from the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, Connecticut General Assembly, April 2011
Black and Puerto rican caucus goals:
1. Improve students' reading success.
2. Improve teachers' abilities in identifying each student's reading level and skill set, so they can intervene promptly and properly.
3. Teach parents how their children learn to read and what to do at home as partners, beginning at birth of the child.
4. Increase the number of third grade students who are at goal on the Connecticut Mastery Test.
5. Decrease inappropriate special education referral rates, so the students who are learning disabled get the special instruction they need and students who have been misdiagnosed are taught to read well and graduate with essential knowledge and skills.
6. Help early care and education providers know what to do in pre-literacy and language development, before the child enters kindergarten
7. Ensure that higher education is teaching our new professionals who want to teach young children, the science of teaching reading, to each and every child.
8. Bring more partners into the effort, including libraries, pediatricians, businesses, philanthropies, and universities.
Components of the plan:
1. Assessment tool. Right now we have a reading test for K- 3 grades that takes too much time to give, score, and interpret. Teachers need to spend more time instructing and less time assessing. We should consider alternatives — especially ones that use technology that will make the process more efficient.
2. Teacher training. Teachers want to help every child learn to read but many don't know what to do when their students struggle. Professional development, especially the kind that shows teachers what to do in the classroom, can make a big difference.
3. Number of times children are assessed each year. All students should be tested three times a year to make sure they are on track to succeed. If at any of these times their skills are sub par, they need supplemental interventions to ensure their success. These interventions require more frequent monitoring. ( When a child is sick and a doctor prescribes a medicine to treat the illness, the doctor and parent don't wait too long to decide if the medicine is working or not. If it doesn't take care of the illness, the doctor will prescribe a new medicine. The same is true for a struggling reader. If the intervention doesn't work, especially the older the child and more severe the reading problem, the child needs to be assessed sooner and more frequently).
4. Family information and partnership. Parents can do a great deal at home if they understand how reading develops and their special role. To date, they are not treated as partners in literacy. But language development begins with them. We are designing curriculum with the Commission on Children to teach them.
5. Improve early language training in early care and education. Early care and education providers- whether in family day care or school readiness, do not have enough information on their critical role to early literacy. They need to learn how to develop language skills and pre-literacy in fun and playful ways. Children will not be burdened, but will fall in love with books and language. We will be working with the field of providers to ensure proper and high level training in early literacy.
6. Work with higher education to ensure high-level classes on reading instruction. We have a Foundations of Reading test now for our young professionals seeking to become teachers. Our Foundations of Reading Test helps teachers prepare and shows our states commitment to performance. About 30% are failing this right of college which tells us that we need to partner with Higher Education to ensure they are teaching the right courses for our new and fresh professionals seeking to enter teaching.
7. CEU's for current teachers. Increase the number of course requirements in reading from 15 to 30. Teachers are now required to take 90 CEUs for recertification. 15 are required for reading. We would like to increase that to ensure substantive and research-based content in reading. In conjunction with the CEU requirement, the Foundations of Reading Test could be used as the outcome measure for current teachers to ensure that they have learned the content well.
8. Require special education candidates to pass the CT Foundation of Reading Test for licensure. Special education teaching candidates need to know the difference between what is biological and what is lack of exposure to words.
9. Partner with community-libraries, universities, pediatricians, etc. There is a great deal we can do if we work together. Pediatricians can use Reach out and Read to assess literacy levels from the early stages of life. Libraries can join this effort with travelling book mobiles and special reading programs. Adult education can partner to make sure our parents are reading and learning to read. (The number one indicator of a child's literacy level is the mom's literacy level). We will be working with higher education, libraries, museums, pediatricians to expand the circle in this partnership.
This proposal is incorporated in the 2011 legislative session proposal An Act Concerning Closing the Achievement Gap.
For more background on the issue, see the Commission on Children's webpage on the 4/5/11 Reading: The Engine for School Success forum.
