NEWS: Too soon to tell on effectiveness of literacy coaches

But state officials agree things look good so far

By Lindsay Street, reporter  |  South Carolina is spending millions of dollars a year to help teachers learn how to improve student literacy, but state officials say it’s really too early to know if the three-year-old program is working.  Why?  The data are not in.

In South Carolina, nearly 60 percent of elementary schools have at least one in five students unable to read on grade level.

Despite the lack of hard numbers to quantify whether the program is helping Palmetto State  students read on level with their peers, S.C. Department of Education (DOE) staff and others report the model has had few hiccups and has been received positively.

Last year, the state spent nearly $30 million to pay part or some of the salaries of 693 literacy coaches stationed at elementary and primary schools throughout the South Carolina. For context, there are 662 public elementary schools statewide.

Not all of the coaches are 100 percent state-funded. Only those coaches at schools where 20 percent or more of the students have “not met” reading standards are paid in full by the state. Some 378 elementary schools have more than 20 percent of their students who are deficient in literacy, according to state figures.

The reading legacy

The reading coach program was born through the Read to Succeed Act, which was passed in 2014 and costs $46.9 million, which includes camps, salaries and more. Reading coaches aren’t hired to sit down and read with children — although that can be included in their duties. Their main objective is to work with teachers on methods that improve literacy among students.

Last week, the program was touted as one of the many legacies Gov. Nikki Haley will leave behind should she, as expected, leave the state after confirmation as  President Donald Trump’s new ambassador to the United Nations.

“Too many of our kids were leaving the third grade without being able to read, so we made it mandatory that they be held back if they couldn’t and provided reading coaches to make sure they could,” Haley said in her Jan. 11 State of the State speech.

Students who start the third grade in August will be the first class who may be held back in the 2018-19 school year if they are not proficient in reading based on the Read to Succeed Act. According to S.C. Department of Education spokesman Matt Orr, third grade students in 2017-18 will take the SCReady assessment in Spring 2018. Those who don’t meet the state’s literacy standards may be held back.

The number of reading coaches per district varies with the number of schools and the district’s capabilities to pay for part of the salaries for coaches in schools where less than 20 percent of students struggle with reading or in primary schools. In Berkeley County School District, for example, there are 18 reading coaches and the district picks up the expense of two of those salaries. However at Lexington County School District 5, there are 12 reading coaches and only one of those coaches is fully paid for by the state. The others are funded at 50 percent of the average teacher salary.

Is the program working?

The takeaway from Haley’s one-line nod to the literacy program is that there are measurable results, but that isn’t so, according to staff at both the education department and the Education Oversight Committee (EOC).

“There’s been no evaluation of the literacy coaches so far,” EOC Director of Public Engagement and Communications Dana Yow told Statehouse Report. “We don’t have results from two years of data to see if things have improved.”

Part of the problem is that during the initial years of the new program, the state gave three different tests were given over three years, DOE Team Lead for Literacy Specialist Cathy Chapman told Statehouse Report.

Chapman said the program is massive in scale and was implemented with little delay — both things that can spell disaster for any program. But she said there have been few hiccups and there is no shortage of reading coaches. However, she added that there were 91 new reading coach hires this year.

“We’ve constantly got turnover,” she said. And when there is turnover, that’s another three years of training before those coaches are fully qualified. This is the program’s first year where coaches will have completed the three-year training requirement to qualify as coaches.

Chapman said, anecdotally, it appears the coaches are making a difference on the ground.

“It’s too early for us to say anything like that (it’s working),” Chapman said. “I think it will … I’ve seen firsthand that it does make a difference in changing teachers’ behaviors.”

She said affecting classroom change doesn’t just happen with a one-day workshop.

“(The teacher) has to have the support, she has to practice in the classroom, and she has to have the coach there to support those efforts,” Chapman said.

She added there are other ways to assess the program’s success without looking at test scores. For example, teacher and parent surveys have “all been real positive” toward the program, she said.  “It is going to make a difference,” she said.

New conversation about reading

Lexington 5’s Chief Instructional Officer Christina Melton echoed Chapman’s positive view of the program.

“It has brought a new level of conversation regarding reading,” Melton said. “There is a new sense of urgency and fear for some parents.”

Melton said districts like hers must look at teacher retention and student retention as insight into whether a program like the literacy coaches is working. And, she said, it appears to be doing just that in Lexington 5.

“But I would also celebrate that my district already had a strong literacy program,” Melton said. “We had a positive beginning because we had a strong foundation.”

Phone calls to districts in Allendale, Bamberg and Jasper counties, where public education has lagged, went unanswered.

The soft metrics of the program’s statewide implementation will be addressed this spring. DOE Director of Early Learning and Literacy Jennifer Anderson said the department has contracted a study to get a better look at the soft metrics of the program while reliable test results are still a few years away.

The study, through the Foundation for Excellence in Education, will look at the qualitative components of the Read to Succeed Act, including literacy coaches, Anderson said.

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