Arkansas leaders and advocates in education and health presented Wednesday aspirations and strategies for helping more Arkansas children become proficient readers by third grade.
Speaking to a lunchtime crowd at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, Angela Duran, director of the Arkansas Campaign for Grade Level Reading, said only 37 percent of this state's third-graders are reading at desired levels as reflected on state-mandated ACT Aspire exams administered last spring.
The goal is to get all students reading on grade level by third grade by 2030, Duran said, with "an all hands on deck comprehensive approach." That includes a focus on parent and community engagement, child readiness for kindergarten, the availability of skilled teachers, a reduction in chronic absenteeism by students and a stop to the "summer slide."
The summer slide is when students lose some of the knowledge and skills they acquired in the school year because of a lack of meaningful education experiences in the summer vacation months.
"We know that if children are not reading right now then they will not be prepared to succeed in the workforce in 2030, and that is important to the success of our state," Duran said. "We know we have a long way to go."
Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key, another member of Wednesday's panel, told how he was challenged by Gov. Asa Hutchinson to do "something big" on reading, which is at the heart of all learning. One of the responses to that was the introduction last January of the Reading Initiative for Student Excellence program, he said.
The program calls in part for training 1,000 elementary school teachers a year for three years in the science of reading so as to improve teachers' abilities to deliver instruction in the classroom that will help students read, Key said. Middle-school teachers also will be folded into that training to help students who are now going into high school three or four years behind.
One of the goals of the program is to show at least a 10-point gain within three years in the percentages of pupils scoring at proficient in reading on the state-required annual ACT Aspire exams. Within five years, the state wants to see at least a 10-point gain in the percentage of high school graduates who meet the reading readiness benchmark on the ACT college entrance exam, he said.
The state also wants to see improvements on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a different test that is taken by a sample of students in all 50 states and is used by educators and business leaders when a common measure of education among states is needed for their decision-making.
"In five years we want to move into the middle third of states," Key said about the national assessment results. "We're in the lower third and have been for a long time. Once we hit that middle third of states, we want to revise our goals. We want to keep moving up.
"By 2030, we want 80 percent of our students meeting the highest levels of academic achievement based upon the ACT Aspire assessment. That's doable when you break it into smaller bites" and form partnerships with higher education, lawmakers and community organizations.
The panel presentation, which included Susan Underwood of the State Department of Human Services' Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education, and Dr. Chad Rogers, a Little Rock pediatrician, was moderated by Ralph Smith, managing director of the national Grade Level Reading Campaign since 2010.
Smith, a former University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty member and a former chief of staff and special counsel in the Philadelphia school system, praised Hutchinson and the Arkansas Campaign for Grade Level Reading -- which is supported by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation -- as role models for the nation.
On the national level, the Grade Level Reading campaign is in place in 340 communities in 43 states and the District of Columbia.
Metro on 11/30/2017