Prior installments of this series have demonstrated that state and national standardized test scores in New Hampshire and Vermont were poor and declining before the COVID pandemic school shutdown. We became curious about the so-called “COVID learning loss” narrative after Principal Nicole Lackie of the Croydon Village School blamed it for her students’ poor performance on standardized reading tests. Because she also said that schools no longer knew how to teach reading, we also researched the methods used to teach reading by local elementary schools.
In addition to the Croydon Village School, we’ve also looked at the elementary schools in Killington, VT, and Washington, NH. We now report on the Albert Bridge School (ABS) in Brownsville, VT.
Assessing this school is challenging because there is very little in the way of standardized test scores to determine whether it was affected by the pandemic shutdown or how it fared over time. Nonetheless, there is some data that shows test scores were falling years before COVID came on the scene.
While the number of students in this school has recently been too small for Vermont to release school-level scores from its Smarter Balanced assessment, its scores were published in 2016 and 2017. In 2016, 64% of students in the Albert Bridge School tested proficient or above in reading. That number dropped dramatically to 37% in 2017.
Jenifer Aldrich has been the principal at the Albert Bridge School (ABS) for ten years. She is a multi-age education specialist. This K-6 school averages 65-70 students per year. It has one class per grade and combines grades to balance the student-teacher ratio. She couldn’t explain the drop in SBAC scores from 2016 and 2017.
When asked how the students have done since the pandemic, Aldrich said that Albert Bridge has focused on community and social-emotional learning (SEL) and has cut back on academics. She said that students can’t pay attention to reading and math until they feel safe, have predictable routines, and have a “sense of agency.” She pointed out that most students had not had a traditional education during these last few years.
The school now asks about a child’s growth rather than what the standards say a child should know. Aldrich said the school meets students where they are, as gauged by a few diagnostic assessments, including Track My Progress, Fountas & Pinnell, DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), and PNOA (Primary Number and Operations Assessment). The school administers these tests three times a year. Aldrich said most of the students are now progressing beyond a third of a year in a third of a year’s time. Still, Aldrich is concerned about the students who are below proficiency.
ABS switched to the Amplify reading curriculum this year. Amplify is built on research from the science of reading. Since 2015, ABS has used, and continues to use, Fountas & Pinnell, along with supplements to close the gaps. As pointed out in prior installments of this series, the science of reading research has shown that the Fountas & Pinnell “cueing” approach is misguided and might harm children, even when used with other methods.
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, they found that good readers process virtually every letter in every word as they read. Some children catch on quickly, others need to be taught how to do it. Learning to read is not as natural as learning to talk. This research is summarized in an engaging podcast series called “Sold a Story,” produced by Emily Hanford, an investigative education journalist at American Public Media.
ABS is instituting another change this year to improve academic performance. Students are being grouped with other students at the same performance level. That is, all 3rd-6th grade students will work on reading at the same time, split into cross-grade groups of students who read at the same level. The same goes for students in grades K-2. If students need to cross into the other group (for example, if a 2nd-grade student is reading at a 5th-grade level), the staff will create a specialized plan.
While sympathetic about the difficulties the pandemic brought, Principal Aldrich said she was grateful that the pandemic happened now as opposed to 15 or 20 years ago because of all that has been learned over about trauma and how the brain and academic performance work.
— This story is part of a series in which we show how the pandemic shutdowns in Vermont and New Hampshire affected student performance on state and national standardized tests. We’re also taking a look at how some elementary schools in our area teach reading. Next, we’ll take a look at test scores and reading instruction at the Grantham Village School in New Hampshire. Prior installments in this series were published in the Eagle Times on September 9, 12, 14, 16, and 19 and can be easily found on Jody Underwood’s Granite Grok author page.
This story originally appeared in the Eagle Times.
