At the June 6 meeting of the Croydon School Board, Associate Principal Nicole Lackie presented the results of Croydon Village School’s (CVS) end-of-year diagnostic assessment.
Of its 30 students, 25 (83%) performed below grade level, with 22 (88%) of them at the lowest level.
When asked about this result by a member of the school board, Ms. Lackie made two remarkable statements. First, she said COVID was responsible. Next, she stated that people don’t really know how to teach kids how to read.
In this series, we’ll address these two statements in detail as we explore state-level results and showcase some elementary schools in New Hampshire and Vermont.
Nicole Lackie has been the associate principal for two years. She refused to be interviewed for this story.
This past year, CVS had two multi-grade classes: K-1 and 2-4. In addition to being a part-time principal, Ms. Lackie also teaches grades 2-4. In addition, the school has a full-time K-1 teacher, who also serves as the special education case manager; two paraprofessionals; a reading specialist; and part-time teachers for music, art, and physical education.
As with many school districts, Croydon uses formative diagnostic assessments to help figure out how students are performing and where they need help. They use the STAR Test for reading and math and the Fountas & Pinnell system to test reading comprehension.
Ms. Lackie’s full response to the board member’s question started with this: “There’s a couple of things going on here and some, I just can’t tell you. One of the things is that the data includes all nine kindergarten students. There are a significant amount of students that are starting below where they should be.”
This raises some questions: Isn’t kindergarten the starting point for teaching kids to read? If that’s not the case, and if kindergarten students are not meeting initial expectations, could it be because parents aren’t aware of what those expectations are?
Even without the kindergarten students, however, there are 13 students (62%) in grades 1-4 performing at the lowest level. That’s still a lot.
Ms. Lackie also said that the effects of COVID were nothing like she would have imagined. The news is full of articles saying that the pandemic has affected student performance. The US Department of Education has declared it so. However, Croydon’s scores don’t paint that picture.
In 2022, the last year for which data is available for the New Hampshire Statewide Assessment System (NHSAS), 54% of Croydon’s students were considered proficient or above in reading. This was actually an improvement over their scores in 2019.
Objectively, the pandemic did not noticeably affect student reading performance at CVS. The larger issue, however, is that only about half the students at CVS are reading at grade level or above. This has been the case for quite a while.
COVID wasn’t the only perceived problem. Ms. Lackie continued, “There’s a lot of conversation out there about the best way to teach reading. Should we use basal readers, or is it more teacher-created, teacher-leading or something very scripted or not? There are a lot of question marks. We just don’t know.”
The Fountas & Pinnell (F&P) program, widely used around the United States, has been around since the 1980s. Because the authors are professors at the renowned Columbia University Teacher’s College, the program is assumed by many educators to be good.
F&P uses a “cueing” approach to teach reading. The idea behind Cueing Theory is that it’s easier for children to learn to read if they start with whole stories and whole sentences and do not try to read individual words. In practice, teachers cover up words in a story, then tell students to look at the picture, look at the first letter, and think of a word that makes sense. Cueing Theory says that, by practicing this approach, children can figure out on their own how to read.
This approach is at odds with reading research. The “science of reading” is based on decades of research about how students become proficient in reading and writing and why some of them have difficulty. Using brain scans and eye-tracking technology, researchers have found that good readers process virtually every letter in every word as they read. Some children catch on quickly. Some need to be taught directly how to sound out words. Learning to read is not as natural as learning to talk.
In addition, studies show that the F&P assessment scoring is unreliable. The scores change from day to day, which does not help teachers know what to focus on.
The science of reading research is summarized in an engaging podcast series called “Sold a Story,” produced by Emily Hanford, an investigative education journalist at American Public Media.
The New Hampshire Department of Education offers intensive LETRS training — Language Essentials for Teaching Reading and Spelling — to address the problems with reading. LETRS helps teachers understand the science of reading in order to help them teach better.
Croydon teachers have not taken this training, while teachers in other schools around the area have. Those schools have already started to see progress.
Observing this exchange at the Croydon School Board meeting inspired this effort to find out how the pandemic shutdowns affected elementary schools in our area and learn how they teach reading. Installments in this series will include reading scores in the U.S., New Hampshire, and Vermont and profile a few area elementary schools.
In the next article, we’ll look at New Hampshire student performance on state tests and on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to assess what impact, if any, the pandemic shutdown had on student achievement.
This article was originally published in the Eagle Times on September 9, 2023. It has been slightly edited.
