The COVID-19 pandemic severely harmed schoolchildren in ways we’re only beginning to fully understand. Loss of instruction time, socialization and structure have repeatedly shown in the past four years to have negatively affected everything from reading comprehension to basic speech. Some states brushed away the problems by abolishing tests and declaring subjects like math racist. My home state of Tennessee, not to be outdone in acts of legislative stupidity, decided to base all of third grade on one pass/fail test.
The Tennessee Learning Loss Remediation and Student Acceleration Act updated the state’s third grade retention requirements and requires intervention for some students before they can be promoted to fourth grade. Starting in the 2022-23 school year, third grade students who score “below expectations” or “approaching expectations” on the third grade ELA TCAP shall not be promoted to the fourth grade unless they meet the requirements.
For those in the audience who don’t speak bureaucrat, allow me to humbly translate. A child’s success or failure during their third grade year is no longer decided in a collaborative effort by parents and teachers. Instead, it’s decided in one section of the third grade TCAP testing—the ELA reading comprehension section.
Children in this part of their standardized assessments are given material to read and write several essays on. If an independent third party reading these essays determines the child is “below expectations” or “approaching expectations” they will repeat third grade unless they participate in “interventions.” These interventions take two forms: summer school or year long tutoring in fourth grade. If a child has to participate in one of these, they are at risk of being held back in fourth grade should they not “meet expectations” again.
Parents and teachers have two options if a students doesn’t meet expectations. One is to retake the test, but in a multiple choice format. The other is “repeated interventions” that take up a child’s summer and school year.
As could be expected, the legislature got what it wanted good and hard.
As the reading law took effect last year, 60% of third grades fell short of the state’s reading benchmark.
…[M]ore than 12,000 opted into yearlong tutoring in fourth grade. Those students must now show adequate growth or again face retention. A state education department projection estimates up to 6,000 of those fourth graders may be retained this year.
The state Board of Education says this is a bad law requiring correction. Parents of retained children or those affected by the law’s interventions say the ordeal places undue stress on families. Hospitals in Tennessee are seeing a 50% increase in emergency room visits for anxiety during the testing periods.
When faced with the horrendous consequences of a bad law, do those with the final say over the education of Tennessee’s children attempt to course correct? Of course not. They double down.
Retaining students in grades K-3 rather than grades 3-4 will ensure that students who are in the most need of additional reading support will have access to foundational literacy skills instruction at a critical point in their foundational literacy development should they be retained…
According to Tennessee’s experts in education, the answer isn’t working with the parents to construct learning plans that address student needs. It’s to fail kids earlier based on one test. Failing them when they’re younger just means they get the negative effects of being held back when children are more “resilient.”
While years of research shows the overall costs and benefits of retaining students are unclear, the general consensus among researchers and educators is that the earlier a struggling student is retained, the better the outcomes for that student.
How is putting a child at risk for dropping out of school earlier better? Or giving a kid anxiety over testing? Maybe there’s some benefit to turning kids off of reading for pleasure parents haven’t fully been briefed on yet? Whatever the case, absent some miracle that sees a legislative body acting with speed and the will of the people, changing this horrible law will take significant time, putting many students at risk of repeating grades twice based on the subjective assessment of one person reading a nine year old’s essays.
H.L. Mencken once said “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible and wrong.” Tennessee’s elected officials either are unaware of Mencken’s wisdom or are damned intent on proving him correct by sticking to their belief a child’s educational success should hinge on one test.
This will harm more children than it helps. That much is playing out in school districts across Tennessee. None of this addresses the issues most everyone acknowledges were fundamental to the problems: that we screwed up bad when it came to kids during COVID and we could’ve done a lot better.
Self-reflection, unfortunately, is something no politician or “expert” seems capable of these days.
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I don’t think the literacy problem arose with COVID. It existed when I was in school, a long time ago. The essence of the problem was that some students didn’t learn to read in K-2, where reading was taught, but the system moved them on into other grades, where reading was not taught. This meant they were “socialized” in the schools for another nine years, but learned very little because they were functionally illiterate. I still have traumatic memories of a high school literature class in which one of my semi-literate classmates was required to attempt a passage from Shakespeare’s “MacBeth.” It was agonizing for the whole class, and must have been utterly humiliating for her.
So I think your educators have a kernel of a useful idea, in that they need to keep students in the grades where reading is taught until the students can read. You may be right about them needing to find a better testing method, but they are part way there with the basic notion.
B. McLeod said: “This meant they were “socialized” in the schools for another nine years, but learned very little because they were functionally illiterate.”
That describes my oldest son to a T. At 40, he still reads at maybe a 4th grade level. His son (my grandson) is doing a little better but seemed to effectively stop learning much when they went online during Covid, and has never recovered. His teachers don’t seem interested in challenging him to do better either. It’s almost like everyone knows the system broke but no one wants to do anything but pat the kids on the heads and get them out the door as soon as they can. I can’t help but think money, or the potential loss of funding is behind the urgency of the schools in this.
As painful as holding back kids who can’t read well, moving them on if they can’t read well enough to pass a multiple-choice test does not seem like you are doing anything but setting them up for failure.
Interesting post, though I don’t agree with the position.
Without proper English skills, the later grades are functionally a waste of everyone’s time. Students who can’t read well are unable to succeed in history, science, language, or even math. This forces teachers to spend even more time with those kids, pulling everyone else down with them. It also means that the non-readers are functionally cursed with being “low down” for their grade, which doesn’t tend to result in good outcomes down the road.
Tennessee is already ranked in the bottom quintile of US state education. If the goal is to radically improve, there’s no way to do it without at least one unpleasant year. But I agree that making sure that TN students can learn to read before they progress is a good idea. And given that this has happened to a huge # of kids, it seems that there will be much less social stigma from the results.
Frankly I’m surprised that ONLY 60% of the students are under-performing.
It looks like they are following the strategy from Mississippi. Search “Mississippi miracle”+74
for some background. They increased NAEP 4th grade reading scores by 10 points in six years.
There is much more to it than just implementing a gate. Teacher training and other infrastructure are required.
As a fellow east TN parent, hard disagree on this one. My oldest has always struggled in school, and has been targeted for intervention on more than one occasion–and those interventions have paid dividends every time. Since Covid, the county has offered a voluntary “summer learning academy” in the month of June and I’ve sent her every year and watched her thrive in them.
I don’t disagree that the 3rd grade retention issue HAS caused problems for the elementary schools… but that (and esteem issues, and “loss of summer”) really are not a reason to socially promote kids who are only going to fail MORE as the move to harder materials before mastering more basic tasks… like reading.
Chris,
We don’t care how you feel about it, you’re being held back in third grade for the 34th time. Get over it.
Perhaps you ‘ll make something of yourself some day, but we teachers are doubtful.
Ignoring most of the post about COVID effects, reading and writing test, etc, one thing seems clear: if 60% of third graders fell short of the state’s reading benchmark, the fault lies not in our students, but in our system. Or, given the growing success of the voucher movement in Tennessee, is this an effort to dismantle public education in the state? Where perhaps the poorest students with the least concerned parents fall even further behind?