The reading instruction failure is a real pandemic!

An article in Education Week by Emily Freitag really has caught my attention! It provides some absolutely stunning information about the impacts of COVID-19 on reading instruction, saying:

According to one commonly used reading assessment, the DIBELS benchmark measures, the percentage of students falling into the “well-below benchmark” category that predicts future reading failure grew from 26 percent in December 2019 to 43 percent in December 2020. All demographic subgroups were affected, but Black and Hispanic students were particularly impacted. There is no precedent for this kind of decline in the last 20 years of using these reading measures.

We are in huge trouble!

In the recent Bluegrass Institute report, “What Milton Wright knew about reading instruction, but lots of teachers apparently don’t,” we made the case in Attachment A that about 200,000 Kentucky K to Grade 12 students as of 2019, before the pandemic started, already were in real trouble for reading.

On average, that works out to about 15,385 students in trouble in every single grade.

If we have to increase those numbers for the sort of impact from COVID-19 that Freitag is pointing to, it works out to adding about another 10,000 students in each of the lower elementary grades that now, or soon, will be in trouble. That would be over 25,000 students in each grade that would be in serious reading trouble.

This works out to be about half of all the students in each of Kentucky’s lower grades! And, we can expect that problem to migrate to upper grades over time.

Kentucky needs to get serious about doing a better job of teaching reading, and it needs to start doing that right now! The status quo in reading instruction in this state just won’t do.