Sen. Kruse has introduced SB 258 which would require 3rd graders who can’t read at a 3rd grade level to be held back. According to an Associated Press article, Governor Daniels is surprised that this bill would cost anything.
The fiscal analysis (pdf) of the bill suggests that remedial reading instruction would cost something as would keeping the kid in school for an extra year. This unremarkable bit of logic was “stunning” to Gov. Daniels:
Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels says he was “stunned” that his proposal to hold back third-grade students who can’t read well came with such a large price tag that a key lawmaker said it shouldn’t pass this year.
Daniels says the proposal to end so-called social promotion shouldn’t cost one cent. He and state Superintendent Tony Bennett say schools already are getting paid to teach students how to read so the plan shouldn’t require more cash.
The Daniels and Bennett solution: Magic! I’m picturing them teaching a class with failing 3rd graders: “READ BILLY! WHAT ARE YOU? STUPID! READ, STUPID!” But maybe that’s just my rich imagination.
I wonder if Sen. Kruse is going to propose any legislation that would require auctioneers to pay their bills.
I believe there are a number of school districts in the state that already have “no social promotion” policies that have been put in place by local school boards. Students with IEPs (special education lingo for “individual education plans”) are typically exempt. Whether the no social promotion policies are truly followed is a separate question. I almost never agree with Bennett and Daniels on education issues, but I think they are right about the cost on this one. Unless a child has a serious learning disability, there is no reason to expect that we cannot get children reading at third grade level using the funds we have available already. That said, I’m not sure it should be the state that decides whether Johnny who is reading at 2.8 would be better off being held back and receiving intervention/remediation in a second grade classroom or moving with his peers and getting extra support in a third grade classroom.
I’m not sure how you can educate a kid an extra year without requiring more resources.
Aside from just wanting it to be true, what’s the basis for supposing that all/most kids can be made to read better without any extra resources? This makes me think of King Canute trying to stop the tide.
I’m a bit surprised that nine years of additional resources to help with remedial work is outweighed by one extra year of standard schooling. And how would one, accurately, weigh such things?
Then again, we’re talking about govt-run entities with significant monopoly power, so who knows. Anyway, either way, they’re picking at specks when there are logs to be removed…
Teachers salaries are always the biggest expenditures for school board.My school used to divide a teacher into 5 parts to figure out what teaching a class would cost..
If the average salary for the district is say, $80,000,then each class taught would cost the district 1/5 of that or $16,000. So if kids are held back to be taught again in a separate class, that would run into real ‘extra’ money. Thats why one class of 40 instead of two of 20 saves the district considerable money,especially if they do that several times .
And in my experience the elected school board’s major duty is to save tax payers money,and that could and does conflict with academic concerns.It usually depends on the priorities of the community.
It should have been assumed that ‘no social promotion’ could be very expensive,depending on set up.
Holding back those who cannot pass the ISTEP+ at third grade (tested in the spring, but results may not be back before promotions are announced) could lead to nearly 1/4 of the students statewide having to repeat the third grade. As in Florida, where they tried this and failed, this causes classes in third grade to increase (how much depends on your school–the worst, where individual help is most needed, will increase the most) and 4th grade classes to decrease. And then 5th and then 6th and so on. We might be able to move a teacher or two from a higher grade to a lower grade in some schools, but in most it will just result in larger classes. However, when this bulge hits the high school years, problems begin. Not enough algebra, science or english teachers to cover them all in all of the required courses.
Check with Rep S. Klinker there at Purdue on Reading Recovery, a program that works, costs money, has proven results and does not wait until the child has failed the grade to intervene.
As for mitch and tony and what they think, remember, moving ISTEP+ to the spring was not going to cost more either, but it does. One needs to look behind the budget to see how costs were shifted around to hide the extra expense. Ask tony and his chief of staff how they did that. And what about all that money tony was going to save the taxpayers and return to schools by slashing one third of the staff?
Average teacher salary in Indiana is around 40,000, maybe as high as 45,000 now–the data should be posted on the doe web site or NEA puts out a publication every year that provides all states data so you can compare.
As an adjunct faculty at IVYTECH, I find I spend at least 3 hours per week out of class (unpaid or perhaps I get paid much less for the 3 hours of actual teaching :) ) preparing for class or grading papers or communicating with students. I know that K-12 teachers rarely get even one plan period per day, most often only one or two a week if on a block schedule, and most are taking home materials every night as well as taking their own prof development courses on the weekends or in the summer.
And yet I legislators, who complain of teacher salaries, pay themselves about 30 grand per year plus per diem for a part time job, much of which is spent being wined and dined by their friends. Or lawyers, who spend their days golfing and lazing about the club–right Doug? :) :)
Perhaps luke K is just looking for a quid pro quo–endorsement for gov from the gov and he will find the money to fund this.
You must be thinking of personal injury attorneys, canoefun! I have a foolish tendency to take cases where I get paid by the hour.
Taken from the first website that came up in Google, for Indiana:
That’s compared to an overall per capita income of about $35,000. I couldn’t find the breakdown by education level.
We all know this guy is a moron: Bennett suggested the cost of an extra 90 minutes a day of reading intervention could be mitigated by embedding it within the normal school day, perhaps at the expense of recess or an arts class, which students would have to give up to focus on reading.
How excited will a student be when he is told, “Sorry Jimmy, you cannot go to recess because you have to read.” I bet he will be very excited/willing to learn.
Do you think third graders would be able to analyze Shakespeare if they were asked to go to school and read 24/7?
First, I find it curious that the same people who think teacher education focuses too much on education are the most fervent believers in things like Reading Levels, which, of course, are determined by the same people who run teacher education.
Pretension of expertise is the modern disease, and is responsible for a wide selection of our current dysfunction, from the full panoply of science being assumed undeservedly, to the solution to all political and economic problems being solved by cutting taxes and sending in the Marines. The state might have some legitimate interest in standardizing testing; using one as an all-purpose diagnostic to expressly overrule local–and presumably specialized–control is, well, a pretty good argument for ISTEP tests for legislators, for one thing.
The deceits and pretenses of various forms of statism– whether military, social or economic– are aspects of the “modern disease”.
Maybe. But my history books suggest that, before statism, things sucked worse.
Anarchy can be rough; hard-core statism is Suck with a capital S; elements of statism range from inconvenient to brutal. Strong but limited government is the best we could do.
With that, I think we’re all statists. Now we’re just haggling over the price.
Yes and no. Although this distinction is not completely clean/clear, there are the institutions of government that provide the basic environment in which people live, work, etc. And then there are the interventions of govt beyond that.
Strong limited government refers to doing an able job with the former (stable money, effective judicial system, national defense, protect property rights, etc.). There is some haggling here, but not much. The statist– whether social, economic, &/or military– sees govt as the active/interventionist solution to various ills. Statists do indeed haggle over price– and also about the realms in which the government should be active.
I’m just having trouble figuring out how ANY kid by the end of third grade can’t read, unless they are truly “learning disabled” in which case they would be in a special education class correct?
Am I missing something, is the ISTEP 3rd grade reading test riddled with 12th grade science terms?
If the stats above by canoefun are accurate and we have 25% of the third grade that can’t read, then the frickin’ problem is in the 1st and 2nd AND 3rd grade isn’t it??
You don’t need another $49 million to fix that, they (the students) are what one might call a “captive audience” from 8 to 3 from 1st grade on, right? Try using a curriculum that teaches spelling and sentence structure instead of one that teaches “how they feel about spelling and sentence structure”. Can no one see we’ve been spending millions more for far worse results for decades?
And Craig, If your brother has financial difficulties are you somehow responsible? I’m no fan of Sen Kruse at all, I think he’s a hack, but it isn’t fair to kick anybody in the sack just because his brother doesn’t pay his bills.
Part of the problem with children not reading by the end of third grade is that some school systems have emphasized phonics over the whole language approach–which is based on coding and phonemic awareness as the first part of reading, but then one moves on whereas phonics just keeps on emphasizing sounding it out. Teachers are often not prepared to teach reading and the new licensing/education standards that tony is pushing will make it worse-little to no pedagogy (that means learning how to teach reading) courses. Another problem is that many of these students are not native english speakers–immersion classes are a great idea–learn only english for 10 weeks or so and then take up normal class work, but the state has been cutting (or not increasing) the funds–about 70 bucks per non-english speaking student.
The biggest problem is that students from low-income backgrounds do not get much support at home to learn to read or even role models to see reading. No books available, probably a parent who cannot read very well. Research (NAEP and TIMSS) shows that the number of books in a home is related to student achievement (and well correlated with income and education of parents). Kids come to school behind their better off peers and, even though teachers are able to improve their skills several grade levels, they are still behind their peers and grade level every year they progress through school. What they need is specialized, one on one intense instruction from trained reading instructors. See Reading Recovery. And one note: many schools already have abandoned recess in favor of remediation classes or normal coursework.
Canoefun—two very on target entries. IF ONLY more people in positions of responsibility and authority would simply become and accept reality on several issues.