Poverty is not destiny, writes Chad Aldeman on The 74. Nationwide, "low-income fourth graders read an average of two to three grade levels below their higher-income peers," but it's possible to find school districts that are outperforming expectations.
His analysis compares the expected reading proficiency rate for third graders, based on the poverty rate, and how students are doing. It's interactive, and you can pick your state or school district to see where reading is being taught well. The gold circles show districts in the top 5 percent for the state.
Based on the local poverty rate, 39 percent of third graders should read proficiently in Steubenville City, Ohio, the analysis predicts. Ninety-nine percent in the Rust Belt city are proficient readers in third grade.
Steubenville, a stand-out for years, adopted a structured, scripted, phonics-based model developed by Johns Hopkins researchers called Success for All in 2000. “We have not jumped on and off every bandwagon of reforms. We found something we felt was working and stuck with it,” said Joseph Nocera, principal of Wells Academy in 2012.
Karin Chenoweth identified Steubenville as an extraordinary district in 2016 and included it in her 2021 book, Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement.
“Before SFA, we heard the term ‘nonreader’,” said Diane Cassucio, Wells Academy facilitator, when the school was named Ohio's best elementary school. "But now we don't hear it."
I reported on Success for All in several San Jose schools back in the last century. Students were grouped by performance level, rather than grade, so teachers didn't have to "differentiate" instruction. All teachers and administrators taught a 90-minute reading class at the start of the day, which enabled small group sizes. Reading proficiency -- and behavior -- improved significantly.
Other gold-circle districts in Aldeman's analysis don't do as well, but they beat the odds. For example, 44 percent of Dearborn, Michigan third graders read proficiently, compared to an expected rate of 17 percent.
Research-backed reading instruction improved reading proficiency -- and math scores in her low-performing, low-income New York district, writes Tanya Wilson-Thevanesan on The 74. "The program we crafted was rooted in phonemic awareness, phonics, blending of sounds, comprehension, evidence-based teaching methods and, perhaps most important, objective assessments to truly understand where our young readers were struggling."
As a math teacher I'll state categorically that teaching children to read is the civil rights issue of our time.
Given that small, rural schools used to be able to teach reading fairly reliably up until about the 1970s, it doesn't seem that the ability to teach reading to poor children is limited to an elite few teachers. Lots of moms used to teach their own kids to read before they entered school at all.
What we have now is a lot more parents with little or no interest in their own kid's education ("that's the school's problem"), a culture that no longer values learning, politicians paying lip service to education, and teacher's unions who consider kids only after teachers. Hard to see how a situation like that can be turned around.