Released last month, the assessment shows a growing achievement gap between the highest and lowest performing students. Scores for both fourth and eighth graders in the 10th percentile for reading on NAEP saw statistically significant declines since 2022.
For students in the very lowest percentiles, a virtual tutoring service called Reading Futures is trying to close the gap. Since basic literacy lessons rarely go beyond second grade, the remote reading intervention is geared toward older students who need intensive instruction to catch up to their peers.
PLAYING CATCH-UP
Students who have severe trouble reading come fourth and fifth grade need a lifeline before they fall farther behind, according to Casey Smitherman, principal of South View Elementary School in Muncie, Ind. She asked Reading Futures to start working with these students in spring 2024.
Smitherman said many of the fourth and fifth graders at her school were missing basic literacy skills when she came on as principal in 2023, perhaps due in part to the pandemic and the fact that the science of reading was not yet widely taught. When Smitherman assumed leadership of the school, she said 97 percent of the student body was at least a grade level behind.
The results have been promising, Smitherman said, as these students are now in the high-growth quadrant for reading on i-Ready, a test that measures student progress, as well as on the reading portion of ILEARN, a standardized test for students in Indiana.
“Those kids are making gains,” she said. “You really have to measure their growth — not just are they achieving at the same level as their peers, but are they growing fast? Because they have to grow much faster than everybody else to catch up.”
This past fall, the fourth and fifth graders who use Reading Futures in all three Muncie elementary schools made 87 percent of their expected annual growth on the i-Ready reading test by December, according to Reading Futures CEO Dave Stevenson.
He added that Reading Futures is in use among several hundred students across six states, and that other sites have seen similar results. For example, he said fifth graders using Reading Futures in Mount Vernon, N.Y., attained 200 percent of their expected annual growth on i-Ready from fall 2023 to spring 2024.
Middle schoolers at a charter school in Denver, who were below the second percentile for reading when they started Reading Futures, grew by 0.25 standard deviations on the STAR benchmark reading assessment after one semester, rather than remaining on their previous STAR growth curve, Stevenson said. He added that the remote intervention is working for high school students as well.
“We’re working with a bunch of high schoolers in Indianapolis, and they are able to make progress,” Stevenson said. “They’re able to grow their ability to read complicated and unfamiliar words. It just takes a lot of time and a lot of attention to get there.”
TIME AND ATTENTION
While Reading Futures does serve some second and third graders, Stevenson said the program’s main focus is on students in fourth through 12th grade, since many K-12 schools stop providing literacy support after second or third grade.
“The program we’re teaching is unusually effective for adolescents. It’s not just copying and pasting a K-3 reading intervention into the adolescent space — it takes advantage of their cognitive differences,” he said. “And virtual [technology] makes it possible to do this really difficult teaching in places that otherwise might not have access to it.”
The company employs about 25 certified teachers, Stevenson said, most of whom are military spouses who need the flexibility of remote work. He added that about half of them have special education certifications, and they all have experience teaching basic literacy skills.
With Reading Futures, they work online with groups of about four students at a time for 45 to 60 minutes a day, four to five days a week. The goal is 80 to 100 hours of intervention in a school year, he said, at which point most students can read well enough to leave the program.
The intervention is based on decades of research led by the neurosciences and mental health program at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It’s designed to support older students with “age-appropriate word identification, decoding and spelling skills,” according to the Reading Futures website.
“We serve middle schoolers who might be reading at a kindergarten or first-grade level,” Stevenson said. “We serve students at the first percentile, at the fifth percentile, students who really have extreme difficulty reading.”
He estimates this is about 2 to 4 percent of the student population, and he said none of them are intellectually disabled, but many could have dyslexia or other reading disabilities. With the remote reach of Reading Futures, Stevenson said he hopes to catch more of these kids in time to teach them how to read.
“It’s not too late. It’s not impossible,” he said. “It just takes a lot of time and a lot of the right type of instruction.”
