CICP News & Updates

As the legislative session comes to a close, hopes are high that lawmakers will advance the cause of reading education by allowing the Indiana Department of Education to end social promotion from 3^rd to 4^th grade if students aren’t reading at grade level.  Reading is the basic skill that makes all other learning possible – it’s common sense that if students are falling behind, schools should be obligated to get them the help they need to catch up rather than simply passing them along and compounding their struggles.

Unfortunately, some defenders of the current system would rather pay lip service to reading reform than accept the core responsibility of teaching our kids.  For example, John Ellis, executive director of the Indiana Association of Public School Superintendents, recently penned an editorial in the Indianapolis Star that rejects the idea of retaining students who can’t read at the end of third grade.

The Indiana Department of Education and State Board of Education have made early reading education a top priority.  They’ve endorsed a policy framework that includes increased classroom time allocated to reading, intensive professional development for teachers on research-based reading instruction, and tools for assessing student reading proficiency on an ongoing basis in grades K-3, to catch problems early and devote more existing resources to struggling readers.

Under this model, retention is a last resort – a final opportunity to get students back on track with more intensive instruction on reading (not just holding back students in the same classroom with the same approach).

Mr. Ellis conveniently ignores this broader strategy and issues dire predictions of ‘mass retention.’  But if reading is the most important activity in our classrooms, and schools have 3,500+ hours of instruction from kindergarten to 3^rd grade within which to teach kids to read, how little confidence must Ellis have in our public schools – his constituents – to fulfill their fundamental duties? 

He also attempts to undermine the progress made in Florida, which ended social promotion as part of an approach similar to what Indiana envisions.  Florida actually climbed from 31^st to 21^st in 4^th grade public school reading scores from 2002-2007, cutting failure rates by a third.  (During the same time, Indiana slid from 15^th to 27^th in national reading scores.)  He implies that minority students were left behind by the Florida reforms – in fact, African-American, Latino, and low-income students all improved their reading performance in Florida from 2003-2007 while closing the ‘achievement gap’ with the general student population (Gauging the Gaps: A Deeper Look at Student Performance – The Education Sector).

Questionable statistics are a poor answer to inarguable logic:  Our schools must teach their students to read. Absent new instructional strategies and measures holding them accountable, the job won’t be done.

Ellis reaches a rhetorical low when he says that the retention policy would ‘label our children as failures.’  No one is calling children failures.  It’s our schools that are failing too many of their students, and this has to change.

Mr. Ellis closes with an excerpt that cites more questionable studies and asserts that “…learning is difficult when leaders or anyone else is driven by ideology.”  I’d submit that the issue here isn’t ideological, but it does involve two competing philosophies:  Ours embraces accountability, his seems wedded to the status quo.  When it comes to preparing future generations of Hoosiers to succeed in school and in life, we can’t afford the latter.