As many as 60% of third graders in New Jersey can’t read at grade level and in poor districts, it’s even higher: More than 90% in Trenton, for instance.
Reading ability in third grade is a crucial marker because students go from learning to read, to reading to learn, and those still struggling with reading fall even further behind in other subjects as well and become much more likely to drop out of school.
“If we know that at third grade, the majority of students who are not already reading at grade level will never catch up, then we need to be conducting ourselves as though our hair is on fire,” says Paula White, an expert in turning around failing schools. “Because essentially, it is for those children.”
Nearly all kids are capable of reading competently with the right instruction, research shows, including a new emphasis on sounding out words that is showing success not just by higher scores, but by before-and-after brain scans that indicate that using phonics causes a physical shift that allows for more fluid reading.
The evidence is “compelling,” says Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist.
Yet New Jersey is among the last states to overhaul how reading is taught. And one key reason is the state’s strong deference to local decision-making. That local autonomy means that many schools will likely continue to use discredited methods, critics say, while Trenton does little to nudge them towards more successful strategies.
“Anything that is centrally driven from the Department of Education runs into this allegiance to localism,” notes Christopher Cerf, a former education commissioner in New Jersey.
Credit: (AP Photo/Alex Slitz)Among the tactics that usually don’t work well: Teaching kids to guess words based on pictures. The problem is that when books get harder and the pictures disappear, they struggle to read because they never actually learned how to decode words.
A second problem, even for those who can decode words, is that as kids progress, too many also don’t acquire the vocabulary and background knowledge of the material that they need to understand what they’re reading.
But New Jersey does not mandate that schools use the reading methods shown to be more effective. Instead, the state describes the qualities that a good program should have, then lets the locals decide, in deference to home rule.
That’s confusing to districts being lobbied by curriculum vendors, critics say. Here’s how White, head of the reform group JerseyCAN, describes it: “Everyone choosing their own adventure…when all options are not created equal.”
Republican-controlled states, meanwhile, are issuing mandates that require districts to choose from an approved list of high-quality programs. So why does New Jersey insist on local control, even though home rule is a value most would more likely ascribe to Republicans?
One answer is that teachers’ unions prefer to negotiate district-by-district, where they have more leverage, rather than having a central authority tell them what to do. And they hold more sway in blue states, so local control reigns supreme.
That may be about to change. Because Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s new education chief, Lily Laux, is known mostly for her advocacy of science-based reading instruction. In Texas, where she was deputy commissioner, she led a reform effort that used financial sticks and carrots to get local districts more in line with the latest science.
These reforms haven’t been perfect, says Seidenberg, the cognitive scientist. Efforts to incorporate the science in many states are worthwhile but still under development.
Yet the biggest hurdle, he says, is that people will stick with what they know – “methods contradicted by a large body of research” – and not even face the challenge.
Here’s the problem in New Jersey, critics say: In addition to not offering a menu of high caliber curriculum options, it has no list of best tools for screening kids on literacy that districts can use.
The state has made no effort to police schools of higher education to see if they are, in fact, teaching new educators the right way to teach reading. And it has made a relatively meager investment in teacher coaching.
And what, they ask, will the state Department of Education do with districts that decline to use the right strategy – give them less funding, like Texas did, or outlaw it?
The current hands-off approach carries a cost. It allows children’s literacy to be determined by zip code lottery. One approach, used in other states, is to require locals to adopt the proven strategy, or to show that their own method works just as well. That could earn them a waiver.
And while New Jersey just started requiring all k-3 students to be screened at least twice a year on literacy skills, a good first step, what’s the strategy for the kids still behind by the end of third grade? The DOE should ensure that schools have a plan to help them, reformers say; requiring a certain dosage of high-quality tutoring and attendance at summer school, for instance.
A big part of the success in Mississippi was its coaching model, experts say. New Jersey’s law allocated $500,000 in state funds for this, as compared to $17.5 million that Mississippi – a state with less than one-third our population – invested in last year’s budget, an enormous difference.
So the Sherrill administration should find ways to use the power of the state to ensure teachers are being fully trained on the new methods, advocates say, without leaving it to strapped districts to divert funds.
Everyone agrees they can’t just flip a switch; teachers will need time and resources for training. And while pushback may come in the form of an ideological argument against the entire reform movement, at its core, the real resistance is often burnout and a lack of on-the-ground coaching for teachers, says Esther Quintero of the Albert Shanker Institute, also known as the think tank of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
“It’s like me watching the surgery, but until I have the scalpel in my hand and I have a master surgeon next to me, guiding me, I am not able to practice what I’m learning,” reform advocate Tracy White of Texas, who began her career as a teacher, said of this coaching. “That is the game changer in terms of changes at the classroom level.”
Administrators need to understand why they’re doing this, too, so they feel invested in the work, she and others say. “People are protective of their narrative and their jobs,” says Kareem Weaver, a leader in the NAACP, former teacher and national advocate for science-based literacy instruction. “That’s the lift.”
For example, a chief academic officer might not want to tell the superintendent that the reading curriculum isn’t good because that person helped choose it, he says. And after Oakland moved to a more highly structured phonics curriculum, the California district was forced to abandon it when the teachers rebelled.
They argued it was too scripted, infringed on their autonomy as professionals and took the joy out of learning, recalled Weaver, a former teacher and administrator in this high poverty, urban district where only a third of students can read on grade level.
“Just, anything negative you could think about it, that’s what they said,” he recounted. “I know what my kids need best. Trust teachers.” The “loudest haters” even called it racist and “white supremacist,” he added. “They let their ideology trump their outcomes. That was the problem.”
It took a while to convince officials to try again, he said, a shift that only started in recent years. “We got a superintendent who has a dyslexic son,” Weaver said. “That was the breaking point…she got it and was able to roll with it.”
While the AFT has historically been more outspoken in support of the science of reading, New Jersey’s largest teachers union, the NJEA, says it wants the choices of curriculum to remain with teachers who should “not be pigeonholed into something specific,” says NJEA President Steve Beatty.
And offering a waiver would only add another burden at a time of teacher shortages, he says, requiring successful schools to prove that their approach is working.
Weaver acknowledges that this effort could add to a workload and that young teachers are already straining. But despite the challenges, he agrees that urgent improvement is called for, considering how critical early reading skills are to success in life.
This is one of the great civil rights issues of our time, says Weaver, also a local NAACP leader: “The precursor to operationalizing the other rights we hold dear,” whether it’s casting a ballot or finding a job.
So New Jersey officials should also enlist groups like the NAACP, disability rights and education activists to drum up support, he advises. “It’s the locals that really can lean,” he says. “They can call up the superintendent, email the school board and say, what about this? You’re violating civil rights, because you’re not giving kids what they need.”
Local control is the key barrier, with fights like this having to play out hundreds of times across the state. While central control has its downsides, the alternative is not having the power to change course statewide based on the evidence, critics say.
Whether the incoming administration agrees is not yet clear.
