March 28, 2024

Iowa schools lack effective reading concepts

Sue Atkinson

Baxter

Reading reforms put in place this school year to have students reading at grade level by the end of third grade are encountering some problems. One problem is Iowa’s low standard of the 41st National Percentile Ranking for proficiency (when grade-level proficiency is the 65th NPR). The second problem is teacher training, which has no standards in Iowa’s teacher training programs and no testing for proficiency in knowledge or teaching skills in the licensing exams. The third problem is the propensity of Iowa teachers to substitute memorization for concepts because this is all they know.

How can children be expected to demonstrate their grasp of concepts on standardized tests by applying them to real life when they have not been taught the concepts but had memorization substituted? Teachers are obviously experiencing this problem because they have had no similar testing for their expertise. Due to this lack of knowledge, memorization is being used in preschool as a substitute for concepts.

I recently had an email exchange with Brad Niebling at the Department of Education regarding the use of memorized sight words beyond kindergarten, a violation of the Iowa Core. His response was that when schools do this it is likely they are misinterpreting the wording of the Iowa Core. This may be true, but memorization has been the substitute for concepts for 60 years, so today’s teachers fail to understand memorization as a mind trainer not the mind developer of critical thinking and problem-solving through concept application.

Schools purchasing reading programs that require no memorization are dumbing them down by adding memorization rather than providing training for teachers to effectively teach the concepts at grade level, and struggle to reach the low 41st NPR. The Iowa Core sets a floor, but schools can go above this by dropping all memorization and effectively teaching all five of the reading concepts (known as the “science of reading”). Effectively teaching these concepts meets the requirement of the Iowa Core for students to recognize certain words by sight because of their frequent use, and it also means they know the concepts well enough to apply them to other related circumstances at grade level. Schools training teachers to effectively teach reading at grade level are in a position to remediate those students they have failed to date using memorization. Holding back third-graders for the failures of the system continues the poor practices of the past.