Fort Worth ISD had its largest summer program ever. Did it help with reading scores?

Read Fort Worth has plans to expand its summer scholars collaborative after seeing success from students in the largest program yet this past summer, according to an impact report released last month.

“We hope it’s bigger, we have plans to make sure that we can grow every single year,” Elizabeth Brands, executive director of Read Fort Worth, told the Star-Telegram. “So we are actively out talking to community partners that serve kids and families in the summer, to say how can we bring our toolkit of effective literacy practices to your program, and make sure that we are striving every year to reach 100% of the kids in the summer who could benefit from Summer Scholars collaborative.”

A top-level analysis of the program, which spanned across 17 community partners and served over 5,000 students, found that 99% of students either maintained or improved reading scores this past summer.

According to the report, 11% more students improved their reading scores than the last summer reading program, and nearly three times as many students attended.

“I think in arguably one of the most needed times for kids to be in enriching literacy experiences in the summer, the summer scholars collaborative program really met that need for kids across Fort Worth,” Brands said.

Students targeted in some programs, like the Leveled Literacy Intervention Program hosted by United Community Center, showed promise in mid-summer, according to teachers in that program.

But students came into the program at a lower level than in the past, Brands said, and early assessment data from Fort Worth ISD shows that students entered the 2021-22 school year at lower levels than the beginning of the prior school year.

Fort Worth ISD has lagged behind Texas’ other major urban districts in reading for years. In the spring of 2019, only a third of the district’s third-graders were able to read on grade level, according to data from the Texas Education Agency.

Education researchers and leaders say lackluster third-grade reading scores are a worrisome sign, because students who don’t read proficiently by the end of third grade will struggle academically later on.

Concerning early scores

Those concerns continue to be an issue for the district, which is looking to bring up reading scores that continue to lag behind despite the major summer learning push and interventions including a Saturday Learning Academy for struggling students.

Board members asked for more concrete advancements in future updates at an October board meeting, and pushed administrators on plans to meet goals that the board set, which will be used to evaluate the performance of Superintendent Kent Scribner.

“I’ve been here eight-and-a-half years,” Trustee Jacinto Ramos said. “There’s always a shiny plan on how were are going to get this done ... I’m trying to trust you, I really am.”

But district administrators, armed with some of the most comprehensive data in North Texas, said that intentional intervention would push students to grow by mid-year.

Chief of Schools Jerry Moore said that the last several years have been about refining and making plans, which include professional development, reading academies and using data more effectively across all campuses to drive interventions.

“You’ve heard us talk about our literacy plan for the last couple of years, and we’ve been intentional these last two years about creating and changing our approach to literacy,” Moore said. “This plan is now in place. And the charge we have in front of us right now is effectively implementing ... the new shift in educational practice.”

The district is still in the early stages of rolling out the new literacy framework, but district leaders said that last year they saw encouraging signs that the new instructional philosophy is moving students in the right direction.

Based on current data, students are performing at a level similar to last year, with only 26% of third grade students projected to meet or exceed grade level in reading.

“We are currently on track to meet where we were last year,” Associate Superintendent Sara Arispe said at an October board meeting. “Our goal is to exceed where we were last year.”

Late testing a factor

Arispe said the drop in beginning of year assessments, which include the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP assessments, could be due to the earlier testing times this year, with phased in openings amid the pandemic pushing assessments back last year.

“We expect that by the middle of the year we will see some of those differences disappear, and hopefully be trending more positive for all grade levels,” Arispe told the board. “It is about a six week difference in testing compared to last year.”

MAP assessments, which are adaptive tests meant to gauge a student’s growth over time, are highly predictive of STAAR scores.

Only 24% of kindergarten students met or exceeded grade-level expectations on the beginning of year MAP assessments tracking phonological awareness compared to 31% in the 2020-21 school year. The percentage of pre-K students remained the same as last year with 60% on track for students tested in English and with a 3% increase in students on track that tested in Spanish.

Sentence reading fluency was lower for first- and second-graders as well, while third-graders performed slightly better than last year, according to data presented at a board meeting at the end of October.

Brands said she is hopeful about reading outcomes moving forward given the the district’s consistent approach to literacy and growing partnership with Read Fort Worth.

“There is plenty of literature and research on the topic of how to make sure that kids are learning how to read,” she said. “And we are working in strong partnership with our districts to put all of those strategies into practice.”

“We are very optimistic about what we are seeing, including additional days of instructional time, including professional development for teachers in the science of reading, including continuity of literacy curriculum across every elementary school across our district, so that if a student moves from one school to the next, they can have familiarity with the content that they’re learning in their classrooms,” she said.

This story was originally published December 10, 2021 at 5:15 AM.