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By Paula White on NJ.com
New literacy standards and laws aligned with evidence-based reading are now in effect in New Jersey. That’s a good thing because, as announced last week, for the third year in a row, reading
proficiency rates for New Jersey’s 3rd graders are still lagging well below pre-pandemic levels.
We witnessed a minimal increase of a couple of percentage points compared to last year, and some schools — such as Park Elementary in Newark — are showing great outcomes for the children they serve. However, if the overall growth rate remains consistent, New Jersey’s parents will have to wait until 2040 for reading proficiency rates to reach an acceptable level.
Surely, we can all work together to build a more urgent timetable than that.
Legislators, educators, advocates, and parents should celebrate the hard work that led to new state policies and the laws enacted last August, as it served as the first time in many years that New Jersey unified to create a new framework to address student learning. As current test scores show, however, New Jersey cannot pacify itself into heralding small gains that still manage to shortchange more than half of our learners in the most pivotal elementary grade.
We must set our sights higher and pair legislative advancements with comprehensive, effective implementation.
♦ Educate to accelerate
To begin with, let’s soundly reject incrementalism. Whether seen in proficiency rates or policy development, it does not work – our united goal must be a dramatic change. Unlike other states,
New Jersey has still not recovered from pandemic losses, and let’s face it — a step forward and then a step backward is not progress, and minuscule gains aren’t good enough.
The antidote to incrementalism is acceleration: Change must be forceful, following the letter and intent of the new state standards and laws that are now in place. New Jersey needs to challenge the status quo and create reading plans that put great books in the hands of every child, emphasize the alphabetic principle, and support sound teacher and administrator training coupled with stellar student screeners and curricular materials.
In addition, we need to ensure these new lesson plans become increasingly challenging over time and develop an aggressive and viable plan to keep parents informed of their children’s progress. For example, North Star Academy in Newark, where these features are present, bested the state’s third grade proficiency rate by 10%, showing that doubling down unambiguously on effective practices accelerates achievement instead of sabotaging teachers’ hard work.
♦ Teach students the whole curriculum
Students do not become fully literate in a vacuum. They must be enveloped in a curricular infrastructure to build a foundation for instruction that defines a high-quality, consistent, and
coherent curriculum in every school. We see the value of this teaching philosophy at Soaring Heights Charter School in Jersey City, where recent first-grade lessons included learning about the lifecycle of a sunflower right alongside structured literacy lessons on letter digraphs and short vowel sounds. Sixty-eight percent of Soaring Heights third graders are reading proficiently, compared to the state average of just 44%.
As a former teacher, I remember scrambling across town to three different libraries to borrow seventeen copies of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry to have enough books for every student in my
class. Curricular resources should be available to render that individual herculean effort unnecessary. Students must have classic and culturally relevant fiction and nonfiction history books brought alive with strategies like script writing and readers theater. These factors rarely make it into our learning equity conversations.
Still, our work should continue beyond there – school district budgets should carve out funds for students to visit historical landmarks, city halls, museums, science centers, parks, and more, as
these are untapped resources for learning acceleration. Broad exposure and field experiences build a schema that students use in tandem with their word decoding skills to derive meaning from a wide range of texts and apply their understanding to new learning situations. Many families access a wide range of resources independently, but for equity of opportunity for all students, these features must be embedded in school curricula.
♦ Partner with parents meaningfully around literacy
New Jersey must also go beyond generic parental engagement and provide pointed, expert guidance to our parents that helps children’s reading performance. This is not an obtuse call to
transform caregivers into reading teachers, but rather to tap into parents’ passions for their kids and provide positive guidance for the home – half an hour of daily screen-free reading, properly
vetted, evidence-based reading activities, frequent parent-child conversations, and stopping children’s reliance on picture cues or arbitrary word guessing when they read.
Leaders must also resolve the problem of conflicting reading approaches and materials shared with parents and children. An often overlooked factor is the need for school districts and their locales to align their approaches across all community partners, including tutoring and after-school programs. With this alignment, added programs are a good use of money and time.
♦ Show courage and consistency across state leadership
With a gubernatorial race in New Jersey ahead, effective foundational literacy instruction must be prioritized across all administrative transitions. Mastering reading should be a priority regardless of who New Jersey’s governor or education commissioner is. When one of our children enters a classroom, it should address clear and consistent benchmarks for proficiency, just like an industry recognized vocational credential or AP or CLEP assessment results.
New Jersey has undoubtedly laid a promising legislative and policy foundation for literacy, which is an unquestionable success. Deep investments, painstaking execution planning, and relentless monitoring of all efforts are now necessary. Only then will we produce an entire literate generation in New Jersey.
Paula White is the executive director of JerseyCAN. Previously, she served as a public school teacher and a statewide policy expert who served as chief turnaround officer at the NJ Department of Education.