The Education Gadfly Weekly

Better late than never, New York state has stirred itself to change the way reading is taught in its 800-plus local school districts. Last month, Governor Kathy Hochul announced a plan to spend (an admittedly paltry) $10 million to train 20,000 teachers in the “science of reading,” including a “microcredentialing” program via the state’s public universities. Hochul’s proposed “Back to Basics” initiative will, she insists, return the state’s classrooms to scientifically proven techniques.

Assuming the legislature grants her modest request, New York will be the latest state—and among the very last—to put the reading instruction offered in its public schools under the microscope. A study conducted last year by the Albert Shanker Institute found that New York was one of only five states to have taken no action in the last few years either to encourage or require “evidence-based” reading instruction. That’s not to suggest that state actions cause swift changes in reading outcomes. Classroom practice is notoriously slow to change, and there’s a wide gulf between earnest efforts by lawmakers to improve student outcomes and what actually transpires when teachers take over, much less what kids end up learning. But credit to Hochul and New York for recognizing they have some catching up to do.

The Reading League, a national educator-led advocacy organization that happens to be based in upstate New York, is “cautiously optimistic” about the plan and is offering Hochul some good advice in rolling out the initiative. For starters, they suggest dropping the “Back to Basics” branding, which might be good politics, but is instructionally tone-deaf. Dr. Heidi Beverine-Curry, the group’s chief academic officer, notes that there’s never been a time when sound reading practice was widely understood, adopted, and implemented in U.S. elementary classrooms, hence no golden age to go back to. She’s also concerned that “Back to Basics” could have the unintended effect of furthering a common and unhelpful narrative that the “science of reading” begins and ends with phonics.

The Reading League further advises New York “not move too quickly” toward curriculum adoptions, noting that even a high-quality curriculum is unlikely to move the needle when teachers lack adequate training to implement it properly. Here I’ll register mild disagreement. This issue involves both chickens and eggs. The science of reading should be a standard and uncontroversial piece of teacher training and professional development, but for those (like Empire State teachers) coming late to the party, there’s no reason that professional learning cannot be embedded in curriculum adoption. Beverine-Curry isn’t contending that educators need to be fully versed in the science of reading before adopting curriculum, but “we’ve seen school districts make very quick [curriculum] choices, then think, ‘That's it. The work is done.’” Trainers hired by curriculum publishers, she adds, “aren’t experts in the science of reading. The trainers are experts in the product, and those are two different things.” Fair enough.

But I definitely share her and the Reading League’s disdain for Hochul’s proposed “microcredential” in the science of reading. Evidence-aligned reading instruction “should be the center of teacher preparation, particularly for elementary school and special education teachers and school administrators,” she insists, “not an add-on.” Hear, hear.

My own advice to Hochul would be to follow the lead of curriculum-based reforms pioneered by a former New York City teacher, John White, when he led Louisiana’s state education department. White and his team used curriculum adoption to drive changes in classroom practice, providing incentives for their state’s districts and schools to adopt and implement a coherent, high-quality English language arts (ELA) curriculum, then use that curriculum as the hook on which everything else hung: assessment, professional development, and teacher training. The goal, as one of White’s lieutenants put it, was to “make the right choice the easy choice.” In other words, they recognized that high-quality curriculum could drive better practice, rather than the other way around.

Buried in the Reading League’s feedback to Hochul is an intriguing and potentially game-changing announcement that should spark interest and attention far beyond the Empire State. This Spring, the organization plans to roll out a series of “Curriculum Navigation Reports,” a collection of reviews and evaluations of the most widely adopted and implemented reading programs. Given that the Reading League is comprised of veteran educators, not bureaucrats, activists, or vendors, and that it claims chapters in thirty-three states, those reviews should have instant credibility among front-line educators and administrators, and help push curriculum to the forefront of efforts to improve student outcomes.

Until recently, curriculum has been almost an afterthought. To be sure, there’s been no shortage of efforts to promote the adoption of “high quality instructional materials” (HQIM), but thoughtful critics have long noted that, for any number of reasons, much of it ends ups underutilized or sitting untouched on classroom shelves. Efforts to evaluate curriculum, such as EdReports, while praiseworthy, have tended to focus too narrowly on alignment with ELA standards while paying insufficient attention to text selection in published curricula, or the need to build background knowledge, which aids comprehension. A standards-alignment lens can also fail to account for what the Reading League calls “red flags”—non-aligned practices in word recognition, language comprehension, reading comprehension, writing, and assessment. The anticipated curriculum reviews promise to raise the ante by evaluating the most commonly used ELA curricula through a more sophisticated set of criteria.

I’ll be waiting eagerly for those evaluations. Here’s hoping a lot of school districts are, too, both in the Empire State and far beyond.

Last year, Colorado’s legislature established an “Accountability, Accreditation, Student Performance, and Resource Inequity Task Force”—a twenty-six-member behemoth charged with, among other things, making recommendations on the future of the state’s K–12 assessment and accountability system. The group has been meeting monthly since August and, to date, has been unable to overcome gaping philosophical differences as fundamental as the proper role, if any, of standardized tests in measuring academic performance. The committee’s dysfunction comes as little surprise, however, as its membership is almost evenly split between pro- and anti-reform camps.

Consider November’s nearly six-hour meeting. During a presentation from the Colorado Department of Education, the group reviewed a scatterplot showing the relationship, or lack thereof, between a school’s population of multilingual students and its accountability rating from the state. Other charts generally showed “weak” correlations between a school’s rating and key dimensions such as poverty, race, and higher percentages of special education students. Surely, this should have been received as encouraging news. Educators, in Colorado at least, must be doing something right if non-native English speakers and other marginalized groups are not unduly pulling down a school’s accountability mark. Chalk one up for demography not determining destiny, right?

Nope. This information, and what it suggested—that a school’s accountability score is not simply a mirror of race and wealth—was deeply unwelcome to the testing and accountability skeptics in the room. As if to underscore his dyspepsia, one member made known in no uncertain terms that the state’s facts would not get in the way of his opinion:

When you look at all of the talk around achievement gaps, when you look at the graduation rates, when you look at SAT scores, when you look at a whole host of things, a very clear picture is painted that not having your first language be English does create an additional challenge. I just wouldn’t want anybody to walk away from this [new state] data thinking, “Oh, your second language learners don’t have any disadvantage…”

In other words, never mind the encouraging data, let’s focus on the fact that English learner (EL) students are disadvantaged. And by extension, there’s little, if anything, that schools and districts can do about it.

Setting aside the findings from an external audit which found Colorado’s accountability system to be “reasonable and appropriate,” it has been criticized for lax oversight and little actual accountability for results. The task force has a rare opportunity to strengthen it, which is what needs to happen, but is instead bogged down in discord and just as likely to weaken or discard it. Indeed, a well-designed accountability system resting atop standardized tests has in fact been shown to help marginalized students.

To be clear, ELs and poor kids do tend to score lower on the state assessment, but the good news is that—according to the state’s accountability framework, the lion’s share of which is informed by growth rather than proficiency—these students are making at least as much, if not more, progress than their peers over time. Even so, the forces of resistance and repeal are bent on throwing out the accountability system altogether by either eliminating the use of state tests or by radically diluting the test results with more gameable indicators and rendering them utterly meaningless. This despite the fact that student performance largely remains below pre-pandemic levels.

Set up to fail, the committee is scheduled to continue its taxpayer supported navel-gazing through the summer. As former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels once observed:

Among the weeds choking out growth and good government are the hundreds of boards, commissions, and advisory committees that have sprouted over the years. They devour time, money, and energy far beyond any real contribution they make. All address worthy goals, but often we could get more real work done if we spent less time conferring and more time working.

Colorado’s accountability task force certainly fits the bill. The outstanding question is what the group’s non-binding recommendations will mean to the future of accountability in the Centennial State.

This is where the political calculus figures in. The task force is charged with delivering an interim report by March and a final report by mid-November. Some believe it’s good that the task force is treading water. Dysfunction is our friend, they say, and, given the badly eroded condition of results-based accountability in Colorado and nationally, perhaps it’s best to avoid making things even worse. On the other hand, if and when the state legislature gets back around to the issue—which wouldn’t be until the 2025 session at the earliest—accountability opponents might argue that school reformers were given a chance with this body and failed to put anything on the table. In fact, an inconclusive report might be exactly what testing skeptics need to finally tip the scales in their favor.

All of this is a far cry from “The Colorado Way”: painstaking conversation and compromise with the goal of finding common ground and win-win solutions. Instead, what we have with this task force is—despite troubling signs—some members digging in their heels and sensing an opportunity to deep-six the accountability framework altogether. The silver lining is that Colorado Governor Jared Polis has been strongly supportive of testing and accountability. But come 2027, in a post-Polis world (i.e., the end of his second and final term), all bets will be off.

As the population of English learners (ELs) in grades K–12 grows, so do the challenges school districts face in identifying gifted students and putting in place appropriate enrichment and acceleration opportunities for them. Often students who do not speak English as their first language are disadvantaged because parents, teachers, and standardized testing regularly fail to recognize their talents as a result of language barriers, cultural differences, and interrupted educational experiences.

Language and cultural barriers for ELs are one part of the challenge. There is a long history of inequality in gifted education, with disproportionate identification of underserved populations, including Hispanic and Black students. These student groups continue to be underrepresented compared to their counterparts, and they often have limited access to gifted education, Advanced Placement (AP), and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses.

More than 10 percent, or more than 5 million, of all public school students were ELs at last count. In twelve states—Alaska, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Texas, and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia—EL students represented more than 10 percent of the school population. Spanish is the home language for more than 75 percent of these students, with others speaking Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese, and Russian.

While Pennsylvania is not among these states, there are certain areas that see a large influx of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. One is where I work: the State College Area School District (SCASD). Located in central Pennsylvania, SCASD is unique because it serves communities surrounding Penn State University, which brings families from diverse cultures into our district, and is home to migrant families, including refugees, who have moved into the community.

Many districts rely on parent and teacher referrals, or base access to gifted programs solely on IQ or standardized testing, but SCASD have taken a different tack: universal screening. Pennsylvania law requires universal screening. However, because universal screening is an unfunded mandate, many districts do not prioritize it or they do not apply best practices, such as maximizing data to get a true holistic view of the child.

At SCASD, we believe the investment in universal screening is important for our school population. Universal screening enables us to provide all students with an opportunity to demonstrate their giftedness. More importantly, it is creating conversations around increasing access to gifted programs among students who may not have qualified via more conventional assessment methods. We also leverage other ways to increase equity in gifted and advanced academic programming, such as better understanding individual students, including their non-verbal skills, and considering other extenuating or masking factors.

Best practices for improving equity

If your school district is interested in ensuring that all students have equitable access to gifted programming, there are three best practices you should consider.

1. Evaluate both achievement (what a student knows at that moment in time) and ability data (readiness to learn at that moment in time) to get a complete student profile.

SCASD believes that looking only at achievement data or taking parent requests is unfair. Instead, we are among the 5.9 percent of schools nationally that use universal screening as a means for improving diversity of gifted programs. We also consider other potential masking of gifted ability to gain a better understanding of the student in order to determine whether they qualify. Though we do consider local norms in our screening process, local norms may be skewed higher, as they are in our district; however, this should not eliminate conversations around the value and importance of local norms—especially in areas with larger populations of students from marginalized populations.

In our district, a team of educators work together in identifying gifted students. While they do consider IQ, they also take a closer look at those students who do not meet Pennsylvania’s 130 IQ threshold, factoring in demonstrated and standardized achievement, including results of the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT) and Measures of Academic Progress (MAP). They also take into account how students are performing in peer groups; their demonstrated abilities; early skill development; rates of acquisition and retention; other factors, such as if they are EL or have free or reduced-price lunch; and race. SCASD, along with our partner Riverside Insights, is piloting use of the CogAT Complete to see if the additional data points for verbal and non-verbal skills will help students stand out more than in the shorter CogAT screener.

2. Be inclusive of many languages within your district.

Since our school district is a cultural melting pot as a result of its proximity to Penn State, we have students and families that speak almost fifty different languages, some of which are not even recognized by the state. Having such an array of languages spoken in the schools makes universal screening using tools like CogAT imperative because they can give insights into verbal, non-verbal, and quantification skills.

In terms of testing, many researchers suggest that only non-verbal assessments are the most equitable in making gifted identification. However, my research suggests that, in our district, culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students may be missed if only relying on non-verbal assessments. Though non-verbal assessments are critical to those who may not have a full command of the English language when tested in grades three and above, the more data schools have in seeing the “full picture,” the more likely students, including CLDs, won’t be missed.

3. Expand enrichment and acceleration opportunities.

Promising students should not be held back just because they do not meet requirements for, or there is not enough funding to expand, gifted programs. In these cases, school districts should consider other ways to provide enrichment and support. This could be basic subject or grade level acceleration—one of the easiest and cheapest ways to support gifted students. This approach could leverage virtual, asynchronous, and/or in-school instruction, or include independent studies and telescope programs in which students take two grades worth of content, like sixth and seventh grade science, in the same school year. Restrictive IQ scores for gifted identification can preclude students with lower IQ scores but who have talent and skills in areas such as math.

School districts should also consider that not all gifted students look the same. We are seeing more twice-exceptional (2e) students who may be in special education programs because they are autistic or have emotional issues, but who have high IQs and excel in certain subjects. If we focus on their deficits, we are not fully meeting their needs. So having programs in place that provide individualized supports, including enrichment and accelerated learning for the subjects in which these students excel, is important for supporting the whole child, while also still supporting the child’s disability.

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I will always advocate for equitable outcomes for all students, especially those who are from marginalized communities. In fact, after a review of three schools that piloted the CogAT Complete, of thirty-five students who had demographic data—including whether they were English learners, Black, Hispanic, or Multiracial—20 percent had at least one standard age score of 126 (our district screening minimum) or higher. In fact, four of these students had a score in verbal and/or quantification subtests that met that minimum, despite having non-verbal scores lower than the cut-off. By relying solely on one type of assessment or subtest, students from marginalized populations may be missed from gifted universal screening procedures.

A new research report examines the confluence of career and technical education (CTE) and the academic trajectory of high school students with learning disabilities (SWLD). The impetus for such an investigation is the existence of two separate “leaky pipelines”: large numbers of students with disabilities who fail to transition successfully to postsecondary education and employment, and a projected dearth of new recruits for numerous STEM jobs. The research team, led by Ohio State University’s Jay Plasman, was looking for a possible approach to sealing both leaks—hoping to find that high school CTE courses propelled SWLDs into further STEM education, where employers could find a previously-overlooked group of prospective recruits—and get those pipelines flowing more strongly. The study’s findings are inconclusive, but point in positive directions.

Primary data come from the High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS), which followed a nationally-representative cohort of students who entered ninth grade in 2009 through high school and into postsecondary education and early career, ending in 2019. The robust dataset includes full course-taking histories (including grades and credits earned), as well as detailed demographic information. The researchers narrowed their sample down to 870 HSLS students whose parents responded affirmatively when asked if they had ever been told by a doctor or other professional that their child had a specific learning disability. This identification method—used because the HSLS administrative data on IEPs is incomplete—has been employed successfully in prior research.

Course-taking data were narrowed to those classes with an engineering or technology focus (called E-CTE here and comprising such things as computer aided design, coding, and laboratory research). Prior research suggests that the hands-on and practical instructional aspects of such courses align with recommended learning strategies for SWLDs and thus support such students’ educational pursuits. (A direct connection between such courses and related postsecondary education and career pathways also underpins this research.)

The researchers ran several different analytical models to determine how E-CTE coursetaking in high school links to two specific college preparation outcomes—math SAT scores and dual credit course participation—and to two specific college transition outcomes—FAFSA completion and application to college. No further outcomes, such as college degree or employment, were studied. Their favored model is a robust school fixed effects analysis, which compares SWLDs who participated in E-CTE to SWLDs who took fewer such courses or none at all.

The findings link E-CTE course-taking in high school to positive and statistically significant outcomes across the board. For each E-CTE credit earned, SWLDs could be expected to score about 74 points higher on their math SAT assessment, and had a 15 percent higher probability of participation in dual credit courses. As to college transition outcomes, each E-CTE credit was associated with a 17 percent increase in FAFSA completion among SWLDs and a 13 percent higher probability of completing at least one college application. Among the limitations noted by Plasman and his team: the age of the data, a lack of clarity on the courses’ curricula and skills taught, and not knowing how readily available E-CTE courses are to SWLDs in every school—especially those with more severe learning disabilities. This is a promising start, but not much more than that.

Plasman and his team suggest a number of ways that the positive impacts thus far indicated—that students with learning disabilities can do well and go further with E-CTE type courses—can be disseminated to educators, parents, policymakers, and STEM employers. They also suggest ways in which the research can be extended with newer and longer-term data. (The Holy Grail would be some solid information on college or credential completion and employment data.) Much has changed in the CTE world since 2019—including a rise in short-term credentialing programs and apprenticeships. The potential for students with learning disabilities to benefit even further from these changes is high.

SOURCE: Jay S. Plasman, Filiz Oskay, and Michael Gottfried, “Transitioning to Success: The Link between E-CTE and College Preparation for Students with Learning Disabilities in the United States,” Education Sciences (January 2024).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, joins Mike and David to discuss what a second Trump term could mean for federal education policy. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber reports on a new study investigating the impacts of licensure and certification on CTE teacher retention.

Recommended content:

• “If Trump returns…” —Chester E. Finn, Jr., Fordham Institute
• “Department of Education” —Lindsey M. Burke, chapter in Mandate for leadership
• Hannah Kistler, Shaun Dougherty, and S. Colby Woods, “Teacher exit and educational opportunity: Lessons from career and technical education,” Educational Researcher (January 2024).

Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at [email protected].

Cheers

• Florida Catholic schools thrive as school choice laws expand. —Next Steps Blog
• Properly implemented, DEI initiatives identify hidden talent in a world where not everyone has a fair shot. —Roland Fryer, Wall Street Journal
• Standardized tests only reveal underlying inequities. They don’t cause them. —Yoon Choi, Hechinger Report
• Black education entrepreneurs are at the forefront of school choice, founding novel micro, home, charter, and private school models. —Denisha Allen, The 74
• College entrance exams remain reliable predictors of student success and accurate measures of student abilities. —Noahpinion

Jeers

• The Chicago Teachers Union is trying to roll back charter schools, school choice, testing, and accountability policies. —Paul Vallas, City Journal
• The Cleveland Schools CEO is appropriating and squandering a $20 million grant. —Cleveland
• “Young students still lag on school readiness post-pandemic.” —K12 Dive

• High-dosage tutoring is a key intervention to overcome pandemic-era learning loss. —Michael Jonas, Commonwealth Beacon
• Experts offer four strategies to help adolescents reduce their screen time. —Geoffrey Fowler and Tatum Hunter, Washington Post
• Both supporters and critics of “equitable grading” misunderstand and mischaracterize its intentions and applications. —Rick Hess and Joe Feldman, Education Week
• New surveys find students are more anxious about their lives, disillusioned by politics, and pessimistic about their futures. —New York Times
• A detailed national study finds that, though students are making up lost learning from school closures, they’re still lagging. —New York Times