A little while back we looked at Senate Enrolled Act (SEA) 1, a new piece of legislation aimed at addressing Indiana’s literacy crisis. Soon after, The74 produced an interactive special called “See How Student Achievement Gaps are Growing in Your State.”

While that piece primarily focused on math achievement scores, The74’s Chad Aldeman also wrote a follow-up piece looking specifically at Indiana’s reading scores and how they started falling abruptly around 2015. It is essential reading to understand our current literacy crisis and it offers a window into the path back to increasing student achievement scores.

“A Tale of Two Eras”

For the past ten years, student achievement has been falling. That’s true nationally. It’s also true in the Hoosier state. But this decline followed years of steady progress. From the early 2000s into the nascent 2010s, fourth-grade reading scores were ticking up. Even better, the biggest gains were made among our state’s lowest-performing students. But around 2015, the bottom fell out. I love a good chart and Aldeman does not disappoint. The below is clipped from his story, which shows the progress from 2003 to 2015 and the precipitous decline from 2015 onward.

Note how higher-performing students have more or less held steady while lower-performing students have experienced shocking declines. In short, the opportunity gap in reading has been widening for almost a decade. (Side note: Aldeman only digs into reading score comparisons between higher- and lower-performing students and does not break things down into what gaps look like between different racial or socioeconomic groups. Perhaps a follow up to his follow up? We hope so.)

What Caused the Decline?

Aldeman is careful to consider a variety of explanations for the decline. He runs through possibilities like the introduction of Common Core (a bone Diane Ravitch has definitely picked when looking nationally), the proliferation of cell phones in schools, and the COVID-19 pandemic. I paraphrase his quick rebuttals to each below.

• Common Core? The timing fits. But states that didn’t adopt Common Core saw similar declines. And subjects like civics and history (not covered by Common Core standards), also saw declines. This shoe doesn’t fit.
• Cell phones? Aldeman admits this is harder to disprove. But he notes that achievement declines are not limited to teenagers. They are just as profound among elementary students who typically have much less access to phones and similar distractive technology. If it were the fault of cell phones and social media, it also isn’t clear why lower-performing students would fare the worst while higher-performing students were able to at least tread water 2015 onward.
• COVID-19. This is perhaps the easiest to set aside. The timing just isn’t there as these declines began in 2015, well before the pandemic. At the same time, it’s clear that COVID-19 accelerated or deepened the achievement malaise that was already established.

Okay, so none of those bogeymen fit. Could it be a lack of funding or a dearth of teachers? That was my next guess but Aldeman swats those aside convincingly as well. For instance, Indiana’s per-pupil spending during the bright years of increasing achievement was mostly flat. And spending actually started to increase around when achievement started falling. (To be clear, I’m not indicating that increased spending doesn’t matter or somehow perversely weakens outcomes. Nor do I think Aldeman thinks that. But it’s clear that spending on its own does not better outcomes achieve. To which you’re probably thinking, “Duh!” But I’m always wary of sounding like that neoliberal line of thinking that says, “Let’s cut school funding because public schools are failing kids,” which is complete nonsense.)

But is it a teacher supply issue? This was perhaps the data point that stunned me most from his piece. As of the most recent data, the teacher student ratio in Indiana is 15.8:1 compared to 17.4:1 a decade ago. So we actually have more teachers today than when these scores started declining.

(Join me over here for a not-so-brief aside. Perhaps the thornier part of the teacher supply idea is that while we have more teachers per student today than before they may 1) be less experienced or effective compared to the teachers of 10 years ago and/or 2) be less well distributed to schools that serve higher percentages of the students who need the best teachers the most. Aldeman does not tackle either of those points, for which I do not blame him in a piece whose brevity is part of its digestibility. On the effectiveness piece, Indiana is putting new muscle behind literacy training requirements for Hoosier educators related to the science of reading. While I applaud the move in principle, the roll-out of this requirement has been, well, less than ideal for teachers.)

So what is at fault? Aldeman admits the many factors at play certainly mean a confluence of issues and pressures could be driving scores down. But his central argument is this:

“The weakening of school accountability pressures after the No Child Left Behind Act was passed is responsible for a large portion of the drop. The timing of the change fits with the patterns both nationally and in Indiana. It also explains the growing achievement gaps. After state and district policymakers stopped focusing on the performance of kids at the bottom, their scores started to decline.”

Whatever you think of NCLB (I’m not sure where I land on it), I am compelled by this particular part of the quote: “After state and district policymakers stopped focusing on the performance of kids at the bottom, their scores started to decline.”

As I wrote about when we tackled the performance of Education Secretary Jenner, we as a state are increasingly focused on delivering support and resources to our lowest-performing students in reading. SEA 1 seems largely a doubling down on that direction (though there are good-faith disagreements to levy against it).

I’ll be interested to see what that chart looks like when it’s updated with data from 2023 and 2024. I suspect it’ll show us getting back on the right path. If it doesn’t, we’ll have to take a hard look at our current approach and interventions.

Either way, we have to ask a hard question: How can we make sure there’s never another lost decade for Hoosier youth?