“Third Grade Gate” Hitting Low-Income Students Hard
2015/07/08 –
Jackson resident Clemarvin Williams, age 9, suffered a number of dreadful setbacks during the months leading up to the statewide third-grade literacy test in April. Earlier this year, his mother went to bed with a bottle of antacid on the nightstand beside her bed, thinking she was suffering from indigestion. It turned out that she was actually feeling the initial stirrings of a massive heart attack that later killed her that night. She was 43.
Clemarvin’s older brother, 26-year-old Marcus Williams, adopted him in their mother’s absence. Sadly, this was only one of a horde of illness-related deaths in the family, including a grandfather, a grandmother, and several aunts. Needless to say, Clemarvin — who suffers from ADHD, among other mental illnesses — was not as prepared for the third grade literacy test as he could have been.
“You could see the strain in his face both times he had to take it,” said Marcus Williams. “I understand the school needing him to have the ability to read, but it scares a third grader to tell him that this test is going to determine whether or not he goes to the 4th grade. The first time he took it, he was nervous. When he didn’t pass it the second time, you could tell that it was scaring him.”
Mississippi legislators created the test, often referred as the “Third Grade Gate,” as a means to prevent ill-prepared students from advancing to the next grade level. Legislators claimed student “social promotions” were choking high schools with students suffering from advanced reading problems. About 38,000 public school students took the Third-Grade Reading Summative Assessment. A total of 5,612 students — about 15 percent of all third-graders — failed to pass the first installment of the test this year.
As a young student struggling with both ADHD and a series of tragedies, Williams was not in the best condition to survive the test, but Williams’ fellow students may not be in the best scholastic shape either, even without a slate of family disasters tearing them down.
The ability to slam a reading test at the age of nine requires a solid reading foundation early in life. However, kindergarten attendance in Mississippi is only optional, and according to Mississippi KIDS COUNT (a project of the Family and Children Research Unit at Mississippi State University’s Social Science Research Center), 52 percent of Mississippi children ages three to four were not attending preschool. A second KIDS COUNT survey revealed that many teachers estimated that 41 percent of their students were not even adequately prepared for kindergarten and lacked basic skills such as color, shape, and even name recognition. They also appeared to lack the fine motor skills required to hold pencils, crayons and scissors. This same survey reported teachers complaining of class sizes being too big, with 32 percent of teachers reporting “very high” teacher stress during student assessments, and 40 percent showing “high” stress levels — for a combined total of 72 percent of teachers virtually sweating bullets during test time.
A racial component is also in the mix, with classrooms predominately comprised of African-American students tending to be larger in size and having lower percentages of children whom teachers believed to have “significant adult involvement.”
Mississippi legislators have historically refused to fund pre-K programs, and they only recently applied money to a kind of pre-K pilot program. While a small number of local school districts and child care centers benefitted from $3 million in state grants, the money will only reach about two dozen school districts, according to the Hechinger Report — fewer than 6 percent of the state’s population of 4-year-olds.
Worse yet, habitually under-funded public school districts, such as Jackson Public Schools (as well as many rural districts), are not ready to prepare an incoming invasion of minimally trained first grade kids for a major test within the span of 26 school months.
Jackson Public Schools Board member Jed Oppenheim pointed out that education funding is woefully inadequate in his district, even though it is a major district with a high student count. He pointed out that the district’s Murrah High School, for example, does not have the funds to send some textbooks home with students. These include critical math textbooks, which often contain practice questions and sample problems required to thoroughly understand upcoming test questions—none of which will see the inside of the student’s house during homework. Also so many students congest the school that the facility routinely cannot offer locker space to all students.
The inadequate funding issue is a particularly maddening problem because of the comparatively low degree of parental involvement in a low-income student’s home life. It appears the absentee parent problem reported by teachers in pre-K surveys extends to high school. Oppenheim said it’s not easy to simply blame the parents.
“We have to understand the nuances of parental engagement in low-income districts, where a lot of parents or guardians are struggling to make ends meet or working multiple jobs,” said Oppenheim. “We think every child should have the middle class standard of reading to your child at home, and have books on the shelf, but we’ve really got to walk away from blaming parents for everything. Parents, like anybody else, do what they do with what they have.”
In this environment of parents working night shift, teachers and administrative heads suggest that students need the absolute optimum amount of daytime attention during class, which includes hard training from full-time literacy coaches in the event of a failed literacy test.
Jackson Federation of Teachers President Akemi Stout said JPS can allow students who failed the test to continue on to 4th grade, but JPS augments their 4th-grade year curriculum with significant literacy training. Not all school systems will have that kind of luxury, however — and none of them for long.
In any case, options for many schools in the aftermath of the Third Grade Gate test are limited because the same state legislators who demanded the creation of the test only added $25 million to state coffers to fund a very small battalion of literacy coaches. Other states that require a reading test, like Florida, invested almost $1 billion in extra funding to ramp up literacy.
Source: NAACP Writers
