2015/05/12 – The student failure rate of the new third-grade reading test is hitting hard at some low-income school districts that will not easily find the resources to help students pass subsequent tests.

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.  Close to 5,000 students tanked a similar reading proficiency test last year, but were not required to pass that test in order to advance.  The new law signed by the Gov. Phil Bryant in 2013, however, imposes new English Language Arts (ELA) standards as part of the Mississippi College and Career Ready Standards, also known as Common Core.  Ironically, the same governor recently vetoed new legislation creating a Common Core review board designed to implement Common Core standards across the state.  Bryant adopted his hostile stance toward Common Core after statewide outcry claimed using Core criteria would “federalize” state schools.

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 it.  The number may sound small, but it translates into big problems and bigger costs for poorer school districts.  Officials at high-poverty Delta schools, for example, are going to have to cut resources from successful programs in order to funnel those resources to reading coaches in preparation for upcoming test re-takes.

“We’re going to have to reallocate resources, and move teachers around,” said Greenville Public School Superintendent Leeson Taylor.  “And, keep in mind, during this same time period, those kids still have to contend with end-of-the-year assessments that are going to count toward school accountability.  While I’m trying to prepare them to be retested on this test, we’re going to lose four or five days for them to be assessed at the end of the year, which could ultimately hurt our school rating.”

Greenville Public Schools had a 36 percent student fail rate.  Many of the children failed just below the 926 passing score, mostly in the 916 range, but that doesn’t really put the school in a much better place.  Schools now have about two weeks before the next assessment, followed by an intensive summer tutoring program leading up to the final assessment in July.  If students fail to pass all subsequent tests, they will be forced to re-take the third grade.  Taylor warned that holding back students “traumatizes” them and increases their chances of dropping out of school altogether.

Legislators who voted to impose the reading test requirement did not allocate adequate resources to finance a sufficient number of reading coaches to help problem students battle their way past the gate.  As it

stands, the Greenville district needs at least five coaches to tutor the 165 students who did not pass the test.  They currently have zero.

Delta school districts traditionally suffer from reduced revenue because of lagging sales and property tax revenue.  Most of the districts’ students qualify for the schools’ free lunch program because they come from low-income families.  In order to fund the new reading coaches, Taylor warned that he will likely have no choice but to make cuts to the district’s free summer school program that it offers to secondary students.

Oddly, Taylor said the situation appears to be better for neighboring school districts that are or were under state conservatorship, including SunflowerCounty, Drew and Indianola.  Under conservator­ship, the state supplants local school leadership and sends interim leaders to reform the district and its schools, due to financial problems, poor student performance, or safety issues.  A district under conservatorship or consolidation, however, becomes the direct responsibility of the Mississippi Department of Education, which is willing to fund reading coaches.

As nutty as it sounds, thanks to a series of academic failures, the smaller Sunflower County Consolidated School District (student population 4,200) now has a total of five reading coaches—all supplied by the state—while Greenville’s comparatively bigger district (serving 18,000 students) has zero state-provided reading coaches.

Source: MS NAACP Staff