Parents may not know until July if their child needs to repeat the fourth-grade

Tennessee Department of Education Assistant Commissioner David Laird told the State Board of Education Friday that school districts may not know until July 1 what fourth-grade students will need to be retained under new state reading requirements.The state’s new Third-Grade Retention law allows third-graders who fail to show reading proficiency on state tests in the spring of their third-grade year to advance to the fourth grade through summer school and/or tutoring in their fourth-grade year.  Those children who receive tutoring still need to show “adequate growth” on spring testing to advance to the fifth-grade.Laird said the complex adequate growth determination that will need to be made for each impacted student likely won’t be finished in time to provide districts with the results until more than a month after school is over.“I know that is far later than anybody would like to receive that information however we have to complete all of the scoring of the spring TCAP (Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program) test to do that. Then comes all of the additional quality control work and production that has to go into actually determining the projections and particularly given the stakes associated with this, make sure that they’re right,” said Laird.  “We will do everything that we can to try to get that information to districts ahead of that.”The state estimates between 40 to 66 percent of fourth-grade students taking tutoring will need to be retained for failing to meet adequate growth, roughly 6 to 10 thousand students. In Nashville for example, district leaders say that leaves a best case scenario of between 400 to 500 students needing to repeat the fourth grade in the district.The possibility of so many retentions received push-back from members of the State Board of Education, including former fourth-grade teacher Krissi McInturff who provided an emotional explanation of the impact of retention.McInturff said research has found students who are retained are more likely to eventually drop out of school.“Failing a fourth-grader is not the answer. This law is so close to being great. The pathways set in place allow every third-grader to move on to fourth-grade with the supports needed to succeed,” said McInturff.  “Research conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Development shows that students retained typically show success during the repeat year but immediately begin to struggle once again when new material is presented in the following years.”Multiple members of the state board expressed an interest in encouraging lawmakers to tweak the new law and perhaps add pathways for advancement in the fourth-grade, similar to the summer school and tutoring pathways third-graders have.Board member Ryan Holt said he plans to bring a recommendation to ask the General Assembly to do just at its next meeting.“Just the sheer number of students that we are talking about that could have all those consequences…gives me a tremendous amount of pause,” said Holt.Holt also said he believes the General Assembly should re-evaluate the law to focus more on kindergarten and first-grade students who are struggling to read.

What is adequate growth

At Friday’s meeting the board finalized multiple changes that are expected to help more fourth-graders meet that adequate growth threshold on testing this spring.The mathematical computation will be different for each student that’s impacted by the Third-Grade Retention Law.The Department of Education will utilize state testing results from each student’s third-grade year along with Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) measurements to determine the growth they need to show in the fourth-grade to illustrate they’re on path to being proficient in reading before they graduate high school.Changes adopted Friday will allow multiple state tests and other evaluation criteria to be considered if one might be more favorable to the student than another. The board also approved a change allowing students who only need to show 1 percent or less of adequate to advance to the fifth-grade if they show any improvement on state testing.“We have to put the line in a place where we know that the kids that we’re saying make growth, do in fact become proficient at some point down the road.  So we are looking at that over multiple years and we will continue to reflect on that,” said Laird.Students who score proficient in reading on state testing qualify to advance to the fifth-grade regardless of what their adequate growth requirement was.