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I’ve spent the last several weeks diving deeply into the complicated world of literacy — how we understand it, how we teach it and why scores here and across the country are so darn stubborn.
In the last few years, we’ve heard so much about pandemic learning loss and concern about why scores are still lingering below pandemic levels.
When the National Center for Education Statistics (RIP … maybe?) released the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress earlier this year, Peggy Carr, the agency’s commissioner, told reporters in a press conference: “This is a major concern, a concern that cannot be blamed solely on the pandemic. This is not just a pandemic story. Our nation is facing complex challenges in reading.”
So I wanted to explore some of the broader conversations happening around literacy here in North Carolina. Here’s my story from last week on the subject.
Now, I’d like to try to navigate something that was a challenge for me — and that’s the alphabet soup of literacy education.
Journalists are often warned about overusing acronyms in stories, but I’ve found following that advice when writing about literacy (or any education topic, really) is hard. And trying to keep up with all the acronyms is complicated.
So, here’s a little glossary of some of the most-used acronyms educators use when talking about reading.
- DIBELS: Stands for “Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills.” It’s a series of reading tests that assess how well students are picking up literacy skills that are considered foundational for learning how to read. In North Carolina, students in kindergarten through third grade take DIBELS three times a year as a screening test, to see how well they’re developing early literacy skills. Educators really like DIBELS because it’s administered all over the country – so they can see how students in North Carolina are performing compared to other places. (When you hear Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools say they want to improve literacy in grades K-2, this test is the metric they are using to assess that).
- Because this test is given three times a year, the results are often broken down in a way that includes even more acronyms: Beginning-of-year (BOY), Middle-of-year (MOY) and End-of-year (EOY).
- There are many acronyms referring to specific literacy skills students are assessed on in DIBELS. Check out Page 7 of this CMS report to see a breakdown of those.
- EL Curriculum: If you’re a part of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, you may have heard this one. It refers to EL Education, the districtwide reading curriculum that CMS has adopted for its students. The curriculum provider and CMS both say it’s based on the science of reading. My predecessor, Ann Doss Helms, did a great story on this in 2021, explaining the decision to adopt it (and the cost to the district).
- EOC: Refers to the “end-of-course” exams taken by high school students. All high school students take EOCs in English II, Math I, Math III and biology.
- Students who score above a Level 3 on the exam reach GLP status, or “Grade-Level Proficiency.” That means they have a “sufficient” understanding of their grade-level content, and “some support may be needed” at the next grade level. Students scoring above a Level 4 or 5 reach CCR status, or “career- and college-ready.” Those students show a “comprehensive” understanding of the material, and are on track for what lies beyond schooling. (When you hear that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools say they’ve set a goal to improve Math I scores, they are looking at the percentage of students who reach CCR on their EOCs).
- EOG: This refers to North Carolina’s standardized statewide “End-of-grade” exams. They’re administered at the end of the year in grades 3-8 in both math and reading, and in grades five and eight in science.
- See the above entry for more on the results — because EOGs use GLP and CCR as well. (When you hear Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools say they want to improve literacy in grades 3-8, they are specifically measuring students attaining CCR status on EOGs).
- LETRS: Stands for “Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling.” It’s a professional development course produced by the company Lexia. North Carolina invested $114 million in 2021 to require every K-5 teacher in the state to take this training on how to teach literacy, which is heavily informed by the science of reading. Importantly, LETRS is not a curriculum — teachers are not returning back to their classrooms with a set of fixed instructional materials for students. Instead, LETRS is meant to get all teachers using the same language and to understand the “why” behind what they’re teaching.
- MTSS: Stands for “Multi-Tiered Systems of Support,” It’s a statewide school improvement framework. It refers to how schools identify and intervene when students are falling behind. Its name references the layered way in which schools offer supports — starting with the core learning experience for all students and narrowing into more targeted interventions and family engagement.
- NAEP: The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a test administered by the U.S. Department of Education, also often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. It measures student achievement across the country, particularly in grades 4 and 8 reading and math. The NAEP is a way the federal government takes the temperature, so to speak, on U.S. students’ progress. These results are typically reported on a state-by-state basis. But Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is one of more than two-dozen large, urban school districts that reports district-level data. (Those districts are called TUDA districts — referring to the “Trial Urban District Assessment” program.).
- Science of reading: You will sometimes see it referred to as SOR, but if there’s anything I learned from reporting on literacy, it’s that everybody has a different idea for what it means. Dennis Davis, a professor of literacy education at NC State, defined it to me as “what we know about how kids learn to read, and how we can best maximize that learning through effective teaching.” It’s informed by many disciplines, such as psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and education.
Closing thoughts on literacy
My story last week focused a lot on the science of reading, and debate over whether educators have overemphasized phonics and literacy skills over higher-level skills like comprehension. So before closing the book (pun intended) on literacy for now, I wanted to offer a few other insights I learned.
- The pandemic is only part of the equation: After covering the NAEP results, I asked Professor Davis, at NC State, if this year’s declining and stagnant scores represented a crisis. He told me it was a cause for alarm, but it was also nothing new. “What we’re seeing now is not unusual because historically we haven’t done well,” Davis said. A recurring theme I heard from experts is that the pandemic may have exacerbated the challenges in reading education — but they existed long before it.
There are really concerning opportunity gaps: Davis told me we still have “disparities between who has access to high-quality literacy achievement and who doesn’t.” This year’s NAEP scores told us that the gap between high- and low-performing students is growing. There are often achievement gaps between Black and Latino students and their white peers.
Jennifer Mann, a research scientist at Duke’s Center for Child and Family Policy, told me there are not enough resources for multilingual learners — which is a particular concern for large, diverse districts like CMS. “Without sustained support in both language and literacy development, then multilingual learners are at risk of falling behind,” Mann said.
- Teaching English is uniquely hard: Annemarie Hindman, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, told me English is a “rule-governed language,” and there are a lot of rules that often conflict. The same letter can represent multiple sounds, which is very confusing to teach. “We have five letters that we use as vowels — six if we co-opt Y — but like 20-odd sounds, vowel sounds that we’re trying to represent,” Hindman said.
- Teaching English is uniquely hard — especially without qualified teachers: Mann, the Duke research scientist, also pointed to chronic underfunding of public schools as a concern, especially because of its impact on teacher recruitment: “This means that schools who should have a literacy coach don't, and many of them are unable to retain qualified teachers due to issues like low teacher pay.”
