP's Trial Urban District
Assessment held steady in reading at both
grades during the pandemic. Only nine of the
26 TUDA districts declined in average reading
scores in 4th grade, and only four declined in
8th grade.
Nationwide, Black, Hispanic, Native
American, and white students all declined in
reading in 4th grade in 2022 compared to 2019,
though only white students also declined in 8th
grade.
Moreover, students performed worse in
reading in both grades, be they boys or girls,
low-income or wealthier students across
most of the country. Only 8th graders in the
West showed no significant change in reading
achievement in 2022.
But reading performance was less troubling
than math, with results showing historic lows
in that subject at both grade levels.
2 Fewer than 1 in 3 students read
proficiently at either grade.
NAEP measures reading comprehension
of both literary texts, such as fiction and
poetry, and informational texts, such as
argumentation and procedural documents.
Students at both grades are gauged on three
" cognitive targets; " their ability to locate and
remember information, interpret meaning,
and critique and evaluate texts.
In 2022, 4th and 8th graders performed
worse across the board than they had in 2019,
correctly answering fewer questions in all three
cognitive areas, working with both literary and
informational texts. Only a third of 4th graders
and 31 percent of 8th graders read at the
proficient level in 2022, significantly fewer in
both grades compared to before the pandemic.
Moreover, 37 percent of 4th graders and
30 percent of 8th graders performed below
NAEP's lowest benchmark-the basic level-
in 2022. That's the largest pool of struggling
readers since 2003 in 4th grade and 1994 in 8th
grade.
In practical terms, that means significantly
more 4th grade students weren't able to make
simple inferences about story characters
or plot, or to identify a main idea that was
explicitly stated in an informational text.
Among 8th graders, more students in 2022
couldn't identify or provide support for their
judgments about an author's intent in a
fictional character's motivation, nor could
they recognize inferences based on main
ideas and supporting details in texts that made
arguments.
" What we need to take away from this is
that ... now what we're seeing is students at
the bottom of the distribution dropping even
faster [than before the pandemic], and we're
also seeing students who were not showing
declines-meaning students at the higherperforming
levels, who were holding steady
before the pandemic or even improving-now
all the students regardless of their ability are
dropping " in achievement, Carr said.
3 Reading teachers are more
comfortable with virtual
instruction, but not closing
learning gaps.
Nearly all students returned to full-time
in-person classes in 2021-22, but after two
years of off-and-on virtual schooling, teachers
reported in a 2022 background survey given
in tandem with NAEP that they have grown
more confident in their ability to handle future
disruptions.
More than 9 out of 10 students in 4th and
8th grades had teachers who were reasonably
confident that they could " probably " or
" definitely " teach a distance-learning lesson in
real time and provide students with feedback
virtually. Likewise, more than 80 percent of
students in both grades had teachers who were
at least moderately confident that they could
create engaging distance-learning materials
and help students who had trouble with the
format.
By contrast, fewer than half of students in
either grade had a teacher who was " quite "
or " extremely " confident that they would be
able to address the gaps in students' reading
skills, and teachers in both grades showed
lower levels of work satisfaction compared to
teachers in 2019.
While many districts pledged to invest
federal and state recovery funding in intensive
tutoring-including 1-to-1 or very small group
instruction several times a week-the share of
students actually receiving such supports has
not yet increased.
4 Intensive tutoring may not have
gained as much ground
as intended.
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona
noted that 56 percent of schools reported-in
a separate NCES study-using intensive, highdosage
tutoring to help students recover lost
academic ground. However, only 25 percent
of 8th graders and 34 percent of 4th graders
in 2022 reported they received tutoring in
English/language arts at least once or twice a
week. That's actually two percentage points
fewer 4th graders who received frequent
reading tutoring than in 2019, and no
difference in tutored 8th graders, compared
to before the pandemic, NAEP's background
data show.
Likewise, 4th graders were no more
likely in 2022 than in 2019 to have a literacy
specialist or coach available to them or their
teachers, though the share of full-time reading
coaches rose compared to part-time coaches
during the pandemic. However, 42 percent
of 8th grade students had full- or part-time
reading specialists at their schools in 2022, 3
percentage points more than in 2019.
Patricia Levesque, the chief executive
officer of the Foundation for Excellence in
Education (ExcelinEd), recommended that
states and districts dedicate more money to
providing middle and high school literacy
coaches to help teachers in upper grades cope
with students with holes in their foundational
reading skills.
" We talk about how kids will learn how to
read from K-3 and then from 4th grade on
they're reading to learn, which means there
isn't a reading class anymore; there's a lit class
or there's a language arts class, where the
assumption is kids can read, " Levesque said.
" A lot of content-area teachers-the science
teacher, the math teacher, the social studies
teacher-in middle school grades or higher,
are not aware of what are the techniques,
what are the things that I can do in my
content-area class in order to help struggling
readers, " Levesque said. " That's why middle
school literacy coaches are going to be really
important in order to give those teachers
the tools that they need to help struggling
readers. "
5 Young students show some signs
of bouncing back this fall,
but there's a long way to go.
Students took the reading NAEP last spring.
At least one study taken this fall suggests
students too young to participate in NAEP
may be starting to rebound from the academic
disruptions of the last few years.
The assessment group Amplify released data
last week on the reading progress of more than
300,000 K-3 students in 43 states who took
the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy
Skills, or DIBELS, a commonly used early
reading assessment. It found 55 percent of 3rd
graders-and only a third of kindergartners-
are on track to read at grade level by the the
end of the 2022-23 school year.
While that's lower than the share of students
on track in reading in K-3 before the pandemic,
there were more students on track this fall
than in fall 2021 in every grade except 3rd.
" Maybe there's some promise in that
we're seeing some benefit [in fall reading
performance] in 2022-23 versus what we'd
seen in 2021-22, " said Paul Gazzerro, director
of data analysis for Amplify and the author
of that study, before the NAEP results were
released. " So while NAEP, I would suspect, is
going to rain down more bad news and fear
... one might argue that if we see the system
starting to turn around, which we are, that
maybe the next set of 9-year-olds that we look
at two years later will start to look a little bit
better. "
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