Fort Worth ISD leaders say reading test scores show progress. Is that the whole picture?

When officials in the Fort Worth Independent School District present reading assessment scores to the district’s board, they often emphasize the fact that students show signs of growth from the beginning of the school year to the end.

It’s true that scores on the district’s benchmark exam consistently show that students are making progress in reading. But what’s also true is that those same scores show an achievement gap between the district and national averages that begins in the early grades and widens as students get older. By the time students reach eighth grade, the district’s average reading scores are years behind national norms.

District officials say they’re working hard to accelerate student achievement and close those performance gaps. They also point out that national averages include districts of all kinds, not just large, high-poverty districts like Fort Worth ISD.

But parents and literacy advocates say they’re frustrated with the lack of progress. Robert Rogers, a Fort Worth reading tutor and president of the Reading League of Texas, pointed to research showing that 95% of kids could be proficient readers with the right instruction.

“So if we’re not doing that, we need to reassess, why not?” Rogers said.

FWISD’s MAP scores show progress, achievement gaps

During the board’s June 25 meeting, Superintendent Angélica Ramsey presented scores from the district’s MAP assessment from the end of the last school year. Ramsey emphasized that the scores show that students in every grade level made academic gains last year. Across all grade levels and student groups, students scored higher on the exam at the end of the school year than they did at the beginning.

But those comparisons only show that students mastered some amount of content during the last school year. When the district’s scores are placed against national norms, a different picture emerges. The district’s kindergartners finished the year on par with national norms in reading. But each year after that, students fell progressively further behind in reading. Fourth-graders in the district finished the year on par with the national end-of-year average for third-graders, and eighth-graders finished the year slightly above the national average for fifth-graders.

MAP assessments are a benchmark exam many districts across the country use to see how much progress students are making. Unlike state tests, which students take once a year, school districts administer the MAP at the beginning of the school year, in the middle of the year and at the end of the year, allowing teachers and administrators to see how much ground they’ve gained over the course of the year. MAP assessments also aren’t geared toward grade level standards the way state tests are, but instead focus on how much progress individual students are making, no matter what grade level they’re performing on.

FWISD officials say they’re working to move students forward

In an emailed statement, Charlie Garcia, associate superintendent of learning and leading for Fort Worth ISD, acknowledged that some of the district’s outcomes lag behind national norms. But Garcia, who wasn’t available for an interview, pointed out that those norms only look at broad national trends and don’t account for specific student groups. About 85% of the district’s students are economically disadvantaged, a subset of students who are more likely to struggle academically because of other challenges in their lives.

“These numbers include districts whose profile resembles ours and those who don’t,” he said. “It isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.”

District leaders are focused on helping students move forward academically, Garcia said. Part of the district’s strategy involves improving the instruction every student gets in class every day, he said. The district bought upgraded instructional materials and added five teacher planning days to its calendar to give teachers more time to prepare lesson plans and collaborate with colleagues.

Garcia said district leaders are also working with teachers to provide more personalized support to students who need extra help. The district is offering individualized tutoring to students who are below grade level, he said. In particular, district leaders are focusing their efforts on Black students, students with disabilities and students who are learning English, he said. District leaders have made a priority of improving performance among those three groups. The district is also working with teachers to use student performance data to guide their planning, Garcia said.

Garcia said the district’s data shows that students are making progress that meets or exceeds expected growth as laid out by NWEA, the testing company that developed the MAP assessment. District officials were unable to provide that data before publication deadline for this story.

When the district begins its school year on Aug. 13, it will most likely do so without a codified set of academic goals. That’s because Fort Worth ISD’s board voted down a proposed five-year strategic plan at a meeting last month. The plan included goals to improve reading and math scores on the state test, as well as strategies for doing so. Several board members who voted against the proposal said they wanted to allow more time for public input before approving the plan. With just days left before the first day of school, the proposal’s future is unclear.

Literacy advocate points to lack of progress in reading

Rogers, the Reading League of Texas president, said he’s been frustrated at the lack of progress in Fort Worth ISD. Rogers has volunteered as a reading tutor in the district with the nonprofit Reading Partners for more than a decade, and in that time, he’s followed how the district fared on state tests. When reading scores climb a few points, district leaders celebrate, he said, but when they decline or stagnate, it barely garners a mention. But there’s been little substantial improvement over the years, he said.

At the most fundamental level, students who come to Reading Partners for tutoring all have the same problem, Rogers said — they’re struggling to master certain skills they need to become proficient readers. The organization gives students an assessment to see what grade level they’re reading at, and volunteer tutors start at that level and work on moving them forward. If the student has specific deficiencies that make it harder for them to become readers, tutors can work with them on those skills, he said.

One of the key questions facing not just Fort Worth schools, but also the city more broadly, is whether it’s reasonable to expect educators to be able to teach all children to read, Rogers said. If school leaders take the position that there are too many hurdles preventing every child from learning how to read, nothing will get done, he said. But if those leaders start from the assumption that any child who doesn’t have a major intellectual disability should be able to learn to read, they’re more likely to make steady progress toward that goal, he said.

Reading scores may oversimplify a complex process

Education leaders and policy makers often look at school districts’ third-grade reading scores as an indicator of how they’re doing overall, saying third grade is the point where students stop learning to read and start reading to learn. But Jessi Murdter-Atkinson, a professor of literacy education at the University of North Texas’ College of Education, said that explanation oversimplifies a more nuanced process.

Murdter-Atkinson, who taught elementary school in central Texas for 15 years, said teachers in early grades work with students on decoding skills — understanding how combinations of letters go together to make up words. The idea behind the “learning to read” vs. “reading to learn” dichotomy is that at some point in second or third grade, students should have mastered those skills, and teachers begin to work with them on making meaning out of words and deriving knowledge from text.

But Murdter-Atkinson said the reality is more complex. Readers can decode words and work out their meaning at the same time, and teachers need to be able to help them do that, she said. And while teachers in kindergarten and first grade place the most emphasis on phonics and decoding skills, that work doesn’t stop once students reach second and third grade, she said.

But that doesn’t mean third-grade reading isn’t an important educational benchmark, Murdter-Atkinson said. Research indicates that students who can’t read proficiently by third grade go on to experience a host of challenges, including being more likely to repeat a grade or drop out of school before graduation. Murdter-Atkinson pointed to research suggesting that students who are struggling academically may be more likely to drop out not necessarily because they’re performing poorly, but because they feel disconnected from the curriculum, their teachers or their peers.

‘Every child deserves to have a quality education’

Melony Watson, a Fort Worth mom, said Fort Worth ISD’s test scores were a big part of the reason she and her husband decided to move out of the district. Watson and her husband have seven kids in school. For the past few years, several of their kids went to campuses operated by IDEA Public Schools, a Weslaco-based charter school network with four campuses in Tarrant County. But Watson said she wasn’t happy with the education her kids were getting there, so she began looking for other options.

At the time, her family lived in Fort Worth’s Como neighborhood. She liked the neighborhood and was happy with the house they all shared, she said. But when she started looking at the Fort Worth ISD schools in the area, she wasn’t satisfied with what she saw. On last year’s state test, the most up-to-date data point when she and her husband were making their decision, 43% of third-graders at the nearby Leadership Academy at Como Elementary School were reading on grade level, a score that exceeded the district as a whole but lagged behind the rest of the state. The school’s third-grade reading rate climbed to 53% on this year’s state test.

Watson said she worried that enrolling her kids in the schools available in her area would be setting them up to fail. So this summer, she and her family moved from southwest Fort Worth to a neighborhood in the eastern part of the city, in the Keller Independent School District. Later this month, six of her seven kids will start school in Keller schools. Her oldest son wanted to finish his senior year at Arlington Heights High School in Fort Worth ISD, so he’ll stay with Watson’s sister until he graduates.

Packing up her five-bedroom home before the move was no small task, she said, and she misses her old neighborhood. But she said she didn’t feel like she had another choice. But she acknowledged that not every family can make the same decision she did, and she worries about kids whose families have fewer options.

“Every child deserves to have a quality education,” Watson said. “No parent should feel like, ‘Oh my God… our children are being set up to fail.’”