In an effort to address poor proficiency scores in reading, Ohio passed a law requiring that students who are not proficient in reading by the end of third grade receive intensive intervention in language arts. Proficiency was to be determined by the child’s score on statewide testing required by law. Unfortunately, what started out as a good idea has not had any impact on proficiency scores and in fact, has turned into a sad game played at the expense of students.
The TGRG requires that a student who does not obtain a score set by the State Board of Education by the end of third grade must be retained in third grade and provided with intensive instruction. The law requires that this instruction can be provided by either the school district or an outside provider and must equal at least ninety minutes per day. The Ohio Department of Education has a guidance manual detailing the requirements, and touts school districts whose promotion rate for students has increased since the TGRG has gone into effect. Let’s take a look at that.
Parents know that scores on statewide testing place their child in one of five ranges of performance: accelerated, advanced, proficient, basic and limited. What they probably do not know is that for the 2015-16 school year, the “cut” score for promotion to the fourth grade set by the State Board was so low that students who scored in the limited range could still be promoted. That’s right. Your child could be promoted even though his or her literacy skills are several grade levels behind their peers. The law allows the Board to do this and it must raise the cut score every year until such time as the score reaches the proficient range. At the rate it is going, that may not happen in our lifetime.
Parents may also not know that students who have previously been retained are not subject to the TGRG. What this means is that if your child was held back in any grade prior to fourth grade, they are not entitled to the benefits provided by the Guarantee. Likewise students identified as having significant cognitive impairments and who take the alternate assessment are not entitled to the benefits of the TGRG. Not surprisingly there has been an otherwise unexplained increase in the number of students being held back as well as an increase in those qualifying for the alternate assessment since the TGRG went into effect. Of course if your child is on an IEP or 504 plan, he or she will be exempt from the TGRG if the IEP team decides to exempt them. Again, what that means is that your student will not receive the guaranteed 90 minutes of intensive language arts instruction. While students are still entitled to receive some remediation, for most school districts that means they will receive more of the same programs that failed to enable them to read in the first place. They will not receive services from an outside provider.
While we have been unable to obtain any numbers from the Department of Education as to how many students on IEPs are exempted, our experience tells us it is substantial. The irony of this should not be lost on parents. Students in IEPs who frequently need the most help, are excluded from participation in this “guarantee” that would enable them to get it. Moreover, it is rare to find an IEP even for a student with a reading disability that provides 90 minutes of specially designed instruction in language arts per day.
The stories we hear about this are always the same. Parents were told of the horrors their child would experience if held back so they agree to exempt their child. What they are not told is that districts only have to retain the student in language arts but otherwise can allow the child to participate in other subjects in fourth grade. Parents are also not told that if they refuse to exempt their child and the child fails to make the cut score they may access services from an outside provider. While the District must choose the provider, many districts have told parents they were not aware of this requirement and could not say who their outside provider was.
Another “out” allows districts to administer alternative tests to students, sometimes multiple times, in an effort to get them above the cut score so they can be promoted. The upshot of all this is that when a parent sees that their school district has a 99% promotion rate of students to the fourth grade, that number says absolutely nothing at all about the number of students who can read.
In Akron for example, for the 2015-16 school year, 87% of third graders were promoted to fourth grade, but only 37.9% scored in the proficient range on statewide testing in reading. Even more profound, of eighth graders in Akron only 27% scored in proficient range in reading which does not portend well for students moving up through the grades. Let’s remember too that the determination of what counts as proficient in Ohio is substantially less than what counts as proficient in other states. In 2013 Ohio’s standards for what counted as proficient were 49th out of 50 in a comparison done by the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) also known as the nation’s report card. What that means is that students in places like New York and Massachusetts who are deemed proficient in reading are reading 3-4 grade levels ahead of students considered proficient in Ohio.
What does this mean for your student who is in early elementary school? Don’t let your child be retained in grades K-3 unless you know the consequences of doing so, including foregoing your right to outside services if he is unable to read by the end of third grade. Don’t let the district exempt your child from the TGRG if he is on an IEP without exploring what he might be able to access from the district if he does qualify. Unless your child is severely impaired, do not agree to allow him to take the alternate assessment which is another “out” for the district.
The TGRG was supposed to assist students who were not progressing in reading because statistics show that students who cannot read by the end of third grade have higher dropout rates and higher rates of incarceration. It was not intended to punish students who had not learned how to read. It was intended to hold school districts accountable for failing to address reading deficiencies. Instead it has become just another source of paperwork for parents and teachers, benefitting nobody.