March 18, 2024

Iowa education is a systemic failure

The state of Iowa has acknowledged what I have been saying for some time: thousands of third-graders will be forced to repeat third grade because they are not able to read at grade level.

The reason for low reading proficiencies lies with systemic failure of the education system itself and not with the students. National assessment of Iowa’s teacher training programs has determined elementary reading to be a failure because few of the five reading concepts were included in the training. The state acknowledged the accuracy of this assessment and stepped in last May to require all five of the concepts to be taught. Repeating the mistakes made during the regular school year again in summer school is not effective remediation, thus a waste of tax dollars, and yet educators promote this false presumption, serving as documentation for the systemic failure.

An example of the failure to effectively teach the five reading concepts is the choice of a phonics program. Educators are so poorly trained, they use phonics rules that fail to cover all words, thus leaving out some learning styles that need the rules for decoding words in order to advance in reading levels. Rather than ask if there are better rules available that cover all words, they turn on the students and blame them (for various reasons) as being the source of the problem.  It is officially acknowledged now that some learning styles cannot learn using memorization (the official educator substitute for concepts), and yet this extremely defective phonics program continues to be used – creating the thousands of students who will have to repeat third grade after May 2017.

For decades, educators have avoided being held accountable for failures of the system by placing the blame on students as their rationale for continually lowering standards and not counting low test scores. Educators want to continue to avoid accountability for thousands of third-graders having to repeat third grade after May 2017 by once again blaming students and asking for more money to repeat the poor processes in summer school.
The best way to remediate students up to grade level by May 2017 is to use computer instructional programs that use student responses to adapt to specific learning styles and take them through all five of the reading concepts for each grade level in faster time than a failed education system that prefers to falsely blame students.

Sue Atkinson

Baxter