How Louisiana Managed to Boost Reading Scores

Fourth graders nationwide are struggling with reading more than they used to, with scores sliding for years. Louisiana is bucking that trend.

Nationally, grade four students’ average reading comprehension scores in 2024 are worse than their 2022 scores, per the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The 2022 scores, in turn, are worse than the 2019 ones. It’s not just lower averages, either. Today’s lowest-performing readers are also scoring below the lowest performers from 30 years ago.

But Louisiana is finding ways to drive up its scores. While Louisiana’s fourth graders ranked 50th in the nation in 2019, they’re now coming in at 16th. Still, there’s a longer path to climb: The state’s improvements brought its fourth graders up to scoring around the national average.

So why are students struggling, and what’s Louisiana done to help them catch up?

Why Have Scores Been Slipping?

The COVID-19 pandemic was one factor dampening students’ academic achievement.

“What we found out was, really and truly, virtual learning was very, very ineffective for my [lower elementary] babies,” who needed an adult there to help them, says Alyshia Coulson, principal at Bellaire Elementary School in Bossier City, La. But efforts to stop the disease’s spread meant children frequently had to be sent home to quarantine after an exposure. “We weren’t able to educate the children to the level that we were used to,” Coulson says.

Plus, by the time the pandemic conditions ended, parents had become accustomed to absences and were keeping kids home for conditions as minor as a runny nose, Coulson says.

Bellaire Elementary has been making a big push to get kids back in person. When a child is out, the school clerical secretary now calls home to find out why and encourage parents to send kids in once they can.

Because of the pandemic, Bellaire also had to pause small group reading instruction. In this approach, adults gather with five to eight kids to work on skills everyone in the group was still trying to master. That kind of focused attention is often more effective than trying to teach the same lesson to the whole class, where some students will be ready to move on before others, Coulson says. But small group instruction became difficult during COVID-19, when schools were practicing social distancing and children were separated into different learning pods.

The pandemic wasn’t the only roadblock — kids’ scores had been steadily declining for years before that. In general, kids in areas with more violence or poverty tend to struggle more, as do kids in schools with fewer resources and less-prepared teachers, says Maryanne Wolf, a literacy expert and director of the University of California Los Angeles’ Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice. Technological trends contribute, too. Wolf points to studies that suggest too much use of digital technology at a young age can be detrimental for children’s attention spans and academic performance.

Then there’s another big factor: finding the right early literacy teaching strategies.

The Science of Reading

Nationally, teachers often aren’t getting the right preparation in how to teach reading, says Megan Gierka, head of implementation strategy at the AIM Institute for Learning and Research, which is a teacher professional development center: “We’re getting students coming to our classroom with more complex reading and language challenges than ever before, and we’ve done a very poor job of training our teachers.”

There’s a long-running debate over whether it’s more effective to focus on teaching young children phonics or to focus on reading high-quality stories to kids, with the assumption that they’ll naturally make connections between letters and words. Both approaches miss something, experts say. Educators cannot assume kids exposed to literature will naturally pick up reading, but at the same time, educators must instruct young students in more skills than just phonics, Wolf says.

The middle ground is something called the science of reading, or structured literacy.

It refers to an evidence-based approach to literacy education that involves explicitly teaching young kids a variety of foundational skills. Those skills include phonology, phoneme awareness, semantics, syntax, the alphabetic principle, morphology, story meaning and more, Wolf writes in her report Elbow Room. Kids should practice foundational and comprehension skills from the start, with an initially heavier emphasis on foundational skills. That emphasis can gradually be reduced as kids become better at the foundations and ready for a greater focus on comprehension skills, per the report.

“For a large amount of the kids, no matter what they get, it’ll be fine,” Wolf says. “[But] probably a good 40 percent desperately need the foundational skills that the science of reading writ large, is really necessary for them to have.”

Louisiana cast its vote for this method, with a law requiring K-3 teachers, principals and assistant principals to take an approved professional development course on the science of reading for early literacy. That law went into effect for the 2023-2024 school year.

Teachers adopting more evidence-backed approaches can make small shifts in their current practices, says Gierka, whose institute is one of four vendors approved by the state to provide training to teachers on the science of reading.

Another important move in Louisiana is that the state is providing high-quality instructional materials to schools. Teachers otherwise may turn to the Internet to find materials and end up with something not evidence-aligned, Gierka says. Superintendents and principals on their own also often lack the time to assess whether an educational publisher’s materials are as evidence-backed as they’re claiming to be, Wolf says.

Many of Louisiana’s moves mirror work in Mississippi that helped the state achieve the so-called “Mississippi Miracle”: lifting that state’s NAEP scores from among the lowest in the nation in 2013, up to roughly the national average by 2022. Both states embraced the science of reading and trained teachers in this approach as well as provided high-quality instructional materials.

Grade Four Deadline

Early interventions matter too. Wolf recommends screening kids as early as grade one or two for signs of dyslexia or other literacy and reading struggles, so kids get help before falling further behind. Struggling kids risk slipping not just in literacy but also in all other school subjects, where they need to read well to learn the material, Coulson says. Louisiana has embraced the idea of early intervention, moving the age at which children start being screened from third grade to kindergarten.

Last year, the state began enforcing a certain level of reading skill by third grade, stopping children from moving on to fourth grade if they’re reading well below grade level. (Students can get a good-cause exemption, however, if they’re new to learning English, have dyslexia or for certain other reasons.) This, too, mirrors Mississippi which began holding back third graders, as part of its educational reform.

New Louisiana policies also required literacy screenings for kids three times per year. Teachers were required to make individualized academic support plans for any child scoring well below or below grade level.

Although initially opposed to holding back rising fourth graders, Coulson says the strict deadline spurred the school into high gear, as it worked to create and implement new, highly detailed academic support plans.

Under state rules, schools check in on struggling kids’ progress every two or three weeks, depending on how much help they need. The kids are put into small groups of up to four students struggling in similar areas and meet with the same, trained adult for targeted work. These groups meet for at least 30 minutes three times a week, for 10 weeks in a row.

“There were so many stipulations that it was just a monstrosity of work to build a schedule, to get the people in place,” and otherwise implement the changes, Coulson says. But, ultimately, the new process paid off: Although some rising fourth graders were still reading below grade level, none were well below without a good-cause exemption.

“Our kids showed growth like never before on this assessment,” Coulson says. “And in the end, we did not have a single third grader fail.”

Louisiana has been making meaningful changes, but much more remains, she says.

“The state is definitely going in the right direction,” Coulson says. “[But] until you’ve got 100 percent of kids reading on grade level, you haven’t arrived. And we have a long way to go.”