NC superintendent says 70,000 students were socially promoted despite Read To Achieve
State Superintendent Mark Johnson is charging that more than 70,000 third-grade students have been “improperly socially promoted” since 2014, despite not meeting the requirements of the Read to Achieve program.
The program was passed in 2012 with the goal of ending social promotion by requiring third-grade students to be proficient in reading before they could advance to fourth grade.
But in a memo released Thursday, Johnson claims that “aggressive work-arounds” developed by the State Board of Education and former state Department of Public Instruction staff “gutted” the program with “unlawful guidance” that allowed thousands of students to be wrongly promoted.
“The NC State Board of Education was tasked with implementing the Read to Achieve legislation,” Johnson said in the memo. “Read to Achieve specifically directed the State Board of Education to end social promotion of 3rd graders — promoting students from one grade level to the next on the basis of age rather than academic ability. Sadly,the State Board’s policy aggressively avoided that directive.”
Johnson, a Republican, has feuded with the state board since shortly after he was elected in 2016. After his election, the Republican-led General Assembly transferred control over DPI from the board to the superintendent.
State board responds to accusations
State board chairman Eric Davis denied Johnson’s allegations.
“The Superintendent claims that the State Board enacted policy that violated state law about one of the General Assembly leadership’s most important education priorities,” Davis said in an email Friday. “If the State Board had enacted policy contrary to law, the General Assembly would surely have taken action of which there is no evidence.”
In his memo, Johnson said he’s working with local superintendents to “restructure the policies implementing Read To Achieve.” Graham Wilson, a spokesman for Johnson, said it’s too soon to say what the impact of the changes will be, such as if they will increase the number of students who are not promoted at the end of this school year.
Read To Achieve has been in the spotlight in the past several months over how reading scores have declined since the program began. Additionally, there’s been controversy over the awarding of a new multi-million dollar state contract to test the reading skills of K-3 students under Read To Achieve.
Uncovering problems in Read To Achieve
Johnson has been superintendent for three years. But Johnson says the problem with the improperly promoted students wasn’t uncovered until he launched an “extensive investigation” following stories in recent months questioning the efficacy of Read To Achieve.
“Superintendent Johnson directed senior staff to review the Read to Achieve program starting with the actual requirements of the legislation, and it was during this review process that this unlawful SBE guidance was discovered,” Johnson says in the memo.
When Read To Achieve was passed, there was considerable fear that the new program would cause thousands of third-grade students to be forced to repeat the grade.
Under the legislation, third-grade students who couldn’t pass the reading exam at the end of the school year or qualify for an exemption would be listed as “retained” for the following school year.
The retained students would be placed in an accelerated reading class or a transitional 3rd-grade/4th-grade class. The law says the state board is to develop a policy where retained students could be promoted during the middle of the school year if they showed they were now proficient in reading.
State board policy said the retained students who were still not proficient were to keep getting help through the rest of the school year, when they’d take the fourth-grade state exams.
Students being socially promoted
In his memo, Johnson says many of those retained students were promoted to fifth grade despite not passing the fourth-grade exams. The problem, Johnson says, is that the state board rules “pass the buck and ultimately place the decision with the principal” about promotion.
“Superintendent Johnson and DPI do not blame principals or local superintendents on this matter,” the memo says. “They were given SBE guidance that ignored the law and clearly delineated that the elimination of social promotion was not a priority.
“The direction from the SBE actually indicated to principals and local superintendents a different goal – find a way not to hold the student back.”
For instance, Johnson said 12,657 third-graders students were “retained” at the end of the 2013-14 school year — the first year Read To Achieve went into effect. But Johnson says only 1 in 10 of those students were proficient in their fourth-grade reading exams. Many of those students are now in ninth grade.
More recently, Johnson says 17,065 third-grade students who didn’t pass the reading exam at the end of the 2017-18 school year were placed in fourth grade instead of being retained. He says fewer than 1 in 10 of those students were proficient in fourth-grade exams at the end of the 2018-19 school year.
In the 2018-19 school year, Johnson says one out of every eight students sitting in a fifth-grade class had not passed Read To Achieve standards in third grade in 2016-17 and hadn’t been proficient in fourth grade in 2017-18.
“Our state’s leaders can and should have productive conversations about whether retaining students works or not,” Johnson says in the memo. “As a former 9th grade teacher, I can tell you that I believe social promotion hurts students, hampers teachers, and negatively affects our schools and families.”
But Davis, the state board chair, said the board policies were implemented with the knowledge of state lawmakers.
“The facts are that the Department of Public Instruction and State Board implemented the present Read to Achieve policies in consultation with General Assembly members and their staff,” Davis said. “If the Superintendent thinks that these policies are somehow inappropriate, then he should come forward with specific policy proposals and solutions.
“Regardless, improving students’ reading proficiency is paramount and we welcome any specific proposals that the Superintendent may offer to improve Read to Achieve at or before the Board’s January meeting.”
Johnson announced last month that instead of seeking re-election he’s running in 2020 for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor. Johnson has said he’s taking on “bureaucrats” to make state government more accountable, such as those he said helped to “undermine” Read To Achieve.
He says state government is so broken now that “no one can be held accountable for failing these 70,000 students, their parents, their teachers, their schools, and their communities.”
This story was originally published December 13, 2019 at 4:08 PM.
