Earlier this summer, New Hanover County Schools touted improvements on a foundational literacy assessment called DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills). The district argued those gains were partially a result of The Endowment’s $8.7 million, three-year grant from June of 2024, which funded early literacy facilitators in each of its elementary schools.
However, when the end-of-grade (EOG) third-grade reading scores, a metric that has been shown to correlate with later academic achievement, were released, they showed a 5 percentage point decrease over four years, with just under half of students being labeled as ‘proficient,’ and just over a fourth described as ‘career and college ready.’
However, moving to overall performance on reading EOGs in fourth and fifth grades, students are making more consistent improvements. Literacy experts say DIBELS and the EOGs measure different skills — and that assessing reading comprehension, in general, is difficult to do.
Difference between DIBELS and EOGs
Dr. Dennis Davis is a professor of literacy education at North Carolina State University. He said he views various literacy assessments as part of a pyramid with at least three different levels.
At the foundational level or at the bottom of the pyramid is the DIBELS assessment, which measures phonemic awareness, reading fluency, and decoding skills. It also includes evaluating basic sentence comprehension and vocabulary. At the middle or center level, there are tests like the MAZE assessment that gauge the ability to understand more complex sentences and paragraphs. However, Davis notes that this middle level isn’t as tracked as closely as foundational skills.
At the top of the pyramid is the end-of-course or end-of-grade reading test that brings the foundational skills together with a more complex analysis of what a student has read and understood.
“[These assessments] exist for different purposes, and they answer different measurement questions,” Davis said. “It's certainly possible that kids could be trending really well in terms of, ‘Yes, they're on track,’ [on DIBELS] but being on track, it doesn't mean you're ready, in a sense, for a core grade level instruction. It doesn't mean you're going to excel at or master grade level standards. That's what the EOG is measuring.”
But he wants to reiterate if a student doesn’t have those foundational skills then they likely won’t do well on the EOG.
“Are these foundational levels on track for helping move you up that ladder of skills?” Davis added.
Efforts to improve literacy skills
In June of this year, Maureen Hill, the district’s curriculum specialist for K-5 English Language Arts, gave a presentation to the school board focused on the DIBELS assessment. According to her, an average of 70% of K-3 students were proficient, having increased their scores by 18 percentage points from the beginning of the school year. She added that the district is outperforming state and national averages on DIBELS.
Hill argued that the three-year $8.7 million grant from The Endowment was responsible for some of the achievement success on DIBELS, and that the 26 early literacy facilitators offered more support for classroom teachers in terms of planning, data aggregation, and professional development.
At this point, the early learning facilitators had only been placed in the district’s schools for about a year — and Hill didn’t have metrics on the end-of-year reading scores to present.
Email records show that The Endowment board likely based some of their decision to scale back an $8.1 million NHCS grant request to put an additional staff member in each of the district’s schools because of the DIBELS assessment, though it did show some improvement.
In an August email with The Endowment’s director of education, David Stegall, Hill wrote, “While we had hoped to see stronger gains in our DIBELS data this past year, it’s important to acknowledge that the first year of implementation focused heavily on foundational work–training staff, establishing systems, and integrating new instructional practices. These efforts, while essential, often take time to yield measurable gains in student data, especially in literacy, where growth is incremental and multifaceted.”
Davis agreed that measuring literacy improvement can be hard.
“Reading comprehension is a particularly difficult thing to measure, and it's a particularly difficult thing to teach because it is influenced by so many extraneous factors,” he said. Those factors can be things like background knowledge as it relates to what the student is reading about.
The district ended up receiving $2.7 million from The Endowment to support 14 academic or behavioral specialists. The district has yet to announce where they will place this personnel, but the funding is supposed to help close the achievement gap and improve graduation rates.
As for the impact of having more literacy staff in schools, Davis said, “I think building teachers' professional expertise through that coaching does have good research support, but that, in and of itself, isn't going to be a magical fix for a challenging problem [of gaining reading proficiency].”
NHCS is not alone in trying to make inroads in increasing literacy rates. Declining reading comprehension rates show up in national and state trends and has been a prominent discussion point among educators and politicians for some time.
“If there were an easy solution to this complicated problem, and we would have already found it, implemented it, and we would have moved on,” Davis said.
Impact of LETRS training?
Around 2020, North Carolina leaned into the ‘science of reading’ approach. Davis said there are some good components to that paradigm of learning and “the science actually points pretty clearly to the importance of oral language, robust academic language skills, and metalinguistic flexibility.”
From 2021-2024, the LETRS training was a ‘science of reading’ initiative that 44,000 North Carolina elementary teachers had to follow.
“That training introduces a lot of really interesting, useful content. However, that training is too long and too time intensive for the use with which it was intended in North Carolina. If you're going to make every teacher do something, to learn something new, it has to be done in a way that's feasible given the other demands on their time,” Davis said.
Davis said the LETRS training likely helped English language arts educators improve their teaching, but questioned whether that support was enough to show significant improvements on the EOG scores. But again, those trends are “caused by a confluence of lots of different factors, some of which are known and some of which aren't,” he said.
And if the teachers were focusing on that training — what else had to shift?
“So it is possible that there were some things displaced unintentionally because of that focus on phonemic awareness and phonics that could account for some of these trends. But again, we don't know,” he said.
North Carolina Superintendent Mo Green released a statement earlier this year that said he thinks the results of that training will show up at least by 2026 on a different measurement – the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) or the Nation’s Report Card.
Why the focus on 3rd grade?
A 2010 seminal study out of the University of Chicago showed that achievement levels on the 3rd grade reading tests can be predictive of a student’s eighth-grade reading level and eventual college enrollment.
While the metrics for third-grade reading for NHCS are declining, fourth and fifth grades aren’t necessarily trending down.
While just under half (48%) of the district’s third graders are proficient on last year’s reading test, 60% of fourth graders and 59% of fifth graders are.
Davis said there might be an outsized emphasis on this 3rd grade assessment when fourth and fifth graders are around the same cognitive development period.
“That's the beginning of standardized testing pressure on teachers. And because third grade is held as such a policy-relevant metric, and it does create more pressure, but year over year that pressure would be consistent, so this [third-grade] dip, I don't know,” he said.
Since September, WHQR has asked to speak with an NHCS subject matter expert to discuss the differences between DIBELS, reading EOGS, and the impact of the early learning facilitators. NHCS has yet to schedule an interview.
