Sue Atkinson
Baxter
The state of Iowa acknowledges a long history of reading deficiencies. The Iowa Reading Resource Center, established in 2012 to address these deficiencies, recently provided focus information on the five concepts for summer reading programs to bring reading up to grade level. The five concepts are: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
The National Panel on Reading identified these, and they formed the basis for assessing Iowa teacher prep programs by the National Council for Teacher Quality. The 2014 NCTQ report found Iowa’s elementary reading program training to be a failure because the majority of the programs did not include all five of the concepts. The official Iowa response to this shortcoming (appearing in a January 2015 update to the 2014 report) was an acknowledgement of the “factual accuracy” and that work would begin in the fall of 2014 to address this shortcoming. The next NCTQ report, due in October 2016, will include not only another update but an analysis of the content of the coursework used to train teachers to be effective. Iowa was also cited for failure to test teacher candidates over these areas in the licensing exams, which the Iowa response says it is beginning to address.
Fourteen years ago, when the national government finally intervened in the continuing deterioration of education with No Child Left Behind, Iowa educators attacked it (as addicts do with interventions) by insisting on local control to continue using the system of memorization, blaming students who could not succeed in such a system, and regularly dumbing down the assessment tests to artificially continue to appear good rather than actually being good. Struggling students can visualize concepts — not memorization. The “life” of a k-12 student is 13 years, so by being the last state to grudgingly agree to Common Core (based on concepts rather than memorization) Iowa effectively denied those students a quality education. While schools adopted various suggestions for changing teaching (such as connecting disciplines), this was done within the context of a system based on memorization rather than concepts, thus limiting its effectiveness.
Beginning in May 2017, third-graders are to be held back if they are below grade level, hence the push now. Grade level is the 65th National Percentile Ranking. Iowa’s official state standard is the 41st NPR; the state will not say if the new tests, such as FAST, are pegged at the 65th NPR standard. The problem continues?