Teaching, not money, is the key to education

The Leandro court case started as a quest for more money for public schools. But the evidence shows that the failure of children to read proficiently is the primary cause of low academic performance resulting in students’ failure to obtain a sound, basic education.

The key holdings of the Leandro decisions require every student to be proficient in basic skills by having an equal opportunity to a sound, basic education in adequately-resourced schools run by competent principals and effective educators.

Most critical to obtaining a sound, basic education is that each child must be able to read and write the English language.

 The primary cause of the failure to achieve grade-level performance in reading is not money, but a failure of classroom instruction and the leadership in a school.

The overwhelming evidence shows that achieving reading proficiency by the end of the third grade is crucial. After third grade, classroom instruction shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”

By the end of third grade, a child has spent four years in the public school system. If the school can’t teach a child to read in four years, that’s an abject failure.

But it’s exactly what’s been happening in schools across the state for years. Just 56.8% of third-graders achieved grade-level proficiency scores on their end-of-grade reading exams. There’s a 28-percentage point difference in reading proficiency between third-graders from low-wealth homes and third-graders from comfortable homes. The consequences are dire.

Third-grade students from disadvantaged homes who can’t read proficiently are 13 times less likely to graduate high school. One in ten male high school dropouts ends up in prison or juvenile detention.

And the scores of older students show the exact same achievement gap, which means economically disadvantaged third-graders have little hope of catching up.

This achievement gap is a failure of the state’s constitutional obligation to provide a sound, basic education.

When I was the Leandro judge, I reviewed statewide school performance data annually from 2004 to 2015 and exposed the deficiencies. So did the General Assembly. In 2013, the legislature passed Read to Achieve, which remade the state’s early childhood literacy curriculum to emphasize strategies that are shown to work. This program has never fully lived up to its potential due to ineffective implementation.

But a closer look at the numbers reveals a more heartening picture in some school districts. Reading scores in some school districts, like Madison County’s, climbed tremendously after Read to Achieve passed. That’s no surprise: Mississippi, which also embraced this new reading curriculum, had the highest reading score growth in the entire country after enacting it.

Many school districts have not seen that growth and reading remains stagnant. That points to a failure of implementation, not policy.

 School districts and schools that I had identified and called on the carpet between 2009 and 2014 are still, for the most part, only achieving reading proficiency at 60% and below.

I found in the 2014 Report From the Court: The Reading Problem that there is simply no excuse for a child not being proficient in reading by the end of the third grade. The cause is a failure of classroom instruction, not more and more money.

While third grade reading proficiency remains static, average teacher pay in North Carolina has risen from $44,990 in 2013-14 to $54,682 in 2019-20.

Reduced to essentials, providing the opportunity for a sound, basic education isn’t more money. It’s competent management from principals and effective teaching from educators.

And that brings us to the present day pandemic. A sound, basic education for our little ones isn’t possible through a computer screen in homes where there are adults who may not be able to read above the ninth grade level and no classroom teacher there to instruct and assess progress. Online learning does not provide each child with a competent certified teacher in a classroom setting and thus fails the Leandro requirement.

The problems of providing a sound, basic education to children have faced North Carolina for decades. It’s a question of focus and effort in classroom instruction. The focus and effort should be on learning to read.

North Carolina’s small children can’t go through another year of insufficient computer instruction at home. Let’s stop throwing the regular curriculum at these young children without a classroom and try hard to make sure they learn basic reading skills and basic math as best they can. Our at-risk children cannot afford to lose another year of learning the basic reading and math skills. They will never ever catch up.

For those adults who will whine and complain, just remember that I have the reading scores by school at my fingertips. If the shoe fits, wear it.

HOWARD E. MANNING JR. IS A FORMER SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE IN WAKE COUNTY WHO OVERSAW STATE COMPLIANCE WITH THE LANDMARK EDUCATION EQUITY RULING KNOWN AS LEANDRO. HE RETIRED FROM THE BENCH IN 2015.