Closing the (Pandemic?) Reading Gap in Our Schools: We Need to Link Sound Assessment with Strategic Intervention
How One New Federal Status Report (and Three Popular Press Articles) May Lead Educators Astray
Dear Colleagues,
Introduction: The Newest Status Report on Students’ (Pandemic) Literacy Progress and Achievement
While technical reports and popular press articles on students’ academic and social-emotional status are released virtually every week, it seems that those involving literacy and reading has been more prevalent the past few weeks—especially as the beginning of the new school year approaches.
In fact, we are now receiving national data from this past year on how many students are “behind” in literacy. . . along with lots of opinions on the interventions that best “close the achievement gap.”
Some of these national results were published this past week (August 4, 2022) by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)—the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing the data from and status of our nation’s schools.
The NCES Report is based on information collected in June (2022) through the School Pulse Panel, an ongoing study that surveys the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic from a national sample of elementary, middle, high, and combined-grade public schools. While the study repeats some survey questions over time to analyze trends, it also asks some questions just once to get a “snapshot” in a specific area.
In the latest series of School Pulse Panel reports, the focus has been on students’ learning recovery, summer learning, staff vacancies, COVID-19 mitigation strategies, learning modes offered by schools, and student and staff quarantine prevalence.
This Blog will discuss only the results related to students’ learning loss and recovery.
[CLICK HERE to Link to the School Pulse Panel Reports]
Here, the following conclusions were reported:
- Public school leaders estimated that nearly half of their students (50%) began the 2021-22 school year behind grade level in at least one academic subject, which is 14 points higher than the percentage of students (36%) they estimated to be behind grade level in at least one academic subject at the beginning of a typical school year before the pandemic began.
Of those schools that reported having students starting the 2021-22 school year behind grade level in at least one academic subject, 64% believed that the COVID-19 pandemic played a major role as to why students were behind grade level at the beginning of the 2021-22 school year.
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- Public school leaders estimated that just over one-third of their students (36%) ended the 2021-22 school year behind grade level in at least one academic subject.
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- Public schools enacted a variety of strategies to support pandemic-related learning recovery for their students this year, including additional instruction, assessments, and peripheral supports.
The most common types of additional instruction used by public schools were remedial instruction (72%) and high-dosage tutoring (56%).
More than three-quarters of public schools used diagnostic (79%) and formative (76%) assessments.
The most common types of peripheral supports addressed student mental health and trauma (72%) and provided teacher professional development specifically focused on learning recovery (51%).
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- According to an analysis in the74, almost 90% of respondents to the NCES survey blamed continuing pandemic-related disruptions, including quarantines and staff absences, for the lack of progress (see the Figure below).
At the same time, according to the 74, limited efforts to ramp up tutoring programs could also be a factor even though more than half of School Pulse Panel schools reported using high-dosage tutoring to help students make up for lost learning, and many offered tutoring as part of their summer learning and enrichment programs this year.
The NCES survey assumes that there is hard, objective, reliable, and valid academic assessment data backing up the survey results. If used, some of this hard data is probably based on the interim or formative assessment results (e.g., from the NWEA, iReady, Renaissance STAR, or MAP tests) collected and analyzed by each school this past academic year.
Regardless, from a national perspective, the NCES survey results confirm what has already been reported. Many of the interim/formative assessment publishers of the tool
The Questions for each individual school, however, are:
- Which specific students are functioning below grade-level expectations—for example, in literacy?
- How far below expectations are they, and—even more important—what literacy skills have they mastered (and at what grade level), not mastered (and at what grade level), and at what grade level are they capably decoding and reading fluently, while also comprehending text?
- For the students with significant skill gaps, when did these literacy struggles begin (i.e., did they pre-date the pandemic or not)?
- For these same students, why are the gaps present (e.g., due to lack of instruction or poor curriculum, due to poor or ineffective instruction or inconsistently-delivered curriculum, due to student learning or motivational gaps, or other (or combined) reasons?
- Based on the diagnostic and root cause assessments (as immediately above) with these same students, what are the strategic interventions needed to effectively and efficiently recalibrate their literacy learning, mastery, and proficiency?
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My experience in schools across the country suggests that:
- Many schools are not diagnostically assessing the root causes to explain why individual students are significantly behind in reading/literacy;
- They are not comparing and contrasting these students’ pre-pandemic versus current-pandemic status and progress; and
- They are not linking the individual student diagnostic assessment results to multi-tiered, high probability of success strategic literacy interventions that are implemented and evaluated with appropriate levels of fidelity and intensity.
Indeed, many schools are implementing large-scale (and often incorrect) interventions with large groups of students before ever determining the length, intensity, specificity, and root causes of their reading difficulties.
Using a medical analogy, this is similar to medicating—before any individual diagnostic assessments—a large group of patients who have the same surface-level symptoms (e.g., a fever) with the same medication to then see which patients are still sick after “the intervention.”
The problem is that this approach delays and/or changes the correct treatment for some patients. Hence, some may get sicker, some may become resistant to the first medication, some may experience additional medical complications, and some may die.
Literacy Gaps are not Closed by Popularity Polls or Either/Or Interventions
Triggered by the NCES study, Education Week published an article (August 4, 2022), “Tutoring or Remediation: Which Learning Recovery Strategy Is Most Popular?”
While the title accurately represents some of the NCES results, it is critical to note that (obviously) (a) interventions should not be based on how popular they appear or the testimonials they accrue; and (b) given the individual nature of individual student’s history, status, challenges, and psychoeducational make-up, educators should not be choosing between “one intervention or the other.”
Among the most important points in the Education Week article are the following:
New federal data provide a glimpse into what strategies schools have used to support learning recovery, and which ones school leaders think are most effective.
The results show that while some research-tested models—such as intensive tutoring—have become popular, other strategies touted by prominent education groups haven’t gained as much traction. And schools report that the learning recovery methods they have been using have had mixed effects. That may partly be because both student and staff quarantines and absences continued to disrupt time in classrooms this past year, and schools reported high levels of teacher burnout.
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Even so, these data show that (the most popular strategies used by) schools trying to enact academic recovery plans are: (a) Remedial instruction—in which teachers go back to prior grades’ content to teach skills or concepts that students have missed; and (b) High-dosage tutoring—one-on-one or small group instruction offered three or more times a week.
Among academic interventions that the NCES schools reported using, they reported high-dosage tutoring moved the needle the most: 43 percent said that the strategy was either “extremely” or “very” effective.
Still, that means that more than half of schools using tutoring found it only “moderately” or “slightly” effective, or not effective at all.
For tutoring to have the highest impact, it needs to be aligned with the rest of the instruction that students are getting throughout the day—and that’s not always the case in practice, Cato Czupryk (a vice president for practices, diagnostics, and impact at independent consulting firm TNTP) said. For example, a 3rd grade student might be working on arrays in math class but a 1st grade skill related to fluency in tutoring. “If I don’t see the connection between those two things, then they’re not going to be as effective as they could,” she said.
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More popular among schools was remedial learning: going back to past years’ content. Seventy-two percent of the NCES schools said they used this strategy. This is in contrast to the 39 percent that used accelerated learning, a strategy that attempts to keep moving students forward while shoring up skills and content that they might have missed in previous grades at the same time.
Some states, districts, and many education advocacy organizations have promoted accelerated learning as a pandemic recovery strategy. The goal is to make sure that every student still has access to grade-level content, even if they need additional support.
Advocates of this approach say that it’s a way to drive equity in instruction. When students are in remedial lessons, their peers move on, widening the gap between the two groups. Studies have also found that teachers are less likely to give students of color, and particularly Black students, rigorous, grade-level work. Acceleration, its proponents say, can address both of these issues.
But these NCES data show that remedial instruction is more popular—and that schools rate acceleration and remediation as similarly effective.
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Once again, we hope that the NCES results are back by hard reliable and valid data. . . but this needs to be demonstrated.
We also (as above) are concerned that some educators will interpret this article as suggesting (a) a fixed, “one-or-the-other” remedial instruction versus high-dose tutoring versus accelerated learning choice for their students and schools; (b) that decisions should be based on popularity, rather than objective data-driven proof; and (c) that these decisions should be first made on a group or cohort basis in the absence of individual student-specific diagnostic, root cause analyses.
Throwing the Baby Out With the Bath Water
The last popular press article discussing literacy that we will review today was published last month in a well-regarded national educational publication.
Quite honestly, I do not want to give it much attention as the main premise of this Op-Ed piece was that—in order to maximize their success—we need to systemically delay formal reading instruction until children are six or seven years old.
Without critiquing the author and his/her background, I must state that I was unconvinced by both the arguments, and the fact that the piece did not include the actual citations of the references sprinkled within.
However, more important is the fact that many students successfully learn to read formally at the preschool, kindergarten, and first grade levels. . . so why would we deny them that joy and privilege?
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At the same time, I am sensitive to the Op-Ed author’s desire to decrease the number of students who do not learn to read as quickly as others, to decrease their need for “remedial” instruction, and to decrease their feelings of failure due to standards and instruction that are often “one size fits all.”
Critically, there are significant psychoeducational differences in students’ readiness, and speed of mastery relative to how quickly they formally learn how to read. . .
And our educational systems do not do a good job of accommodating these individual differences.
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In this context, I do want to revisit a past suggestion of mine:
That, because students learn how to read at different developmental speeds, we should not be using the “end of third grade” as the time-marker for when students should be “on grade level” in reading.
This is especially true now due to the effects of the pandemic.
But this was true even before the pandemic—even as many states passed (developmentally inappropriate) laws requiring students to be retained in third grade when not “proficiently” performing on grade-level in reading at that time.
My recommendation is to move this criterion to the end of Grade 4 at the earliest, and to require—as in many states’ dyslexia regulations—diagnostic assessments for unsuccessful students by Third Grade, complemented by well-designed and implemented strategic interventions for at least two years.
As states are currently re-evaluating and re-regulating their scientific approaches to reading instruction, this would be a perfect time to change any “Third Grade Retention” states’ regulations in this area.
Six Interdependent Blueprints for Closing the Literacy Gap
For those who follow this Blog, you know that I always pair my critiques of different psychoeducational policies, practices, and procedures with proven, evidence-based approaches that I have field-tested and demonstrated as successful in my nationwide school consultations over the past 40 years.
For today, I am going to refer back and reference a Blog that I wrote on March 14, 2020 titled,
Underachieving, Unresponsive, Unsuccessful, Disabled, and Failing Readers. Diagnostic Assessment Must Link to Intervention: If We Don’t Know “Why,” We Can’t Know “What”
This Blog describes in detail six interdependent evidence-based Blueprints that are instrumental in helping schools to close students’ literacy gaps. . . whether they existed before or due to the pandemic (or to determine which one is which).
These Blueprints are:
- Blueprint 1: The Principles Underlying Effective Educational Policy
- Blueprint 2: A Psychoeducational Science-to-Practice Blueprint for Effective Literacy Instruction and Multi-Tiered Services and Supports
- Blueprint 3: Understanding the Instructional Environment and Its Contribution to Student Reading Proficiency
- Blueprint 4. The Data-based Problem-Solving Blueprint for Struggling and Failing Readers
- Blueprint 5. The Seven High-Hit Reasons Why Students Struggling or Fail in Reading
- Blueprint 6: The Multi-tiered Positive Academic Supports and Services Continuum
While I encourage everyone to read the original Blog, let me detail Blueprint 6 as I believe it is particularly pertinent to the current Blog’s discussion of the NCES Report and the three articles reviewed above.
Blueprint 6: The Positive Academic Supports and Services (PASS) Continuum
Grounded by effective, differentiated classroom instruction, Universal Design for Learning strategies, and well-designed progress monitoring and evaluation, the Positive Academic Supports and Services (PASS) continuum identifies services, supports, strategies, interventions, and programs—at different, student-needed levels of intensity—to address the root causes when students are struggling or failing to master different facets of literacy.
The PASS continuum consists of the following (see also the Figure below):
- Assistive Supports
- Remediation
- Accommodation
- Curricular Modification
- Targeted Intervention
- Compensation
These instruction- and intervention-related components are briefly described below.
Assistive Supports involve specialized equipment, technologies, medical/physical devices, and other resources that help students, especially those with significant disabilities, to learn and function—for example, physically, behaviorally, academically, and in all areas of communication. Assistive supports can be used anywhere along the PASS continuum.
Remediation involves strategies that teach students specific, usually prerequisite, skills to help them master broader curricular, scope and sequence, or benchmark objectives.
Accommodations change conditions that support student learning—such as the classroom setting or set-up, how and where instruction is presented, the length of instruction, the length or timeframe for assignments, or how students are expected to respond to questions or complete assignments. Accommodations can range from the informal ones implemented by a classroom teacher to the formal accommodations required by and specified on a 504 Plan (named for the federal statute that covers these services).
Modifications involve changes in curricular content—its scope, depth, breadth, or complexity.
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Remediations, accommodations, and modifications typically are implemented in general education classrooms by general education teachers, although they may involve consultations with other colleagues or specialists to facilitate effective implementation. At times, these strategies may be implemented in “pull-out,” “pull-in,” or co-taught instructional skill groups so that larger groups of students with the same needs can be helped.
If target students do not respond to the strategically-chosen approaches within these three areas, or if their needs are more significant or complex, approaches from the next two PASS areas may be needed:
Strategic Interventions focus on changing students’ specific academic skills or strategies, their motivation, or their ability to comprehend, apply, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate academic content and material. Strategic Interventions typically involve multidisciplinary assessments, as well as formal Academic Intervention or Individualized Education plans (AIPs or IEPs).
Compensatory Approaches help students to compensate for disabilities that cannot be changed or overcome (e.g., being deaf, blind, or having physical or central nervous system/neurological disabilities). Often combined with assistive supports, compensatory approaches help students to accomplish learning outcomes, even though they cannot learn or demonstrate specific skills within those outcomes. For example, for students who will never learn to decode sounds and words due to neurological dysfunctions, the compensatory use of audio or web-based instruction and (electronic) books can still help them to access information from text and become knowledgeable and literate. Both assistive supports and compensatory approaches are “positive academic supports” that typically are provided through IEPs.
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Critically, there are numerous components and strategies embedded in each of the components (and Blueprints) above. Only through a comprehensive professional development experience—that includes using real case studies to demonstrate how to link assessment to specific multi-tiered services, supports, strategies, and interventions—can school personnel truly learn, build, and sustain the skill and capacity needed to address the different levels of academically struggling students.
Beyond this, while there is a sequential nature to the components within the PASS continuum, it is a strategic and fluid— not a lock-step— blueprint. That is, the supports and services are utilized based on students’ needs and the intensity of these needs.
For example, if reliable and valid assessments indicate that a student needs immediate accommodations to be successful in the classroom, then there is no need to implement remediations or modifications just to “prove” that they were not successful. In addition, there are times when students will receive different supports or services on the continuum simultaneously. Indeed, some students will need both modifications and assistive supports in order to be successful. Thus, the supports and services within the PASS are strategically applied to individual students.
Beyond this, while it is most advantageous to deliver needed supports and services within the general education classroom (i.e., the least restrictive environment), other instructional options could include co-teaching (e.g., by general and special education teachers in a general education classroom), pull-in services (e.g., by instructional support or special education teachers in a general education classroom), short-term pull-out services (e.g., by instructional support teachers focusing on specific academic skills and outcomes), or more intensive pull-out services (e.g., by instructional support or special education teachers). These staff and setting decisions are based on the intensity of students’ skill-specific needs, their response to previous instructional or intervention supports and services, and the level of instructional or intervention expertise needed.
Ultimately, the intervention goal is to provide students with early, intensive, and successful services and supports that are identified through a data-based problem-solving process, and implemented with needed integrity and intensity.
Summary
The August 4, 2022 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) School Pulse Panel report provides survey results quantifying how many students ended the just-past school year with academic skill gaps. This confirms what has already been reported by many of the interim/formative assessment publishers of tools like the NWEA, iReady, Renaissance STAR, or the MAP.
Rather than “chasing symptoms” and moving prematurely to “intervention,” this Blog recommends that every school first ask the following questions:
- Which specific students are functioning below grade-level expectations—for example, in literacy?
- How far below expectations are they, and—even more important—what literacy skills have they mastered (and at what grade level), not mastered (and at what grade level), and at what grade level are they capably decoding and reading fluently, while also comprehending text?
- For the students with significant skill gaps, when did these literacy struggles begin (i.e., did they pre-date the pandemic or not)?
- For these same students, why are the gaps present (e.g., due to lack of instruction or poor curriculum, due to poor or ineffective instruction or inconsistently-delivered curriculum, due to student learning or motivational gaps, or other (or combined) reasons?
- Based on the diagnostic and root cause assessments (as immediately above) with these same students, what are the strategic interventions needed to effectively and efficiently recalibrate their literacy learning, mastery, and proficiency?
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These questions are important because, in our experience:
- Many schools are not diagnostically assessing the root causes to explain why individual students are significantly behind in reading/literacy;
- They are not comparing and contrasting these students’ pre-pandemic versus current-pandemic status and progress; and
- They are not linking the individual student diagnostic assessment results to multi-tiered, high probability of success strategic literacy interventions that are implemented and evaluated with appropriate levels of fidelity and intensity.
In fact, many schools are implementing large-scale (and often incorrect) interventions with large groups of students before ever determining the length, intensity, specificity, and root causes of their reading difficulties.
Based on our critique of three related articles, we additionally note that (a) literacy interventions should not be based on how popular they appear or the testimonials they accrue; and (b) given the individual nature of individual student’s history, status, challenges, and psychoeducational make-up, educators should not be choosing between one intervention (e.g., remedial instruction versus high-dose tutoring versus accelerated learning) or the other for school-wide implementation.
Finally, we stress that there are significant psychoeducational differences in students’ readiness and speed of mastery relative to how quickly they formally learn how to read. . . and that schools need to have the differentiated, instructional flexibility to accommodate to these differences—rather than deliver a “one size fits all” program and intervention process.
In this context, we recommended that states (and district and schools) not use an “end of third grade” time-marker for when students should be “on grade level” in reading. Indeed, we suggest, especially as they introduce and implement new laws or regulations for dyslexia and (separately) to ensure more scientifically-based literacy instruction, that states change existing statutes that require students to be retained in third grade when not “proficiently” performing on grade-level in reading at that time.
In fact, our recommendation is to move this criterion to the end of Grade 4 at the earliest, and to require—as in many states’ current dyslexia regulations—diagnostic assessments for unsuccessful students by third grade, complemented by well-designed and implemented strategic interventions for at least two years.
Relative to these strategic interventions, we referenced six interdependent evidence-based Blueprints—from a previous, linked Blog—that are instrumental in helping schools close students’ literacy gaps. . . whether due to or existing before the pandemic. We then provided details on Blueprint 6 which involves a multi-tiered continuum of literacy services, supports, strategies, and interventions for struggling students.
The six interdependent Blueprints are:
- Blueprint 1: The Principles Underlying Effective Educational Policy
- Blueprint 2: A Psychoeducational Science-to-Practice Blueprint for Effective Literacy Instruction and Multi-Tiered Services and Supports
- Blueprint 3: Understanding the Instructional Environment and Its Contribution to Student Reading Proficiency
- Blueprint 4. The Data-based Problem-Solving Blueprint for Struggling and Failing Readers
- Blueprint 5. The Seven High-Hit Reasons Why Students Struggling or Fail in Reading
- Blueprint 6: The Multi-tiered Positive Academic Supports and Services Continuum
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I hope that this Blog has provided helpful information on how to effectively conceptualize the closing-the-gap literacy instruction needed in today’s schools—especially addressing students who are underachieving, unresponsive, unsuccessful, disabled, and failing.
Clearly, this is a complex area of education, instruction, and intervention.
But that’s the point. Too many are over-simplifying this complexity, and the result has been the continued failure of thousands of students who are being retained, not mastering essential literacy skills, and/or graduating (or dropping out of) high school as functional illiterates.
I appreciate, as always, the time that you invest in reading these Blogs, and your dedication to your students, your colleagues, and the educational process.
Please feel free to send me your thoughts and questions.
And please know that I continue to work with new schools and districts across the country as much as my schedule permits. If interested, send me an e-mail, and let’s set up an initial Zoom consultation.
Best,
