Indiana students’ reading scores have barely changed in three years, new IREAD results show

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat Indiana.

Indiana students’ reading scores have been virtually unchanged for three years, according to new test data, underscoring fears about students’ struggles to recover from the pandemic.

More than four out of five third graders—just under 82%—passed the Indiana reading exam, the IREAD, in 2023. Yet that’s approximately the same rate as in 2021 and 2022, and several percentage points below the passing rate from 2019, when 87.3% of all students passed the test.

The results, released by the state on Wednesday, tell a similar story to scores released last month from the statewide assessment for grades 3-8, the ILEARN. Both exams showed student performance has stagnated in reading over the last three years.

The IREAD scores come as the state undertakes an overhaul of literacy instruction to implement the science of reading—a body of research that emphasizes five pillars of literacy that help students decode words—in an effort to improve students’ reading skills.

IREAD scores for most student groups changed by less than one percentage point this year, with a few notable exceptions.

Black students’ scores appear to be recovering faster than many other groups, with their proficiency rates rising by 1.5 percentage points from 2022 to 2023. Scores for students in special education also rose by 2 percentage points.

Scores for Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander students—a group of around 86 students total—rose 7.5 points in 2023. The group is the only student demographic or socioeconomic category to have recovered to pre-pandemic proficiency rates.

No student groups posted precipitous drops this year, though scores for both Hispanic and American Indian students declined by just under one percentage point each.

Last year, English learners’ IREAD proficiency rates dropped 8.5 percentage points from 2021, prompting Department of Education officials to raise the alarm about their performance. The group’s scores showed virtually no change this year, and remain around 20 percentage points below their non-English learner peers.

The state has this year pushed to align its curriculum and teacher training methods to the science of reading.

As part of that effort, a pilot program placed literacy instructional coaches in 54 schools during the 2022-2023 school year, in order to help teachers train on reading science principles.

The pass rate among those schools was 71.8% — approximately a 1.8 percentage point increase from 2022.

One of the first districts to adopt the instructional coaching model, Anderson Community Schools, showed a 1.4 point increase in proficiency rates over 2022; however, there were fewer students tested in 2023. (That was due to a drop in student enrollment, said Brad Meadows, director of district and community engagement for the district.)

Meadows said the district was “very encouraged by the higher pass rates this year” and that it expects scores to continue rising in future years.

Anderson Schools has literacy instructional coaches at all its elementary schools. The coaches focus on working with students in kindergarten to second grade, but are also helping to bring the science of reading to all elementary students, Meadows said.

In Indianapolis Public Schools, the state’s largest district, 60.6% of students tested proficient this year, a decline of  2.2 percentage points this year. The district had rolled out its own tutoring programs to focus on math and reading skills in 2022, including offering free virtual tutoring for all students.

This story will be updated. Scores for individual schools can be found here.

Chalkbeat Indiana is a not-for-profit news site covering educational change in public schools.