How Seattle Students Read

Last week I used A.I. for the first time. (OK, bear with me on this.) I asked ChatGPT how well K-3 kids in Seattle Public Schools were learning to read.

This is something a few years back and over some time I knew about. For five years in the late 1990s I reported on schools for the Seattle Times. A couple years after I left the paper, I was elected to the Seattle School Board and served one term, 2001-2005.

ChatGPT turned up results just as I remembered. For more than 30 years – and really more, going back into the 80s – Seattle Public Schools have consistently failed to teach low-income students how to read. With little variation since then, on average only about 35 percent of low-income kids were able to read at the standard for third grade. In contrast, more than 70 percent of higher income kids regularly meet the grade-level standard. The only exceptions were 2014 through 2019 when just over 40 percent of low-income students were reading at grade level and kids from higher income families hit 80 percent proficient. But then Covid set everyone back to the mid 30s-low70s range. (Low income means qualified for free and reduced lunch – FRL.)

Not surprisingly, these results track with the rate of family poverty in the city’s schools, which varies by neighborhood. At schools with lots of low-income enrollment (70-90 percent FRL) only 30 to 45 percent of the kids meet the reading standard. At schools serving mostly middle-class families, 75 to 90 percent of the kids will meet the grade-level reading standard, according ChatGPT. The highest poverty group includes Gatzert, Northgate, Concord, Rainier Vew, Emerson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Dunlap. In higher income neighborhoods you’ll find Blaine, Bryant, Coe, Montlake, McGilvra, Lawton, and Queen Anne, among others.

Readers will recall media reports every year that 60 or 70 or 80 percent of Seattle or Washington stare third graders are reading successfully at grade level, looking pretty good in national rankings. But both the state and Seattle are trumpeting averages in which the low-income kids who can’t adequately read get lost (perhaps deliberately) in the overall data. And if only 40 percent or fewer of FRL kids meet grade-level standards, that means almost two-thirds of children from low-income families can’t read adequately by the end of third grade. Mostly, they never get better. Lots of studies have found these kids among the most likely to drop out of high school.

Seattle is not alone in the low-income vs. middle class split of student achievement. It’s been a national problem for at least the past three decades. And, risking oversimplification, the cause has been a strategy for teaching reading called “whole language.” Though not the originator of the idea, Lucy Calkins, an education professor at Columbia University, in the 1990s produced widely popular teaching materials that stimulated “whole language” adoption by school districts and teachers nationwide. Only in the last 10 years has there begun a swing away from whole language back to phonics. Readers who are old enough will remember back in the middle of the last century learning to “sound out” words.

The attack on whole language marches under the banner of the “science of reading,” a necessary subterfuge that gives phonics and “phonemic awareness” among other things the status – and the power – of being “researched based.” Educators – and the rest of us – love “researched based.” And it’s a good sales slogan when pushing against decades of education establishment inertia.

Already, in some places use of the “science of reading” approach has produced impressive results. Mississippi, for example, has become a national model with a rigid statewide program that notably includes every day in all K-3 classrooms a 90-minute block for reading instruction. For kids still behind, more time is added – in effect individual education plans (IEPs). It works. From 2013 when Mississippi was ranked 49^th in the U.S. on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to 2024 Mississippi state schools shot up to 9^th in the nation.

Can Seattle follow that path? Let’s hope. Last week, at its board meeting March 18, after a couple years of stakeholder review of the alternatives, the school board was ready to adopt a new science of reading based “English Language Arts” (ELA) curriculum for grades K-5 to take effect for the 2026-27 school year. The plan, (McGraw Hill Emerge!) at a $9 million cost spread over several years, includes substantial teacher training beginning this summer and ongoing review requirements. Still, the question remains: Will Seattle educators include and apply anything equivalent to that 90-minute reading block that looks like they key to Mississippi’s success?

Grade-level reading for all will take determination and attention to the goal that Seattle Public Schools has not managed for decades. And it will be tough to deliver a 90-minutre block or anything like it focused on the skill of reading in classrooms where reading skills vary from very poor (largely from low-income households) to very strong, often those kids from middle and upper middle-class families. That’s a real challenge for teachers in the classroom and for district leaders who’ve got in ensure that everyone sticks to the program. We’ll see in the next couple years if Superintendent Ben Shuldiner, Seattle teachers and the School Board are up to it. So far, their predecessors have failed.