Why Can’t MPS Improve Student Reading Scores?

Beginning sometime after 2000, there was growing concern that many students had difficulty with reading. When comparing reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) among states, Massachusetts stood out. Suddenly, that state’s reading and math scores jumped.

Massachusetts’ scores (shown in yellow in the graph below) started the late 1990s looking similar to Wisconsin’s, but then enjoyed a substantial jump. By contrast, Wisconsin scores (shown in gray) were largely flat or decreasing and were eventually joined by the average national scores.

What accounted for the jump in Massachusetts’ scores? That state decided to replace whole language (currently called “balanced literacy”) with a program that was based on research into the science of learning to read. Children learning to read were taught to sound out the parts of unknown words (called phonemes) and then combine these parts to sound out the whole word.

To enforce this change, the state designed a test for aspiring teachers to assess their knowledge of the research on the process of learning to read.

As the next graph shows, Milwaukee Public Schools made little or no progress during the last two decades. Scores were also flat during this period, indicating that many of its students were struggling with reading. They also trailed the average scores for big cities in the nation.

Starting in 2014, Wisconsin instituted a similar requirement for aspiring elementary teachers, special education teachers, reading teachers, and reading specialists. Those teachers are required to get a passing grade on the Wisconsin Foundations of Reading Test (FORT) in order to be fully licensed.

Surprisingly—and depressingly—the pass rate on the FORT test has steadily declined since it was introduced. This is shown by the next graph taken from the Department of Public Instruction’s 2022 Educator Preparation Program and Workforce Analysis Report issued this month. In my opinion, this graph represents a failure by the colleges of education that claim to prepare their students to teach. It appears that many of the colleges have concluded that learning to teach reading is something that teachers should master on their own, rather than be one of the most important elements of their programs.

This failure is not evenly distributed among the Wisconsin schools of education. The graph below shows the number of potential teachers who took the Wisconsin FORT test and their pass rates by the universities they attended. The number of test takers are shown by the blue columns, using the left-hand scale. The percentage who passed the test are shown by the orange line and the right-hand scale. The universities are arranged by their pass rates, with the least successful on the left and the most successful on the right.

There is little in common among the various Universities of Wisconsin campuses, which show substantial variability in their ability to prepare their students for the FORT. UW-Madison students have the greatest success on the test, with an 83% pass rate. At many of the other UW campuses, including UW-Milwaukee, fewer than half of the students pass. At UW-Whitewater, the school with the largest number of test-takers, only a third passed.

The need for more effective reading instruction is particularly urgent for children growing up in poverty in large cities. Participation in NAEP is voluntary. Only four of the 26 urban school districts whose students participate in the program are in the Midwest and all four (Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Detroit) score below that average for large cities, as shown in the graph below.

Recently the Legislature passed, and Governor Tony Evers signed, a bill that requires schools to teach reading using methods that are supported by research. Somewhat surprisingly, Mississippi was the state that often came up for discussion. The next graph shows why. Mississippi (the blue line) has seen a tremendous increase in fourth-grade reading scores.

Schools are currently challenged by a shortage of new teachers. A major factor behind this shortage in Wisconsin is the failure to keep up with inflation in teacher pay, as the Republican-led Legislature has reduced school funding in real (un-inflated) dollars.

Another factor is the difficulty in passing the FORT. A recent proposal by two Republican state legislators to remove the requirement also seems misguided. It seems much better to make sure that prospective teachers are knowledgeable about teaching children to read.