Good job Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Those are impressive gains. Hopefully some things in there the rest of us can learn from. Notice that some of what they are doing came from Florida. https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...096d72-f468-11ed-918d-012572d64930_story.html Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022. Louisiana and Alabama, meanwhile, were among only three states to see modest gains in fourth-grade reading during the pandemic, which saw massive learning setbacks in most other states. The turnaround in these three states has grabbed the attention of educators nationally, showing rapid progress is possible anywhere, even in areas that have struggled for decades with poverty and dismal literacy rates. The states have passed laws adopting similar reforms that emphasize phonics and early screenings for struggling kids. “In this region, we have decided to go big,” said Burk, now a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd, a national advocacy group. These Deep South states were not the first to pass major literacy laws; in fact, much of Mississippi’s legislation was based on a 2002 law in Florida that saw the Sunshine State achieve some of the country’s highest reading scores. The states also still have far to go to make sure every child can read.
Investing time, money, and resources into education is investing into the future. Glad to see it paying dividends
I am happy to see that but history shows that "miracle" gains in test scores are usually not the product of improved pedagogy but are almost always the product of some manipulation. Improvements can and do occur. I don't mean to sound too cynical. The NAEP has shown gradual improvements over long time frames. But dramatic improvement like that reported usually doesn't happen, unless you use some very limited self-selected samples. I note that the article did not use that many metrics - it may be in the underlying data. The share of kindergarteners reading at grade level at the charter network grew from 38% in December 2021 to 55% this spring; first-graders grew from 19% to 43%. Hope I'm wrong
Those states better be careful about teaching their kids to read. Gonna grow up to be Democrat voters. Zingggggg
We take it for granted, but it's interesting to think back about how daunting reading was a kid, particularly reading out loud. From what I've read, most Americans (I saw 54%) have a reading level below the sixth grade - so basically an elementary level of literacy. I'm not faulting teachers, but that seems to be a lot of high school graduates who can't read beyond a 5th grade level. From the link within your link. I didn't know about the debate over teachings methods, but that's interesting. An end to the reading wars? More US schools embrace phonics In 2000, a government-formed National Reading Panel released the findings of its exhaustive examination of the research. It declared phonics instruction was crucial to teaching young readers, along with several related concepts. *** In practice, this science calls for schools to focus on the building blocks of words. Kindergartners might play rhyming games and clap out the individual syllables in a word to learn to manipulate sounds. Experts call this phonemic awareness. Students later will learn explicitly how to make letter sounds and blend letters. To make sure students aren’t just guessing at words, teachers might ask them to sound out so-called nonsense words, like “nant” or “zim.” Gone is rote memorization of word spellings. Instead, students learn the elements that make up a word. In a lesson using the word “unhappy,” students would learn how the prefix “un-” changed the meaning of the base word.
If I recall correctly, Florida was pretty highly ranked on 4th grade scores but were ranked very low on either 7th or 8th grade scores.
