Kentucky Board of Education to Pay Attention to Reading Instruction – FINALLY!

There have been some big disappointments since Governor Andy Beshear irregularly reconstituted the Kentucky Board of Education as soon as he took office in December 2019. Not only did the reconstituted board summarily shut down its finance committee, whose work was badly needed to improve the horrible shortcomings in Kentucky education’s financial reporting (more on that here), but the board also seemed to lose all interest in the Bluegrass State’s deplorable performance in teaching students how to read well, a problem we discuss at length in What Milton Wright knew about reading instruction, but lots of teachers apparently don’t.

Specifically, while former Kentucky Commissioner of Education Wayne Lewis did brief the old board about contacts with the Mississippi K-12 community to find out how that state had jumped to prominence for reading performance on the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress Grade 4 Reading Assessment, there was nary a word about the entire reading situation once the reconstituted board took over and summarily dismissed Lewis.

And, so things remained for the past two years.

Now, to our great delight, we note the following has appeared (finally) for the board’s pending agenda for its upcoming meeting on December 1, 2021:

III.E. Update on KDE Early Literacy Initiatives- KDE Chief Academic Officer Micki Ray

Reading should have been an agenda item from day one for the reconstituted board, but better late than never.

Hopefully, Ray will provide an accurate and honest appraisal of what has been going on that points to the fact that far too many Kentucky teachers are not using what the scientific research on reading shows works best. In fact, as we noted in the Milton Wright report, Kentucky teachers even in the state’s specially-funded remedial reading program called Read to Achieve are holding onto instructional techniques that real research has shown don’t work well for many students. For example, the Milton Wright report discusses some of the remedial programs used by the Read to Achieve teachers, providing evidence on Page 9 that:

“At least two of those programs, Reading Recovery and the Leveled Literacy Intervention, are now controversial.”

So, let’s hope Ray gets her presentation right and the state board finally starts to pay attention.

Because, as we also point out in the Milton Wright report, as of 2019 at least 200,000 of Kentucky’s K-12 public school students have serious reading problems (and now COVID has probably swelled that number even more) . That is a whole lot of kids Kentucky’s K-12 system is clearly not preparing for what is needed in adult life.

There are better answers. Mississippi knows it, and we are looking at some material involving Clay County elementary schools in Kentucky that might show at least some in the Bluegrass State know how to do things better, too.