Middle and high school students struggle in reading. Can Fort Worth ISD help them catch up?
In the Fort Worth Independent School District and across Texas, conversations about literacy instruction have largely focused on the early grades. But the results of a nationwide exam released last month suggest that many of Fort Worth ISD’s older students also struggle in reading.
More than half of the Fort Worth ISD’s eighth-graders couldn’t demonstrate even basic reading proficiency on the National Assessment of Academic Progress, a nationwide exam administered every two years. Now in the early days of a renewed effort to boost reading test scores, district officials say they’re working on strategies to make sure those older students get the help they need to catch up.
“We have work to do, no doubt,” said Mohammed Choudhury, Fort Worth ISD’s deputy superintendent for teaching and learning.
NAEP scores show older students struggle in reading
About 53% of the Fort Worth ISD’s eighth-graders scored below basic on this year’s National Assessment of Academic Progress. Students who score basic are able to demonstrate some rudimentary skills, but aren’t advanced enough to be considered proficient on the assessment, which is commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card.
For eighth-graders, a basic rating means the student can likely use context clues to work out the meanings of words, find the main idea in a text and identify basic literary elements like a character’s motivation and the order of events. A proficient rating means students can likely draw conclusions about a reading passage from more complex features like character qualities and interactions among characters, and also identify one or both sides of an argument. A student who can’t demonstrate any of those skills scores below basic.
Fort Worth ISD wasn’t alone: Across Texas, students posted declines in reading in both fourth and eighth grades. Those results mirror what schools saw in scores on last year’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR: Years after the end of pandemic-era school closures, students still struggle to regain ground in reading.
Student achievement in most states and districts across the country still lags behind pre-pandemic norms, the assessment results suggest. Nationwide, the gap between top performers and those at the bottom widened this year. The lowest-performing test-takers in both fourth and eighth grade posted the worst reading scores in more than 30 years, while those at the top fared better.
Fort Worth ISD looks to boost reading scores
The scores come as Fort Worth ISD is in the early days of an effort to improve its reading instruction. At a meeting last month, the district’s school board passed a resolution naming literacy its top priority and directing the superintendent to come up with a plan to ensure all students can read on grade level.
During the same meeting, interim Superintendent Karen Molinar outlined preliminary details of a district-wide literacy plan, including developing a single instructional framework to be implemented at schools across the district, monitoring student progress in reading and putting more money behind reading instruction. The plan is intended to lay the groundwork for reading for the district’s youngest students, she said, with an eye toward making sure they’re on track by the time they finish third grade.
At the same time, Molinar said, the district can’t ignore middle and high school students who have already passed that threshold, but still struggle in reading. That means working to speed up academic progress among groups of students who consistently lag behind their peers in reading, including Black students, students who are learning English and students with disabilities, she said.
Choudhury, the Fort Worth ISD deputy superintendent, acknowledged that large numbers of older students in the district struggle in reading. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they haven’t mastered even the basic building blocks of literacy, he told the Star-Telegram.
Choudhury pointed to state test scores that show that large numbers of students are approaching grade level in reading, but aren’t where they should be. On last year’s STAAR exams, 40% of the district’s fifth-graders scored on grade level or better in reading. But another 28% of fifth-graders were approaching grade level, meaning about two-thirds were where they needed to be, or weren’t far behind. That’s a sign that most students have mastered the foundational skills needed for reading, but need extra support to reach grade level, he said.
There’s also a smaller group of older students who still struggle with foundational skills like decoding text, Choudhury said. To help those students, district leaders plan to send teachers who specialize in accelerating student progress to campuses across the district to work with them in small groups, he said. Those teachers will offer high-quality instruction, he said, and they’ll do it with books and other reading materials that are grade-level appropriate — teachers can’t hand middle schoolers a book that was written for second-graders and expect them to engage with it, no matter their reading level, he said.
Choudhury said he also expects the district will introduce screening for disabilities like dyslexia in later grades. Texas state law requires that students be screened for dyslexia in kindergarten, and again in first grade. The district could begin screening students at certain points in middle school, in addition to those early screenings the state requires, he said. That later screening could help the district identify students who can’t even begin to work on reading comprehension because a disability is keeping them from being able to decode text, he said.
Reading instruction for older students presents challenges
Holly Hungerford-Kresser, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Texas at Arlington’s College of Education, said the kind of instruction older students who struggle in reading need is different from what students get in earlier grades.
One of the biggest challenges with helping struggling readers in later grades is figuring out which part of the process is causing them problems, Hungerford-Kresser said. For younger students, the main challenge is almost always understanding how combinations of letters go together to make sounds, and how those sounds go together to form words. But for older students, the problem is usually — but not always — reading comprehension. Those are two separate skills, she said, and it takes two different kinds of instruction to help students master them both.
There’s broad consensus among education researchers that the best way to teach students in early elementary school how to read is through explicit phonics instruction. But after about third grade, phonics becomes less effective as a tool on its own, Hungerford-Kresser said. That isn’t to say that struggling readers in later grades don’t need phonics instruction at all, she said, but it needs to be presented in combination with instruction that gives students a chance to analyze text and build the background knowledge they need to understand what they’re reading.
“They need really targeted, direct instruction,” she said. “But then they also need to talk about what they’re reading, to think about what they’re reading, to engage with text in low-stakes environments.”
