Methuen Reading Scores Dissected
By Laurie Keegan, School Committee Member
There has been a lot of talk about Methuen’s reading scores. There are statistics thrown around to make Methuen look like a terrible place to have a child educated. Let’s take a closer look at what is being said.
“70 percent of Methuen students can’t read” is the most recent one I’ve heard, over and over.
It is an absolute distortion of reality. Anyone can say anything, but where does this come from?
According to the DESE data for MCAS, 30% of methuen students are meeting or exceeding grade level expectations for ELA (English Language Arts). Notice that MCAS is not called “reading”. It is called ELA. There is a good reason for this label.
It is not just a technicality. MCAS is *not* a reading assessment. It is a measurement of skill compared to the entire English language arts curriculum standards for each grade level. This standards being assessed during the ELA MCAS can be found on the DESE website, HERE. While reading is one component of the curriculum, it is not the only part and is not the only thing being assessed. Therefore, it is completely untrue to say that 70% of Methuen students can not read, and then back it up with a statistic that is not a measurement of reading to us as “proof”. Anyone who says this is either purposely lying or doesn’t have any understanding of what MCAS is and is not.
There is no state measurement of reading.
Additionally, just because a student is not meeting grade level expectations on the ELA MCAS does not mean that a student can’t read all together.
In fact, it doesn’t even mean that a student can’t read at grade level, because perhaps, they are not able to write well, or decided they weren’t going to write the essay that day, and that brings their ELA score below grade level. You can not determine based on the overall ELA MCAS score whether or not a student can read.
You need to see the breakdown of where the student received points to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the individual student across the entire ELA standards for a given grade level.
How, then, do we know if kids are reading at grade level since there is no state wide assessment that gives us this information?
First, we need to define what it means to read.
It sounds silly, but I say it with all seriousness. Let me give an example, when my youngest was 3, I could put War and Peace in front of him and he could read the words. Does this mean my son son was a genius or could read above grade level? Absolutely not. He had no comprehension of any word he read. He could sound out the letters and say the words, but they were completely meaningless to him. This is not reading.
So, what does it mean to “read at grade level”? A quick google search tells me “Reading at grade level means a person can comprehend texts similar in complexity (vocabulary, sentence structure, themes) to what an average student in that specific grade level is expected to understand, assessed through fluency, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension skills, rather than just sounding out words. It's a benchmark for progress.”
Therefore, reading has a few components:
Comprehension: Understanding the meaning, not just decoding words.
Fluency: Reading smoothly and accurately at an appropriate pace.
Vocabulary: Knowing the meaning of a wide range of words, including academic and specialized terms.
Complexity: Handling varied sentence structures, figurative language, and evolving plots.
Measurement: Assessed by readability formulas or standardized tests, comparing a reader to the average performance of their age/grade group.
This is where Methuen’s reading benchmark testing comes into play.
Three times a year, students in kindergarten through grade 8 are tested with a standardized reading assessment to determine if they are reading “at grade level”. These assessments are used to determine where students need support.
These assessments are not Methuen-made, subjective or teacher alterable. They are well known, industry standard, nationally normed, objective reading assessments. In grades K-4, DIBELS is used and in grades 5-8, students are assessed using Deambox, ReadingPlus.
New this year, students in grades 9-10 are now being assessed using the CommonLit assessment. These scores, the only reading scores Methuen has, are reported to the school committee 3 times a year. The beginning of the year benchmark scores were shared in November and can be found HERE.
Let’s understand what they say, because context is everything. When you compare Methuen to the entire nation, in all grades K-4 (the DIBELS assessment) 49% of the students across the country are not reading at grade level. In Methuen, 50% are not reading at grade level. Given this simple comparison, Methuen is not a “failing” district, we are in fact exactly where the rest of the country is.
Now, let’s look at Kindergarten students.
This is very important. These are 5 year old students that Methuen has not ever seen or educated before. These are students who are coming to us for the first time. According to our DIBELS assessment, 67% of kindergarteners came to school for the first time NOT reading at grade level!
Let that sit for a moment.
Almost 70% of students who entered Methuen Public Schools this past fall came to us already behind age/grade expectations! This is not a failure of the district. This is not about “bad teaching”, or a sub-par education being offered. This is simply a real picture of what we are up against. Our kindergartners are coming to us without the expected grade-level knowledge and experience of a 5 year old.
Think about this, how do our kindergarten teachers teach “at grade level” when almost ¾ of the class is not ready to learn at grade level?
Now think about the domino effect. We are expecting that kindergarten teachers get kids to grade level, but they have to “catch up” most students.
Some kids can in fact just catch up, but others can not make multiple years of progress in one year of kindergarten. Also, remember that Kindergarten is not required in Massachusetts.
So, now imagine, a 6 year old coming into the district in first grade, not having any previous schooling, or having the opportunity to catch up in kindergarten, being placed in first grade. How are we expecting the teachers or the curriculum to fix this very real issue?
Next consider that Methuen has an extremely high “churn rate”. We have kids coming into the district at all grade levels. Many of these students are not reading at grade level when they come to us, but they are now in our grade level reports.
The failure of these students not reading at grade level and not having had the MPS reading curriculum, is not the fault of MPS, but we expect our teachers to do the impossible and make sure they are reading at grade level by the time they finish their first year with us.
I think it is very important to understand the numbers in context. Methuen Public Schools is not expected to take students ready for school and teach them grade level curriculum. Rather, Methuen Public Schools is expected to take students who are already behind and educate them. Then, our educators are criticized and told they “aren’t doing their job” when all students aren’t making multiple years worth of progress to “make it to grade level”. This is unfair to our educators.
No one satisfied with the fact that even one student is not reading at grade level. No one has ever said, “we are doing enough”. However, when we judge the district, we need to look at where students are when they enter the system and if they are making progress.
In order to determine if our reading curriculum is good, we need to look at the students who come into the system and follow those students’ progress. It is not the failure of Methuen Public Schools that 68% of students entering kindergarten are not reading at grade level, but rather, it is the success of Methuen Public Schools that by 4th grade, we have reduced that number to 44%. Do we need to figure out how to lower that number even more? Absolutely. But, just because 44% of fourth graders are not reading at grade level, does NOT mean that they can not read. It means they are not meeting grade level expectations in one or more of the components discussed above.