Vermont students have consistently ranked among the top 10 states on reading proficiency tests. Despite those high marks, a large percentage of Vermont children still do not read at a proficient level.
Educators, business leaders and government officials have been attempting for years to address the achievement gap between failing students, who tend to be low-income or speak English as a second language, and their more advantaged counterparts.
A broad-based coalition of statewide groups has just announced a new literacy initiative based on the latest neuroscience and best practices developed by educational experts. The Vermont Blueprint to Close the Achievement Gap is designed to help teachers learn how to reach students — especially those in preschool or early grades — who are failing to read with proficiency.
Vermont’s most recent test results indicate that students have made few positive gains on reading assessments over a 10-year period. The 2011 New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) results, announced last week, and the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores show no progress in reading mastery for about 27 percent of Vermont students who are either “partially” or “substantially below” proficiency.
The scores are consistent with previous national and state assessments.
The NECAP is given each year to approximately 44,000 Vermont students in grades 3 through 8. About a quarter of children still do not become capable readers by 4th grade. In the most recent results, for 2011, the reading proficiency gap narrowed to 20 percent for eighth-graders, but then widened again for 11th graders, who are also given the NECAP, to 27 percent.
On the NAEP — often called The Nation’s Report Card — the scores, as well as the percentages of successful vs. failing students, are at the same level they were when the tests were first reported in 2002. The overall state score is still 227. The percentage of non-reading students remains at 27 percent. Thirty-two percent of students perform at a “basic” reading level, which means “partial mastery.” (NAEP results are based on a random sample of students at a selection of schools chosen as representative of the state.)
The NAEP test scores spark questions about reading competency for over 50 percent of Vermont students.
The NECAP tests “measure performance according to each state’s content standards,” rather than the national standards reflected in the NAEP tests. The NECAP results show 30 percent of fourth-graders reading below the proficient level — that is, they are not “meet[ing] reading grade expectations.” This mirrors the results of previous testing which have shown between 29 percent and 31 percent not making the grade. As of this year, 73 percent of fourth-graders taking the NECAP test are at grade level.
Though there have been gains in individual schools over the years, with high scores reported on the NECAP, overall, the problem of weak reading skills persists.”
In 1996, the State Board of Education developed the Vermont Common Assessment System (CAS) to evaluate student performance in the state’s schools based on Vermont’s Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities, with the goal of “improving teaching and learning.” The NECAP tests were developed about eight years ago jointly by Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont and use the Framework as a basis for the construction of test questions.
Though there have been gains in individual schools over the years, with high scores reported on the NECAP, overall, the problem of weak reading skills persists. The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, at least as reflected in test results either on the NAEP or the NECAP, has not led to more children reading competently in Vermont.
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Vermont’s national ranking
Vermont’s high standing compared with other states is often cited to counter the reports of failures in reading achievement. With an average score of 227 on the NAEP test, Vermont fourth-graders rank fourth in the nation, tied with Connecticut and Pennsylvania. And eighth-graders, with an average score of 274, are second only to New Jersey. The average score for U.S. fourth-graders is 220; for eighth-graders it is 264. Nationally, 34 percent of fourth-graders are not reading with competence; in Vermont, that number is 27 percent.
With 41 percent of fourth-graders in the 2011 assessment reading proficiently or at the advanced level, Vermont outshines the national average of just 32 percent by 9 percentage points. This is an improvement of 2 percentage points since 2002. The NAEP says this is “statistically significant,” but since the scores can change a few percentage points year to year, it is not clear whether there will be anything to celebrate for at least several years.
In the area of low-income student performance, Vermont students also do somewhat better on the NAEP tests than low-income students across the nation: The overall Vermont score is 213 compared to 207 nationally.
Poverty levels, based on whether students qualify for the federal school lunch program, are strongly associated with persistent learning problems, though it is by no means the only marker. Nationally, 52 percent of students qualify for free or reduced cost lunches; in Vermont the average is 41 percent but some town schools have 60 percent or more qualifying for the program.
An intractable problem?
For educators, parents, taxpayers and businesses looking for qualified workers, the more-than-respectable average score on the NAEP test masks the fact that a disturbingly large segment of the state’s fourth-graders are not capable of reading well enough to master the subjects they are studying as they move on to middle and high school. And what progress they make by eighth grade appears to evaporate by the time students are tested again on the NECAP in the fall of their junior year of high school.
The “achievement gap” for more than a quarter of Vermont students widens by the 11th grade especially for the poor. This “gap” refers to the difference in scores between “mainstream” students and those in the vulnerable subgroups.
The State Literacy Plan published last September shows the ongoing gap over the first six years the NECAP was administered. In 2010, the difference between proficient and non-proficient students was greatest for special education students — a 57 percentage point gap; “English Language Learners” (ELL), 29 points; students from poor homes, 24 points; African-Americans, 17 points. There is a gender gap, with girls outperforming boys, but it is a relatively moderate 9 points.
The costs and the benefits
Gov. Peter Shumlin has called for a concerted effort to provide each child with the kind of teaching he or she needs. As he puts it, “If we can teach Pete Shumlin to read, we can teach anyone in Vermont to read.”
While statistics can show the persistence of the literacy problem, they don’t reveal the psychological costs for the child who grows up feeling “stupid,” in Shumlin’s words. The governor, who is dyslexic, had a good early reading teacher and a supportive family to give him faith in himself, but he stressed that he was lucky. For children in poverty, whose parents may be reading at what the National Adult Literacy Survey calls Level 1 or 2 skills, and who are stressed in multiple ways, this kind of luck is unlikely.
Speaking last month at the launch of the Vermont Blueprint to Close the Achievement Gap, the latest state-level plan intended to increase the number of competent readers, G. Reid Lyon, a psychologist who advised both presidents Clinton and Bush on education, reflected on his early years teaching in both inner city and affluent neighborhoods. What stayed in his mind, he said, was the look of fear in a child’s eyes when they were called upon to read and could not.
It has been estimated that if the high school graduation rate of boys were increased by just 5 percent a year, the savings in public benefits could total $9.3 million each year.”
Lyon presented research findings along with “best practices” developed from these long-term, controlled studies conducted in the last 10 or 20 years. This research has quantified some of the pieces of the reading instruction puzzle. Advances in neuroscience findings, developmental psychology, behavioral pediatrics, reading development and pedagogical practices were used to assemble an initiative that responds to the problem from all these vantage points.
Researchers have found that capable readers do better throughout life. Taking both ends of the spectrum — “advanced” readers on the NAEP scale vs. “below basic” — about 4 percent of the former compared to 43 percent of the latter are poor as adults.
When schools provide the training that enables children to become effective readers, fewer students drop out of school and end up in special education programs, and more are ready for college by the end of high school (a cost savings, since they don’t require remedial work in college) or are ready to enter the workforce.
Most youngsters who go through the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate. More than half of the Vermont students who annually drop out of high school (1,300 in 2010) read below the “basic” level of competency. It has been estimated that if the high school graduation rate of boys were increased by just 5 percent a year, the savings in public benefits could total $9.3 million each year.
These long-term economic and social costs and benefits are on the minds of the educators and others who look at test results and back efforts like the Vermont Blueprint for Closing the Achievement Gap.
Lisa Ventriss, president of the Vermont Business Roundtable, an organization that has sponsored child literacy programs since 1998, says, “Test everything on ‘how is this improving the education of each child?’ I don’t want to hear about opening up a new wing or getting a new school bus. We must keep working with people to elevate their sights and invest in things even though times are tough. That’s what businesses did in the downturn. If we invest in ‘our company’ we’re going to be investing in our human capital, our children.”
Blanche Podhajski, director of the Stern Center for Language and Learning, which led the development of the Vermont Blueprint to Close the Achievement Gap, says test scores can be controversial, but they are a necessary way of assessing student progress. “Statistics can be slippery, but we have to have something to go on,” she says, citing the NAEP scores and the New England Common Assessment Program as reliable measures of achievement in the nation’s schools, partly because they are administered regularly over many years.
The Blueprint is concise — two pages, eight points, and no more than six bulleted items under each strategy. It follows the September 2011 announcement of the State Literacy Plan, which deals with both reading and writing, in emphasizing very specific teaching strategies for pre-K and elementary school children and professional development that would reach teachers statewide.
The objective of the Blueprint is to deploy research-based knowhow to educators. Outreach to families is also part of the plan, including workshops for home-school partnerships.
The effort is also collaborative. The Blueprint has attracted an array of stakeholders including the Vermont Department of Education, the Vermont Superintendents’ Association, the Vermont Council of Special Education Administrators, the Vermont Principals’ Association, the Vermont-NEA, the Vermont School Boards’ Association and the Vermont Business Roundtable.
Limited resources, difficult choices
All around the state schools are trying to meet the standards of No Child Left Behind and its demand for “annual yearly progress” (AYP) measured on national and state tests. There are schools with high proportions of children qualifying for the free and reduced lunch program that have high scores on reading and other tests. (In some cases, very high scores — Montgomery Elementary School, with 63 percent of students in poverty, had the highest overall percent of proficient students, 90 percent, on the most recent town by town NECAP scores, and the highest percentage of proficient poor students, 88.8 percent.)
Even with the nation’s highest per pupil spending, many Vermont schools are “failing” by No Child Left Behind standards, and the state is asking for a waiver from the federal government to avoid the penalties that come with not meeting AYP goals.
Education and political leaders are pursuing a highly targeted strategy for pre-K programs to address the achievement gap, but this will mean more money must be spent on early childhood education. The governor has said he supports “universal pre-K,” but his proposals for “expanding school choice” and allowing high school juniors and seniors to take college courses with money following the student, could run head on into the public’s resistance to spending any more on education. To move ahead with the universal pre-K initiative, the Legislature will have to remove the current 10-hour cap on the number of hours a school district can offer preschool programs. And there is the hurdle of getting districts to expand these services without making them mandatory.
All this will cost money. One superintendent, speaking off the record, said, “Yes, it is all about poverty, but is Vermont in the mood to fund these promises around support of early reading?”
