Educators are all too familiar with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. It's known as the nation's report card– and as a country, our grades are dropping.

According to NAEP's long-term trend report, students' reading and math scores have declined for the last decade. States have been evaluating and adjusting their policies, curriculum and school schedules in response. On this episode of the Educator's Playbook podcast, host Kimberly McGlonn delves into the complexities and nuances of those changes, and the role teaching standards and innovative policies play in shaping the future. What's working, what isn't – and why?

Our first guest on this deep dive is Patrick Sexton, head of teacher ed programs at Penn GSE. He talks about how crucial an effective rollout of new standards is for long-term success. Even the most well-intentioned standards will fall short without adequate training for educators. Then we're joined by Mississippi's state literacy director, Kristen Wynn, who shares what they've been doing to radically transform the state's approach over the last decade. She provides valuable insight into what it took to help their students gain proficiency against various factors.

GUESTS:

• Patrick Sexton, Executive Director of Teacher Education Programs, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
• Kristen Wynn, State Literacy Director (K-12), Mississippi Department of Education

NEWSLETTER:

• Subscribe to the Educator's Playbook newsletter for ongoing resources and content

RELATED PLAYBOOKS:

• No. 62: Bringing theater into the classroom
• No. 41: Engineering can be elementary
• No. 22: Math that students can use in real life, right now

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES & RESOURCES:

• National Assessment of Educational Progress
• 76.3% of Mississippi third graders pass state reading assessment on first attempt (05-18-23)
• National Report Finds Mississippi’s 3rd Grade Promotion Law Leads to Early Literacy Gains (02-07-23)
• Mississippi Literacy-Based Promotion Act
• From Mississippi’s State Literacy Plan: Strong Readers, Strong Leaders Mississippi and Leading in Literacy

It has the potential to change lives.

This is the Educator's Playbook from the Penn Graduate School of Education. I'm Kimberly McGlonn. After I finished my PhD in curriculum and instruction, I taught high school English for 20 years. As educators, many of us are familiar with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. According to their long-term trend report, students reading and math scores have been on the decline the last decade. In response, states have been evaluating and adjusting their policies, curriculum, school schedules. It seems like pretty much everything is on the table. Some of these changes are working, some of them just aren't. Why is that? On today's Educator's Playbook podcast, we're exploring how teaching standards for reading and math are being changed, as well as best practices for districts implementing innovative new policies in our schools.

I'm joined now by Patrick Sexton, Executive Director of Teacher Education Programs at Penn GSE. He's here to talk about how changes can be best rolled out in schools because new standards are meaningless without effective training for those charged with implementing them. Patrick, thanks so much for taking time to talk with me today.

Thanks for having me.

This seems to be a time of just tremendous change. So if you can just set the stage for us, thinking really big picture, what in your view is actually going on with math and reading in K through 12 in this moment?

In terms of reading specifically, we have had huge pendulum swings in terms of approaches to teaching reading. The trend that we have been seeing for the past number of years has been a more holistic whole language approach and a little backward pedaling on fundamentals like teaching phonics and phonemic awareness and real building blocks of teaching basic concepts in reading. In favor of teaching, a love of reading. In favor of teaching, reading as a culturally specific act that happens inside of families and classrooms and communities, and those things are incredibly important.

So I don't want the pendulum to swing back in that direction. So that's all we're doing because like I said, those cultural pieces, the love of reading, the joy, the kid specific content that they're reading, those things are really important. So we are hopefully seeing a rebalancing, but the jury is out.

Yeah, yeah, that jury, that jury, that jury does its thing.

We'll see.

We'll see. I was an English teacher and that idea of being able to figure out how to fall in that sweet spot of establishing a core skill that will carry kids through life, but it will also give them a fondness and affection for stories.

Absolutely.

They both just have to happen.

They do.

In Pennsylvania in particular, what are some of those recent challenges to reading and math policies that we've seen?

So there's a new structured literacy set of competencies that all preparation programs need to address.

That's big.

It's very big, and I have a theory that when we moved to whole language, it was easier for preparation programs to teach that instead of spending the time to teach the building blocks and this race to get cheaper, faster, funnier, I say, right? Because we want to get students in, we want to get them out, we want to get them into classrooms, and it's very expensive to do teacher training and we don't invest in it as a society. So it was much easier, much quicker to do this. So we have this whole slew of teachers that never got the fundamentals.

So now those are coming back from a policy perspective at the state, it's happening all across the country. It's not necessarily completely new way of teaching reading. What it is, is it's now in the competencies that I'm being held accountable for teaching my students to teach their students.

Got it.

It's not law, but it's essentially I don't get reapproved unless I'm doing these things by the state of Pennsylvania. So it means that we have to adjust. Now, my programs and lots of other programs, we're doing lots of these things already in terms of having both elements, but there are things that we have to work on, like all programs across the country. Everyone is struggling with, "Okay, where do we go now? What are the pieces that we're missing?" The specific things, the policies are being driven because large segments of our young people are being left out of access to basic literacy skills because they don't have what they need. Right? As the pendulum is swinging, as I was talking about before, somebody keeps getting left out, and in this case, kids that need those fundamentals explicitly taught to them or being left out.

So the policy is really being driven by evidence that not all kids are being served, and I couldn't be more in favor of that. I don't think that you could find an educator that would not be in favor of more kids getting access to what they need. We don't always all agree-

On how to drive that.

On how to drive that. So that's why you have reading wars and you have math wars, but my view is if we have both sides, that actually more kids will have more access.

It's so tricky. But one of the things I appreciate most about what you just shared with us is the tenderness in your framing of what we really have to keep it top of mind, which is how are we taking care of individual children with a deep well of compassion for what they need in any given moment despite the challenges that creates for us as educators?

That we have to keep kids at the center. We're the adults here. We need to be caring for them in everything and that means that I need to get my teachers what they need, and I think that the revisions of standards are aiming towards that.

How does that play out for math?

Math, we see and have seen over years similar ideological battles between fundamentals. "Can you do your times tables? Here is the algorithm, learn it. That's all you need." That's a very extreme version.

Oh no, I have a daughter, and I remember we had timed sheets. It was like, set the clock.

Yes, mine too.

Run it.

Mine too. So there's that, and it's not the kids don't need fluency with facts and all that. Of course they do, but the other side is what is math really about? What kind of thinking is behind that? How do we actually position children as competent sense makers within this area of mathematics? Instead of saying, "I'm sorry, you needed a 90% in five minutes and you got an 89% in five minutes, so go do it again." That's not positioning a student as someone who is a math thinker.

Here specifically in Philadelphia, we're moving towards a curriculum. Curriculum has been adopted that actually does focus thinking about math. It doesn't ignore algorithms. It doesn't ignore those fundamental things that kids need to learn in order to gain fluency and practice. Practice, of course, important, but you don't want to... The drill and kill as the term that people use. So I'm really hopeful, but teachers have not been trained by and large in terms of teaching critical thinking with the mathematics, that that's actually the important thing is getting kids ideas out there. Teachers have to be able to see, "Where is that mistake that that kid is making so I can help address that mistake?"

And seeing the thinking.

Seeing the thinking.

Seeing the thinking.

Not about right answers.

And even getting students to see their own thinking.

That's right.

It's like we as teachers are facilitating that process. Someone who's spent so many years training educators who are working in the field, who will work in the field, what do you see or what are you thinking right now about what are some of those best practices for schools and for districts when it comes to adopting these new state guidelines?

In terms of districts, I think coming back to the point that I made earlier about the potential problem of having preparation programs go for the least expensive route, being forced to make those choices and saying, "Okay, we're going to go with this easier way of approaching reading." So we have a lot of teachers out there who are not well versed in practices in terms of mathematics, of getting at the deeper ideas of getting at the mathematical concepts and seeing where kids are on track, off track in terms of their understanding of those things.

And on the other side, the fundamental building blocks of phonics and phonemic awareness and all of those other things. So districts have to assess where they are. Who are the teachers that we have? Where were they coming from? Do they know this?

How do we meet them where they are?

That's exactly right, because if I can't meet the teachers where they are, then they won't be able to meet the students where the students are. And so I think for districts, one, assessment, "Where are we?" And thinking about a new curriculum, a curriculum does not teach itself and there's no such thing as a teacher proof curriculum. So we need to actually help the teachers frame themselves as learners and be in community with one another and say, "Okay, I don't know how to do this."

"I wasn't trained how to do this."

"I wasn't trained how to do it, and my whole community around me in terms of the rest of the teachers in my school or wherever," that has to be done with compassion. The way we were just talking about approaching kids with compassion. Compassion and urgency both, and I think that that's both true for the conceptual stuff on the math side and the building block stuff on the reading side.

I think that's a really beautiful framing because I think it gets at being reflective in your practice, which is so important. And I think that looking outside of the role of teachers and thinking about school administrators, school leaders, how do we get them to be able to even work with their faculty with that broader framework in mind?

Well, just take the compassion up a notch because first of all, you have to think about when were they teaching? What were they teaching? What kinds of things were they exposed to in their teaching? What kinds of communities were they a part of? How able are they to say, "I don't know. I don't know how to lead this because I never did it? Or I do know exactly how to do this and I haven't been successful doing it, and I'm actually a little bit afraid to try because I've been shut down before." Or this is the other part for leaders. I'm dealing with the fact that half my kids are not having breakfast, or lunch or a quarter of my population isn't here in school-

On any given day.

On any given day, right? Or the violence that we see in our communities. So you can't ask administrators to lead this kind of fundamental change without support for them. So how does the whole structure, the whole system get focused on the kids? Of course, we're focused on the kids, but if the scaffolds aren't in place for the teachers and for those leaders to get what they need in order to make the changes that you want, they're not going to be able to do it because if you asked me which of the things I'm going to pay attention to, the professional development that I'm trying to plan for tomorrow, or the kid that's in my office that needs something, I'm on the kid. Right?

[inaudible 00:12:15] triage.

That's right.

And even when it's for the better, people are by nature resistant to change.

Sure.

And so why in your view, is it important for education policy to actually pursue that hard thing, that change over time?

The evidence is irrefutable. Our kids, some are getting left behind in terms of their access to education.

What will that mean? Why should we be even alarmed or concerned with that philosophically?

It is our future. When we are thinking about all kids, and we talked about the moral imperative and what we are built on foundationally, the challenges that we're talking about in terms of math and literacy, basic knowledge, it finds its way into every piece of society. So when we're talking about all kids, it means that we have to attend to different needs for different kids. And the evidence is saying that we are missing some and it is in our-

Collective best interest.

Collective best interest to actually serve all kids and all communities because the problems that we're facing today, if we're going to get really large, we got big problems, climate change, wars across the world that don't seem to be ending anytime soon. We need a diversity of thought that can address those issues in ways that we haven't thought about before. And we know that the diversity of thought and access to those conversations starts in pre-K, and then it continues. And we either continue to cut kids out of that conversation, particularly kids of color, low income children in our country. If we can't attend to those things, then we're actually cutting the possibilities for our own future short. So if you're looking at a self-interest kind of model and that's what's going to drive you, then think about that.

There are so many challenges to thinking about how we bring people to the table together to really figure out how we can better use our time and our talents in service of what are the needs of all of us? And I think that once we move into a space of understanding that our individual needs can't be extricated from the needs of other people, that our basic needs are very much so aligned that we will rise or fall together, that our quality of life concerns are very much so fundamentally the same, I think that we can tap into the kind of attitude of embracing change that educators have to really celebrate as a way of standing the frontline of preserving this radical experiment in democracy

That is beautiful. And on the negative side, we can kill that joy by not following through for teachers and leaders and kids, by not following through with compassion, by not being there for them. If I want them to hold that joy, that vision that you just articulated so well, I actually have to hold them in that vision. I have to bring them to the table and keep saying, "Come on back. I respect your time. I have to compensate you for that. This actually costs resources of all different kinds, and I have to respect that you're bringing something to the table that I could never bring."

That's why I incorporate practicing teachers into my programs as my instructors, with my standing faculty, with my tenure line faculty, with my other permanent faculty. It's got to be both of those things at the table, right? Because the needs of compassion, of understanding what's really going on in the ground, of understanding that these are the lives that teachers are leading has to actually be front and center if I want that to translate to the kids.

I want to thank you for your approach to serving our community of emerging educators. It's such a beautiful value add to the very nature of how we're perceiving what is valuable. So thank you so much, Patrick.

Thank you so much for having this conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Thanks again to Patrick for coming on the podcast. My next guest is from Mississippi, a state that has made headlines for the leaps and bounds that students have made on NAEP fourth grade reading scores, against some pretty big odds too. Kristen Wynn is Mississippi's State Literacy Director. Kristen, welcome to the Educator's Playbook. Can you just tell our audience who you are?

Sure. My name is Kristen Wynn, and I currently serve as the State Literacy Director in Mississippi.

And what do you do As the Director of State Literacy?

I am responsible for our literacy initiative across the state. So any initiative that we have that involves literacy falls under my office.

I've been doing a little bit of light research, and it is very clear to me that over the last few years, Mississippi has made dramatic improvements, particularly in the fourth grade reading NAEP scores. People have called this the Mississippi Miracle. So I want to give our audience just the background. What is the situation in Mississippi and what gains have you all been able to make together?

Our big literacy initiative started really in 2013. In 2013, we were 49th in the nation. We were at the bottom, and so we knew that changes needed to be made because we knew literacy, how important it was and how it impacted not only our state as a whole, but our communities and really focusing on kindergarten through third grade to ensure students have the foundational skills they need to be prepared for the next level and beyond.

So we started with policies that were put into place. Our early learning collaboratives, which established our first state funded pre-K programs, our literacy-based Promotion Act eliminated social promotion and really focuses on insurance students have the reading skills they need in kindergarten through third grade. A part of that is our kindergarten readiness assessment, which we look at our kindergartners and assess readiness and growth at the beginning of the year because we know that we really had to focus in Mississippi on prevention and intervention with our students.

How do we prevent reading failure? What are some things that we needed to put in place and how do we intervene strategically and based on research to ensure students are equipped with what they need to be successful? And then we had our dyslexia policy that really came into place in 1997, and so we really had some provisions and some different things that were added to that particular legislation. So those key pieces of legislation really set the foundation for where we were headed, but I always tell anyone this, a policy is only as good as its implementation. You have to have the driving forces that really push the implementation.

That is 10 years now. That's a serious strategic commitment to change that's anchored in a shared vision, and it's remarkable how you all have been able to just be dedicated to executing on the principles that guided, I would imagine the development of those policies. And then where does Mississippi rank now when we look back at its placement against other states in the country?

Where we are now versus where we were, we were 49th and now we're 21st. We're excited to be there, but we still have a lot of work to do because we want to make sure all of our students are proficient. Until we get there, we will not stop the work.

If we go back a little bit, can you just give me a little context as to what was happening in Mississippi in 2013 that puts you in 49th place?

What was happening is similar to what was happening across the nation. There was this focus on an ineffective type of instruction around balanced literacy in the whole language approach to teaching students, which, if we read a lot to kids, if we immerse them in books and pictures, that reading just happens haphazard. We were very heavily grounded in balanced literacy approaches to teaching students reading with level text and all of that, and that was not working. It was working for some, but it wasn't working for all and some is just not good enough.

In addition, our state assessment was not really aligned to the NAEP or the National Assessment. So we went back as an agency, and our leader at the time was Dr. Carrie Wright, and she really pushed for standards that were more rigorous and more aligned to the expectation of the NAEP. All of that came into play at that time in Mississippi because we were not really focused on the science of reading and what that type of instruction looked like. It really had an impact on where we were in the nation.

No, that makes a lot of sense, and thank you for that context. Mississippi has faced some criticism over your numbers, and I want to dive in that just a little bit before we break down how you've looked at strategies and tactics. Some people claim that the fourth grade literacy rates there are overinflated due to policies that skew data, like the fact that third grade students need to pass a reading exam to even enter the fourth grade. How do you respond to that kind of perspective on what the data is and isn't saying?

So two ways that I respond. First of all, our policy is not focused on the retention part. We really focus on prevention and intervention and our strategies run deep. So we look at educator training. How are we training our teachers to understand how students learn to read, how they acquire reading, why some students have difficulties reading. So our training is grounded in that, and we do training for administrators as well as teachers, and these are year long courses. It's not a sit and get a quick fist type of thing. These are things that we really delve deep into those questions. We have coaches that support our lowest performing schools, and they're in there for a year or until the school falls off our list. That list is populated every year and we hire those coaches at the state level. We also have measures in place within our policy that focuses on early identification.

So before students in Mississippi get to third grade, or when they get to third grade, they've been screened 12 times. So they get a screener starting in kindergarten that they take, and the law also requires the district to develop an individual reading plan even on kindergartners. So we know in kindergarten, beginning of the year where you are. And so we keep track of that and make sure that we're getting those checkpoints in. We're screening kids three times a year and that we're making sure interventions meet the needs of students. And then we have, again, like I mentioned, our individual reading plan. We have a really big push on ensuring equitable access for all students to high quality instructional materials that align to the science, but also, we have a really robust parent communication. We at the state level, host parent meetings across the state. Those are public meetings. We talk to parents about the provisions of the law, what to expect, how to ask questions, how to be an advocate for your child, how to read the screener data, what you need to expect.

The retention for us is the last resort, and actually, we worked with Boston University that did a study of students retained under that particular policy, and that study yielded the results that students' score in sixth grade on their ELA state assessment substantially higher because they may need it some extra time for those intense interventions. So we know how important it is to make sure that students are receiving instruction aligned to the science and they're receiving interventions that match their individual needs. So that's how I answer that.

It's answered.

Yeah.

I think your strategies for involving parents as stakeholders and everything from, like you said, essentially what you're teaching, you're giving them literacy. This is how you make sense, how you become literate in what you're going to get from us and from the state, from classroom teachers around your individual child's performances. I'm curious though, knowing what you know now, what were some of those surprises along the way in terms of figuring out how to make this magic happen?

I think some of the surprises would be training our leaders. So as we're working really hard with our teachers to make sure they have what they need to build their capacity, then there's this whole group of district and school leaders that are responsible for change and they need that same type of training. So we have really been intentional about training our district and school leaders with our statewide professional development. We've offered a training for not only our district and schools leaders, but also our... We call them in Mississippi, our institute supplier learning. Those professors as well, because those professors are responsible for teaching the pre-service teachers and preparing them for the classroom. So that was not only a surprise, but it also was enlightening for us to know that we need to make sure that we're also putting stock into our leaders. They need to have the same level of understanding, but also an understanding of how do I put this in action steps because they're responsible for those communities.

And I always go back to the community conversation because literacy is an educational issue, but it's also an economic issue. If we don't have kids proficient by the time they leave fourth grade, then these dropout rates are high. When you're looking at our black and Hispanic communities, they are even higher. It's bigger than what people think it is because it has the potential to change lives and change communities. I think of that when I look at the district and school leaders who need just as much training and guidance as the teachers.

And I love that point that you just made about the economic outcomes of not addressing literacy, how far-reaching they are. We get to those high dropout rates, and then we look at other data that suggests correlation with mass incarceration, with poverty and crime that are essentially linked to a community's access to literacy. And so these are really important, I think, conceptual frameworks for educators across this country to think about when we decide how much buy-in we're going to invest into conversations around early literacy. It's definitely linked to every other outcome that cities, communities are going to have to navigate.

You've mentioned already this notion of the science of reading and that that's been an emphasis of Mississippi's literacy strategy. Can you explain what the science of reading is, what you're referring to when you mentioned the science of reading?

The science of reading is the research. It is the decades, 50 plus years of research around how students learn to read and write. How do we get them to proficiency, why some students have difficulties in how we assess and instruct. And so that research is grounded in special education, is grounded in the fields of cognitive science, in linguistics, in communication, developmental psychology, neuroscience, all of that. And so the science is the research and what we as educators and practitioners have to do is synthesize the research, understand the research, take the research and put it into practice. That's what we've been trying to do is ensure that our professional development and our instruction and assessments align to the research known as the science of reading.

And I can see some of the ways that that research is showing up. In practice, you're doing these 12 data dips between pre-K and third grade as a way of just assessing it. Are there other ways that you think that that research can appear in practice that might be helpful for teachers across the country?

Absolutely. We have dyslexia legislation that last year we added awareness training at the building and district level for teachers and paraprofessionals. We've also looked at what those interventions look like. We have a whole department that's on intervention services, and I say that because there's a lot of research behind how students with dyslexia, how we can change the mapping of their brain and how we can improve instructions there and what that instruction should look like. Making sure that we get students' instruction that is grounded in foundational reading skills, that talks about the importance of foundational skills. And so we've tried to be really intentional with that in particular.

Are there some strategies that you would love to recommend for some of our listeners around how they as educators can improve reading scores in their own schools? Or do you think it's something that can only be achieved through that kind of large scale policy revision that you just talked about?

No. There are things that schools in local districts can do to really put an emphasis on making sure that the effective strategies are in their buildings. One thing is the adoption of high quality instructional materials. If you're training teachers in professional development that's aligned to the science, they need to be able to go back into their classroom and have the materials that match that training. Looking at your instructional materials that teachers are using on a daily basis, but also how much training have they had on what does good instruction look like? As a district or a building level principal, you can take the initiative to start. Do teachers understand the importance of phonemic awareness and phonics, and do they understand how students come to them speaking because speaking is natural, and how do you cultivate that? How do you cultivate their language comprehension that attributes to reading comprehension? So some of those things are things that don't have to be done at a large scale. They can be done at the local level and at the school level.

Yeah, I love that idea of thinking about teaching as an art that requires a reflective nature in terms of the approach to practice. The Mississippi Department of Education is so fortunate to have you as State Literacy Director. You're doing all the things, and it's been so amazing for even a little bit to tap into your expertise and to share your insights with our listening audience. So thank you so much, Kristen, for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me. Anytime.

Thanks again to Kristen for coming on the podcast. Change can be exhausting, especially when it feels like you have no locus of control, but we persevere because perseverance is in the best interest of our students. Some of the most useful advice I ever received came from fellow teachers. Here's a helpful tip that you too can implement in your classroom.

Hi, this is Kelly. I have been a Spanish teacher for more than 33 years. I'm involved with a lot of community organizations and I get my kids to volunteer with me when I'm teaching ESL lessons, or it can be if I'm doing an event, I have kids help running tables, working with people, and when they see that they could actually use what they're learning in the classroom when they're talking to outside people, especially in Spanish, it makes them feel proud of themselves. It makes them feel virtuous. And when they're virtuous, they want to learn more and hopefully then that it's beginning of their lifelong journey. Do language, culture, travel, and just being a respectful citizen of the world.

What works best for you? Give us a call at (267) 225-4413 or share your own advice on social media and tag us with the hashtag #PennGSEPlaybook. Thank you for listening to this Educator's Playbook. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen. Leave us a five star review and share with your colleagues. For more tips and advice, please check out educatorsplaybook.com and subscribe to our monthly newsletter. Educator's Playbook is produced in Philadelphia by the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education in partnership with RADIOKISMET. This podcast is produced by Amy Carson. Our mix engineer is Justin Berger. Christopher Plant is Radio Kismet's Head of Operations, and Ben Geise is our project manager. Matthew Vlahos is our executive producer, and I'm your host, Kimberly McGlonn. Thanks so much for listening. This has been Educator's Playbook.