THE PLUS

As our legislators debate the best way to keep public schools running during the COVID pandemic, the unfortunate fact remains that even back before the virus hit, Kentucky’s public school system was doing a pretty sorry job with teaching reading.

According to results for the fourth grade from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), overall, only 35% of Kentucky’s public school fourth graders were reading at a proficient or better level while a really disturbing 33% were doing reading at a level the NAEP considers to be below the level that indicates just partial mastery of the skill.

For the Bluegrass State’s Black students, the picture from the 2019 NAEP was positively gruesome. Only 14% of the Black fourth graders could read at a proficient level and a horribly high 57% did so poorly that they were considered to not even have just a partial mastery of the skill.

Kentucky could do a lot better, as I discussed in our recent report about “What Milton Wright knew about reading instruction, but lots of teachers apparently don’t.”  

One way would be to adopt some of the exciting programs now leading to dramatic reading improvement in Mississippi, where a statewide program is ensuring every teacher knows about and can use the best research on reading to teach their students.

Another way Kentucky could improve would be to recognize the research that Wexler discusses in her Forbes article. A growing number of studies show boosting student content knowledge is associated with much better reading performance, as well.

But, whether Kentucky is teaching students face to face or by NTI, the messages from Mississippi and Wexler seem to fall on deaf ears in the Bluegrass State’s public education system.

As discussed in “What Milton Wright knew about reading instruction, but lots of teachers apparently don’t,” thanks to self-serving lobbying by a small group of teachers, a bill that would have set up a reading program similar to that in Mississippi got shut down completely in the Kentucky House without even getting a hearing in early 2021.

And, as I have written before, especially in the area of social studies, content gets short shrift in the Bluegrass State’s education standards, as well.

So, whether we teach our kids in the school house or their own house really isn’t the most critical question we face.

If we are going to do school at all, we need to figure out much better ways to do it and also figure out how to shake our public education system out of a seemingly built-in-stone mindset that simply ignores the top research about what really works best for kids.

For sure, if we can’t shake our public educators out of their lock-step mindset, then students and parents should be offered some viable choices for education that do the job better.

If we don’t fix reading instruction, the Bluegrass State will face problems that could last long after COVID recedes from primary attention.