Mississippi focuses on boosting middle school students’ reading scores

By Devna Bose | Originally published by Mississippi Today

Fourth grade literacy gains earned Mississippi national acclaim. But that achievement tapers off as students advance to higher grades. 

Lawmakers are putting millions toward changing that. 

Mississippi has seen the least progress across subject areas in eighth grade reading scores, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and performs near the bottom compared to the rest of the country. 

This gap has long concerned lawmakers, who in large part chalk those fourth-grade gains up to the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act, a state law that raised literacy standards and established a reading “gate,” a test that third graders have to pass to advance to fourth grade. 

The Legislature passed Senate Bill 2294 this past session in an attempt to extend the state’s reading gains. The legislation established several classroom initiatives in Mississippi, including expanding initiatives in the state’s existing literacy act into higher grades.

Senate Bill 2294 directs $9 million toward the Adolescent Literacy Initiative, which will fund literacy coaches in districts across the state starting this school year. The initiative ramps up literacy education for fourth through eighth grade students, including introducing assessments throughout the year to gauge how well students are keeping up with reading benchmarks and requiring schools use high-quality curriculum pre-selected by the agency. Early pilots have been lauded among educators, but it’s too early to see results yet. 

House Education Committee Vice Chairman Kent McCarty, a Republican from Hattiesburg, said for a long time, lawmakers were waiting for those third graders to matriculate into the eighth grade, expecting to see reading progress then. But those students have come and gone, and eighth grade reading has remained stagnant. It’s a worrisome sign, he said, given the correlation between reading and life outcomes. 

“We need our students to be performing better because every child deserves to know how to read,” McCarty said. “If we’re not meeting that very basic need, we have failed them terribly.”

‘That’s not the ballgame’

The 2013 literacy law overhauled how the state taught and measured reading in kindergarten through third grade. 

Students took screeners, which are assessments intended to gauge proficiency, throughout the year and were held back in the third grade if they didn’t pass a reading assessment, one of the most controversial pieces of the law. Students who were retained received intensive remediation.

Teachers underwent extensive training in the science of reading and received ongoing professional development from coaches. The state Education Department deployed coaches to the neediest schools, so teachers could receive live help, and approved a handful of curriculum that schools were required to use. 

And slowly, reading proficiency among the state’s youngest readers began to climb.

That progress is no mystery, said Rachel Canter, director of education policy for Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. 

“It’s a big picture, and people have zoomed in on one piece, depending on who it is,” said Canter, the former leader of Mississippi First, an education policy advocacy group. “You’re not going to get anything out of coaching teachers in the absence of accountability or standards or measurement or transparency.”

Pilot program in Wayne County

Mississippi Department of Education officials selected Wayne County, along with Kosciusko and Moss Point, to pilot the adolescent literacy initiative last year. 

Mildred Gandy was a little suspicious when the reading coaches arrived. But Gandy, a longtime seventh- and eighth-grade English/Language Arts teacher at Buckatunna Elementary School in Wayne County, learned that she and her colleagues could slowly roll out the literacy strategies in her classes and use them in every subject area, allowing students to engage more deeply with their work. Then she was fully on board.

“Teachers will always buy in when they see students becoming engaged,” she said. “You’ve got to reach them before you can teach them.”

Over the course of the year, coaches from the Florida Center for Reading Research showed teachers new strategies on how to teach older students how to read. These included giving students a framework for how to take notes during class and teaching them how to mark a text as they read in order to more easily find answers to questions later. Coaches told teachers to find an engaging question to get students to read the text more than once.

Gandy often worked with another history teacher, aligning their classes so students were hearing about similar topics and being taught similar strategies throughout the day. 

Crystal Bates, curriculum director at Wayne County School District, said teachers were impressed with the training and were able to deploy the literacy strategies in the classrooms.

“Usually English II is one of the hardest state tests for students to pass to graduate, so anything helps,” she said. “It’s not just about getting them through a gate. We’ve got to get them a diploma.”

No reading ‘gate’

Soon, middle school classrooms across the state will be using the same reading strategies. 

As part of the literacy initiative, the state education agency will deploy coaches to schools across the state, provide training for teachers, require screeners throughout the year to assess students’ proficiency and mandate that schools use agency-approved curriculum. 

But the new legislation is not a replica of the 2013 bill, said Michelle Nowell, associate superintendent in the state Department of Education’s Office of Curriculum and Instruction.

Teachers across subject areas will receive training, with the goal of providing middle-schoolers with literacy training in multiple classes. And students will primarily be taught reading strategies instead of phonics.

Another component that’s missing: The reading gate that drew so much ire in 2013. 

McCarty said lawmakers omitted a retention component from the adolescent bill because research shows that holding older students back negatively impacts their chances of graduating. 

But the adolescent initiative does require remediation. Throughout the school year, McCarty said, students who aren’t meeting academic benchmarks will receive help. The agency is working on an intensive remediation course for students who pass the eighth grade but aren’t reading on grade level, Nowell said.

Gandy was apprehensive about the effectiveness of the literacy initiative without holding students accountable with the possibility of retention.

“I don’t know if (the remediation) is enough,” she said. “But it’s definitely a start.”

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article