Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) students are making progress in meeting literacy benchmarks, although kindergarteners’ performance levels dropped from fall 2023 to fall 2024, district staff told the school board Thursday.
“We’re proud of this improvement but [we] recognize there’s more work that needs to be done,” Melaika Brown, supervisor of elementary English, said during the board’s meeting at its Rockville headquarters.
Literacy education changes
According to Brown, the shift in reading education has been occurring over the past three years.
In the 2022-2023 school year, the district began a pilot program in nine schools to teach foundational literacy skills to kindergarteners through second graders, which then expanded into a program for all elementary school students. To capture literacy progress data, MCPS also implemented the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) assessment, which tests the early literacy skills of students in kindergarten through third grade.
In the 2023-2024 school year, the district continued with the previous year’s initiatives, but also emphasized the monitoring of literacy skills progress. This year, the district implemented a new reading curriculum that focuses on both reading comprehension and foundational skills, among other initiatives.
Fall 2024 numbers
According to Brown’s presentation of data based on DIBELS testing, the number of kindergarteners reaching literacy performance benchmarks decreased overall from almost 50% in fall 2023 to 47% in fall 2024. However, more students in first and second grade met or were above the benchmarks. In fall 2024 61% of first graders met the benchmarks, compared to almost 58% in fall 2023. In fall 2024, about 62% of second graders met the benchmarks compared to roughly 60% in fall 2023.
When board President Julie Yang questioned why there was a decrease in kindergarten performance, Brown said it was due to differing experiences that students may have had in pre-kindergarten.
“That’s kindergarten fall data, so those students were in school, some of them, maybe a couple of weeks before they were assessed,” Brown said.
The district also tracked testing over two years from the current cohort of second-grade students. From kindergarten to second grade, the testing scores for that cohort of students increased by 18 percentage points – 47% of the students met benchmarks in kindergarten, 60% in first grade, followed by 65% in second grade.
“[This] is considered a significant improvement,” Brown said.
Brown attributed the increase to the implementation of foundational reading skills in 2022-2023, when the second-grade cohort was in kindergarten.
To achieve that 18-percentage point increase, MCPS spent roughly $1.84 million on literacy initiatives over the past three years that impacted the current second grade class. According to Thursday’s presentation, each percentage point increase over the two years cost $102,153.
Brown called the improvement “a meaningful return on our investment.”
The improvements over the two years for the second-grade cohort occurred across different demographics, including race, emergent multilingual learners and students receiving special education services. However, there were still disparities in the data.
Among the second-grade cohort, Black students improved from 57% of students meeting the benchmarks in fall 2022 to 67% in fall 2024. Hispanic and Latino students saw the largest increase – 22 percentage points – but had the lowest percentage of students meeting benchmarks. Forty-five percent met them in fall 2024, compared to 23% in fall 2022.
The number of White students meeting benchmarks improved to 78% in fall 2024 from 61% in fall 2022. Asian students improved from 71% of students meeting benchmarks in fall 2022 to 86% in fall 2024.
The percentage of emergent multilingual learners in the second-grade cohort who met DIBELS benchmarks increased by 22 percentage points – from 17% to 39%. The percentage of students receiving special education services meeting the benchmarks increased from 29% to 38%.
“For every dollar spent we’ve made measurable improvements in reading proficiency,” Brown said. “This represents a meaningful return on our investment.”
