It's good to see Birmingham finally doing something right. It so easy to become distracted by the corruption and the drama surrounding the water board at the moment.
Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade. It brought them from basically the worst State to the 30th percentile in reading for 4th graders.
So, common sense? If you’re requiring proficiency in order to promote, then I’d expect to see significantly better results than this.
It’s noteworthy that they’re still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. Might take some time for these literate 4th graders to get up to 8th grade age.
I don’t think Alabama is a model for anything related to public education.
Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.
1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home.
2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days.
3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores much earlier in life. The article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)
I’m very against financial incentives for perfect attendance. American schools by and large still do not have adequate ventilation and space to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Combine that with a state like Alabama with low childhood vaccine rates and it’s a recipe for epidemics like measles.
They might be better looking at what the states going down were doing and using that for (anti-) lessons as maintaining a score hardly seems like a rousing success for new initiatives.
Two ways poor school districts could work on serving the kids are take some money from administration salaries to pay teachers and take some money from administration salaries to pay for breakfast and lunch for students.
I read the article and would argue that it is really just two things they did. However, both things are really the same coin and are about solving poverty and almost nothing to do with education. Both are small (but positive) band aids on general food insecurity and housing insecurity. Amazing how having a known safe place to sleep at night and food to eat everyday helps kids live better lives.
All schools should have free breakfast and free lunch. Countless studies have shown that kids learn better when properly fed nutritious meals. Struggling schools near more after school and weekend programs with tutoring AND meals. These problems are fairly easy to solve and the cost is less than the status quo.
It is interesting how much these interventions copy the absolute basics of what is done in Steubenville, one of the best performing low-income cities in the nation [1]:
- Get kids to school at all costs. Birmingham has lottery incentives. Steubenville has a staff member whose full time job is tracking down students and bringing them to school.
- Teach phonics, instead of the "Reading recovery" and cueing methods made popular by extensive marketing in teacher training programs. (And consequently popular in Blue districts.)
- Have lots of people teach reading. Birmingham uses college students as tutors. Steubenville uses ALL teachers (including phy-ed, art, music) and volunteers.
- Have more school. Birmingham does summer sessions, Steubenville does free pre-K.
Steubenville's preK programs teach grammatical sentences, the alphabet phonetically, and prereading.
The Steubenville schools sort reading classes by student ability rather than grade level, so that stuggling classes can be smaller and those students can get closer to one-on-one attention. They famously consistently get to third grade with no students reading below grade level. It is more expensive per student, but they make up for it with fewer students repeating grades.
So a lot of this falls under the category of "stops you can pull if you really want to," but the methods that have evidence showing they work [2] are not profitable for publishers, so teachers don't get trained on them. They also require teachers to carefully follow a script, which is boring and rubs against idealism.
I plotted a bunch of random states and created a line chart showing the progression since 2017. I chose to look at Math scores, since that's most objectively measured. I am not trying to "adjust for demographics" because that just makes it easy to derive whatever result you want.
Some obvious conclusions from playing with the data:
* Everybody is worse off compared with pre-pandemic. The best-performing states seem to be doing worse compared with 2019
* Puerto Rico is a total disaster outlier, and Massachusetts clearly outperforms the rest of the states.
* There doesn't appear to be any other clear "winner"
The only conclusion I think you can draw from the data the article describes is that Alabama and Mississippi are poorer, and so if you adjust your data by $$ they move up more.
teacher here. there is a huge reason why we dont use reading levels to promote in michigan. its unfair to hold a third of the kids back because of biology. the kids develop early on in elementary school rapidly and kids born at the end of the year from september to december will always be a few months behind in development. unsurprisingly, the current statistic we have is that 1/3 of our 3rd graders are illiterate according to our state. not just having trouble reading, but cannot read at all. that tracks in my classroom, but we're getting better about it as the year progresses. Ive found that reduced screen time is the best way to get kids literate again in my homeroom.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] threadSo, common sense? If you’re requiring proficiency in order to promote, then I’d expect to see significantly better results than this.
It’s noteworthy that they’re still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. Might take some time for these literate 4th graders to get up to 8th grade age.
I don’t think Alabama is a model for anything related to public education.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/...
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
They might be better looking at what the states going down were doing and using that for (anti-) lessons as maintaining a score hardly seems like a rousing success for new initiatives.
All schools should have free breakfast and free lunch. Countless studies have shown that kids learn better when properly fed nutritious meals. Struggling schools near more after school and weekend programs with tutoring AND meals. These problems are fairly easy to solve and the cost is less than the status quo.
- Get kids to school at all costs. Birmingham has lottery incentives. Steubenville has a staff member whose full time job is tracking down students and bringing them to school.
- Teach phonics, instead of the "Reading recovery" and cueing methods made popular by extensive marketing in teacher training programs. (And consequently popular in Blue districts.)
- Have lots of people teach reading. Birmingham uses college students as tutors. Steubenville uses ALL teachers (including phy-ed, art, music) and volunteers.
- Have more school. Birmingham does summer sessions, Steubenville does free pre-K.
Steubenville's preK programs teach grammatical sentences, the alphabet phonetically, and prereading.
The Steubenville schools sort reading classes by student ability rather than grade level, so that stuggling classes can be smaller and those students can get closer to one-on-one attention. They famously consistently get to third grade with no students reading below grade level. It is more expensive per student, but they make up for it with fewer students repeating grades.
So a lot of this falls under the category of "stops you can pull if you really want to," but the methods that have evidence showing they work [2] are not profitable for publishers, so teachers don't get trained on them. They also require teachers to carefully follow a script, which is boring and rubs against idealism.
[1] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2025/02/20/sold-a-story-e...
[2] https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA...
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/xplore/NDE
I plotted a bunch of random states and created a line chart showing the progression since 2017. I chose to look at Math scores, since that's most objectively measured. I am not trying to "adjust for demographics" because that just makes it easy to derive whatever result you want.
Some obvious conclusions from playing with the data:
* Everybody is worse off compared with pre-pandemic. The best-performing states seem to be doing worse compared with 2019
* Puerto Rico is a total disaster outlier, and Massachusetts clearly outperforms the rest of the states.
* There doesn't appear to be any other clear "winner"
The only conclusion I think you can draw from the data the article describes is that Alabama and Mississippi are poorer, and so if you adjust your data by $$ they move up more.
And math is much worse. 51 of 53 States* have worse 8th grade Math scores in 2019 than 2024. (Again, not a single state improved.)
My biggest takeaway is that it is in-person teaching, in the classroom, that actually helps kids learn, _not_ spending on "edtech".
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
(incl DC, PR, military)