Indiana legislators say they want more children to repeat third grade if they don’t pass the state’s IREAD-3 test. Data released last week suggest that would be a big change in elementary schools.
According to the Indiana Department of Education, nearly all third-graders who weren’t proficient on IREAD-3 in spring 2023 were promoted to fourth grade anyway. Many of those students had “good-cause exemptions” because they were in special education, were English learners or had previously been held back twice. But even among the 8,337 students without such exemptions, 95% were promoted.
It sounds like schools have been following current state law, which says students who don’t pass IREAD-3 should be retained “as a last resort.” The law seems likely to change, however. House and Senate leaders say improving reading scores is a top priority for the 2024 legislative session, and the tool they’ve identified is to make students repeat third grade.
If the tool you have is a hammer, they say, every problem looks like a nail.
What about parent rights?
It will be interesting to see how legislators square an insistence on mandatory, test-based third-grade retention with their stated philosophy that parent rights are sacred.
Republicans have spent years promoting the idea that parents know best. If parents think a private religious school or a charter school or homeschooling is best for their child, they must be right, and the state will help pay for it. If parents think books should be removed from the school library, the school had better listen. If they don’t like sex ed, they can opt their kid out.
But when it comes to the highly consequential decision of whether a child should repeat third grade, the state knows best. Or maybe the test knows best.
Scores ‘dropping for a decade’
An Indiana Department of Education news release last week said IREAD-3 proficiency rates have been “dropping for a decade.” That’s true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Passing rates were right at 91% for the first three years Indiana gave the test, starting in 2012. Then they dropped to about 89% in 2016 and 2017. Then they dropped to 87% and stayed there for two years.
What could explain that stair-step decline in scores? One reason could be changing guidance from the Indiana Department of Education on when students should be retained. In the first years of IREAD-3, everyone who failed the test was held back. Later, the retention rules became more flexible.
More retained students lead to higher test scores. You add to the pool of test-takers a group of students who are older and have attended an extra year of school. They are more likely to pass, and scores go up.
There was no IREAD-3 in 2020 because of COVID. When the test resumed, in 2021, only 81.2% passed, and the rate has barely ticked up since then – to 81.9% this year. That’s not surprising. Young students missed a lot of in-person school and suffered other harms in the years they were learning to read.
Third-graders who take IREAD-3 next spring were in kindergarten in 2020-21, the year of the greatest pandemic disruptions. Don’t be surprised if their scores are affected, too.
Missing data on fourth-graders
Guidance from the Indiana Department of Education says students who are promoted without passing IREAD-3 “must continue to receive third grade reading instruction during the subsequent school year” and must retake the exam at the end of fourth grade. Has that happened? And has it helped?
Unfortunately, we don’t know. Secretary of Education Katie Jenner said last week that the state doesn’t have data on how many fourth-graders take and pass IREAD-3.
It’s also not clear whether schools can effectively deliver “third grade reading instruction” to students who are in fourth grade. How does that work? Do they receive both third and fourth grade reading instruction. Or do they stay a year behind their peers in reading?
That test data shouldn’t be hard to collect, and it would be helpful to have it.
Retention costs money
This is simple math. If students repeat third grade, they will spend 14 years, not 13, in school. And the state – i.e., the taxpayers – will pay for the additional year.
In 2023, some 8,337 third-graders didn’t pass IREAD-3 and didn’t receive a good-cause exemption. Indiana funds education at a rate of about $9,000 per pupil, so we could expect a mandatory third-grade retention policy to add about $75 million every year to the state education budget.
If legislators won’t explain how they intend to pay for that, they aren’t being honest.
‘No single answer’
It should go without saying that it’s important – it’s essential – for students to learn to read. Kids grow and develop at different rates, but they need to learn reading skills in early elementary grades.
The good news: Indiana Education Department officials seem to understand it’s not a simple task. While lawmakers are fixated on retention, the department is also promoting efforts to improve reading instruction, including a “science of reading” mandate, grants and training for teachers, and tutoring.
“There is no single answer to any of this,” State Board of Education member Scott Bess said at last week’s board meeting. “We have to give the things we’ve done time to work. But they also have to work.”
The evidence that grade retention will work over the long run is mixed, at best. And making students repeat a grade has negative social and emotional impacts, especially for poor children and students of color. Let’s hope Indiana officials keep all that in mind in their efforts to improve reading.
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