When schools make budgets or annual reports, they don’t always show this kind of gap. It really does live in the hallways, where a teacher is trying to give a reading test to a six-year-old while passing classes make noise in the other hallways. It’s not exciting. It’s not easy to make the news. A new study from MIT, on the other hand, suggests that this quiet problem may be robbing thousands of kids of a unique chance to learn how to read.
The study was led by MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and published in the Annals of Dyslexia. It polled about 250 teachers from 39 states. What came back was very interesting. Seventy-five percent of those who answered said they had less than three hours of training on how to give reading screening tests. Almost half got less than an hour, or nothing at all.
These screenings are required and cannot be skipped. All the way through second grade, most states now make kids do them twice or three times a year. The idea is simple: notice the warning signs early, step in quickly, and give readers who are having trouble a real chance before the gap gets bigger. This method is based on good science. Early signs of reading problems, such as dyslexia, can show up in the first few months of kindergarten. Researchers say it is well known that interventions work best when they happen early on. The idea isn’t the problem. It’s how it’s done.
Ola Ozernov-Palchik, a research scientist at MIT and the lead author, made it clear. In an ideal world, a trained professional would walk teachers through the process, give them practice tests, give them feedback, and watch as the tests are given. That is the norm. The survey results show that standard is rarely met. Teachers said they figured it out on their own, sometimes with help from other teachers and sometimes by putting together what they could. When new employees came on board after the first training sessions, they were often left to their own devices.
It’s also important to think about the conditions in which the tests are being given. About 80% of teachers said that interruptions happened during screenings. Forty percent said they had to give the tests in noisy places like hallways, shared areas, and rooms that were never meant to be quiet, one-on-one testing spaces. One can’t help but wonder how a child can show phonemic awareness when someone ten feet away is rattling lockers.
It’s also important to think about English language learners, who are in a very tough spot in this system. A lot of the teachers polled said they hadn’t been told how to tell the difference between a child who is having trouble reading and one who just doesn’t know English well enough yet. Ozernov-Palchik says this means that ELL students are either recognized too much or too little, but they’re not getting the help they need either way. That is a failure inside a failure.
What happens (or doesn’t happen) after the tests is scored is what makes all of this even worse. 44% of teachers said that their schools had a formal way to turn screening results into plans for how to help students. What about the rest? Not clear. The screening takes place, the data is saved, but it seems to disappear somewhere in the system before it can reach a child who needs help.
It’s important to note that reading skills across the country haven’t changed much. Three-thirds of fourth-graders could read at grade level in 2022, up from 29% in 1992. In 30 years, there was only a 4% rate of progress. Because of that, these results don’t seem like the result of a single survey. Instead, they feel like the result of a structural problem that has been getting worse for a long time.
It’s not like the MIT researchers don’t have any ideas. They say that there should be designated screening areas, regular professional development, and someone trained to look at screening data and make connections to real interventions in every district. They are also working on an AI-assisted reading platform that will help them give more personalized lessons, but that is still a ways off. They say that what is needed right now is something more immediate: help for the teachers who are already in the classrooms, giving tests, and doing their best with tools they were barely shown how to use.
Reading this research makes me think that the system that was made to help readers who are having trouble is having trouble itself—not because it doesn’t care, but because it doesn’t have any structure. Teachers think the screenings are good. Even more, they need them to work. The next policy conversation needs to be about the difference between what was meant and what is happening in school hallways across the country.
