State-by-State Illusions of Reading Proficiency

A few years ago, The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation released a paper that exposed just how badly states are overstating the academic competence of their students. The landmark report, The Proficiency Illusion, showed that states were setting such low bars for proficiency that they were giving a false impression of success — with particularly low expectations for elementary school children.

Last week, a report from Voices for America’s Children delivered that same troubling assessment for reading skills in particular.  The report, “Are All America’s Children Really Above Average?,” shows that states’ reports of children’s reading levels are wildly out of sync with the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The NAEP, as it is called, measures “proficiency” by assessing whether children can correctly answer questions about passages from grade-level texts. Proficient students, according to NAEP’s definition, are those who show that they can draw conclusions and make evaluations based on what they have read. According to the NAEP, two-thirds of American fourth-graders are missing this mark, which means, in the eyes of reading experts, that they are not reading at grade level. For African Americans and Hispanics, the numbers are even more dire, with nearly 85 percent unable to read at grade level.

Not one state, according to the NAEP, has at least half of its students reading at grade level.

Yet if you look at states’ reports of how their children are doing on state reading tests, the number of students who are labeled “proficient” is much higher. Take Tennessee, one of the winners of the first round of the federal Race to the Top competition. It has reported that 90 percent of fourth graders are proficient in reading on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program while the NAEP reports that 28 percent of Tennessee fourth-graders are proficient in reading. (See the report for details and bar graphs that provide comparisons for each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands.)

Voices for America’s Children, the country’s largest network of children’s advocacy groups, published the report on the heels of a new campaign launched by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to get all American children reading by third grade. It also coincides with the release of Massachusetts report by Strategies for Children that spotlighted the achievement gap in that state and called for a re-focusing of efforts starting at birth and reaching up to age 9.

Bill Bentley, president and CEO of Voices, rightly derides the distortion in state data as a “Lake Wobegon Effect” in which “all the children are above average.”

These reports are sounding an alarm that we can only hope is starting to be heard: Our elementary education system is not cutting it.  Students are arriving in middle and high schools with such weak reading skills that it is no wonder that only 75 percent of students graduate from high school on time.

The remedy takes many forms — and will require a serious commitment of resources and political will — but it is no secret that a big part of the answer is the provision of high-quality pre-kindergarten programs that are seamlessly aligned, through high standards and challenging curricula, with kindergarten, first, second and third grade. This PreK-3rd approach, described in our Next Social Contract for the Primary Years of Education, has been shown to close achievement gaps and lift achievement generally in the Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland and in several districts in New Jersey. The strategy envisioned in Massachusetts, which includes strong recommendations and starts at birth, hews to many of the same approaches taken in these districts, using data to help teachers provide pointed interventions and continuously evaluate the effectiveness of their instruction.

States and districts need to take stock of their strategies for raising student achievement and make sure they include these kinds of interventions for young children up through the primary grades. And they need to stop playing the low-expectations game and start setting their bars for proficiency high enough to reflect true reading success.