Parents don’t want ‘to just sit and read through state statutes’
A three-year-old Wisconsin law requiring schools to inform parents when their students are struggling with reading is going unenforced in far too many districts, leading many learners to fall behind state-mandated reading benchmarks, according to literacy advocates.
In some places parents are not being properly notified of either their children’s struggles or remediation plans or both. In other places, remediation appears to not be meeting the standards specified in the law. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, meanwhile, is not providing clear guidance, let alone oversight.
“I think that no one is really checking up on (the schools), no one is really monitoring the implementation (of the law),” said the head of Forward Literacy, Katie Kasubaski.
One mother of children with special needs described guidance materials from the DPI as being “clear as mud.”
The Legislature in 2023 passed Act 20, a reading reform law that requires districts to adopt “science of reading” methods — essentially, teaching children to sound out words in preference to the discredited “three-cuing” method that included guessing at words by looking at nearby pictures and using context clues.
Under the law, students undergo screening tests three times per year. Students who fall into the lowest-scoring quarter are supposed to receive a personalized reading plan and their parents are supposed to be notified.
The intention is to help learners achieve proficiency before fourth grade. Students who continually fall below this threshold may require special education.
According to Forward Literacy, however, some 150 Wisconsin school districts and charter schools appear to be failing in the execution of early literacy remediation plans, which lay out exactly how parents will be notified and what steps will be taken to help students.
While schools are supposed to alert parents when new testing data is released, executive director Katie Kasubaski said the information is often merely uploaded to schools’ internal grading systems. Often, she said, parents either can’t access these or aren’t taught how. This, she said, leads parents to go uninformed about key deficiencies in their child’s education.
Instead of being instructed on how to find their students’ data, Kasubaski told Badger Institute “some parents are unaware.”
“Parents were technically notified but just didn’t know to look in the system for the scores,” she said.
Even the scope of how much information parents are missing isn’t clear. Kasubaski compiled a list identifying nearly 150 school districts and some charter schools as not meeting the law’s requirement that they publicly post their early literacy remediation plans detailing how they ensure that struggling readers progress toward reading proficiency and communicate that information to families.
The issue, Kasubaski said, is concentrated among smaller districts, though she said some larger districts are stumbling in implementing remediation plans as well. She blamed the DPI, which is supposed to oversee the law’s implementation, for failing to enforce the requirements.
Many districts’ school board members go unnotified of when new student literacy data is published, Kasubaski said, cutting out another safeguard.
The head of the DPI Office of Literacy stepped down in April. Kasubaski said she suspects that turnover could be hindering the agency’s follow-up with non-compliant schools.
Still, Kasubaski said, the department should have taken a stronger stand on upholding Act 20 from the beginning and that parents should not have to push it.
“I would think that there should have been stronger guidance from DPI, clearer guidance,” she said. “It is frustrating, but I feel like, as an advocate and a parent, there’s a little bit more structure and recourse and ways to try to get the schools to comply. Whereas before, the schools would just not comply and parents might have to hire a lawyer.”
“I’m actually finding that schools are complying a lot better now that we have this law,” she added.
Jill Berends, a mother of two dyslexic children, told the Badger Institute that her small western Wisconsin school district at first refused to create a personalized reading plan for one of her children, who tested below the 25th percentile threshold on one test but above it on another.
“The problem for me is that, as a parent, if we’re not on a personalized reading plan or we don’t have an (individual education plan), you don’t have the 10-week progress monitoring that is part of the statute, you don’t have a document that is telling you what they’re getting,” she said. “That’s part of the gap for me: I feel like I don’t have a plan in place to know what is actually happening.”
While the district has since cooperated, Berends said she was forced to contact Forward Literacy for support in searching for specific information about the school’s literacy strategies.
She described ensuing conversations with the school on that topic as “hard,” and said her conversations with the state were needlessly confusing and challenging to navigate.
“Maybe they want to tell you, maybe they don’t,” Berends said. “I started going down this path to see if we are aligned with the statutes, but that takes a lot of time, and I know that people don’t have a lot of extra time to just sit and read through state statutes.”
“When you talk to the schools, they will tell you, ‘They’re supported, everything is good, we’re in line,’ and it’s hard to argue with that,” she added. “If it’s happening to my child, what about all the children who don’t have advocacy allies in our community?”
The DPI did not respond to a request for comment from Badger Institute regarding its enforcement policies regarding Act 20’s requirements.
Jackson Walker is a native Wisconsinite and a Michigan-based journalist.Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute Marketing Director Matt Erdman at matt@badgerinstitute.org.
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