MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Alabama State Board of Education Thursday approved a three-year increase in the score needed to pass a statewide third-grade literacy test.
The 2019 Alabama Literacy Act requires students reading on grade level by the end of third grade. Students who fall short on the test and don’t meet an alternative requirement can be held back.
Currently, a student needs to score at 435 to advance to fourth grade. The measure approved by board members Thursday would raise the score to 444 for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years, and 454 for the 2026-27 school year.
According to a Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA) report, a student can score between 270 and 740 on the exam. 473 is the grade level score, but the lowered cut score allows for more statistical confidence that the correct students will be retained.
Raising the scores will increase the standard for a student to pass. But it could also lower the department’s confidence that it is capturing all students reading below grade level.
“I think we’ve got the right plan in place,” said State Superintendent Eric Mackey to reporters. “We’ve talked to our consultants who are testing experts. We’ve talked to our teachers. We’ve talked to our literacy leaders and this is a really good place again. Some folks wanted us to stay at the current score. Some folks wanted us to move up a little faster, but all in all, you know, nine out of 10 people I talked to said this is a really good compromise. This is a good place that moves that bar up, but moves it up in a reasonable timeframe.”
Two board members voted against the measure.
Jackie Zeigler, a Republican who represents District 1 on the board, said that a lot of her constituents, including teachers, reached out to say “we just need to push on that accelerator a bit harder.”
“I just wanted it to be understood, and it’s a very hard decision to be made, but we’ve got to keep moving it forward, because the ones who benefit are going to be our students, and so therefore I’m going to have to vote no against this particular cut score,” she said.
Stephanie Bell, a Republican who represents District 3, said she agreed with Zeigler and had heard from people about students who may have been better off if they were not promoted. She also expressed concerns about someone taking Mackey’s place who does not have the same commitment, although she acknowledged that she did not believe Mackey would be leaving.
“But the future is something that we don’t really know sometimes,” she said.
Other board members voiced their support for the change.
Yvette Richardson, a Democrat who represents District 4, said she preferred keeping the current passing score because school districts had seen the benefit of what had happened so far. But Richardson said she supported the change because the passing grade will remain the same for two years.
“Which means if school districts are not where they should be the first year, they will have the opportunity to get there the next year and then continue to move forward,” she said.
Wayne Reynolds, a Republican representing District 8, said that the final score is where he believes the score should be all along.
“We are moving forward,” he said.
Marie Manning, a Republican representing District 6, also said that some members of her district wanted to remain at the current score, but would accept moving forward.
“They understand that most of this board has the opportunity and the desire to see an increase in our student performance,” she said.
The aim of the act is to get students reading on grade level, which Mackey told reporters should be “C” or high “D” students.
“Of course, a high ‘D’ student doesn’t mean that they’re a proficient reader, so they’re still going to need help, they’re still going to need support, and we still are supporting those students who are close to the cut score,” he said. “But it does mean that they’ve scored sufficiently, and that’s where that term comes from, to move on to the next grade,” he said.
Mackey said to reporters they are working on a model letter to send to parents whose children meet sufficiency but are “on the bubble.”
“What we don’t want is to send a false message to parents that, ‘Hey, my student’s doing just fine,’” he said. “Once we raise the cut score, we’re, actually, we’re lowering the reliability.”
The higher score means the higher likelihood that the test will catch a student who would test above or below the required score on a given day.
The superintendent said that he believes that the Alabama Literacy Act is working, but expressed concerns about this year’s current fifth graders, who were in kindergarten when the first COVID case was reported in Alabama in March 2020. That led to schools shutting down for the remainder of the school year. Those children went to first grade that fall, with many seeing ongoing disruptions as a result of the pandemic.
“I’ve said this over and over and over and over and over, and y’all should print it, is this year’s fifth graders, because they’re the ones that were in first grade during COVID that we continue to see students struggling in this year’s fifth grade class,” Mackey said to reporters.
Mackey said those are the students that will show up in 2025 on the NAEP, a national test that measures academic progress. If their struggles are reflected on this year’s test results, he said, people may conclude that third grade reading efforts are not working.
“We know that they are the grade where we have the most strugglers, and we got to continue to support them, but we don’t have a lot of resources and funds to support middle schoolers in reading,” he said.
The board approved a $52 million request for struggling readers beyond Grade 3 Thursday.
This article originally appeared on Alabama Reflector, an independent, nonprofit news outlet. It appears on FOX54.com under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.