A new report issued by the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) found that teacher-licensing tests in most states fail to measure whether both elementary special and general educators have mastered the basic building blocks of reading instruction. Read the full report at nctq.org.
In 2000, the National Reading Panel identified several pillars of scientifically valid reading instruction, including comprehension, fluency, phonemic awareness, phonics and vocabulary. In 2016, the Institute for Education Sciences released a practice guide that outlines the foundation skills needed to help early readers.
The NCTQ study found that only 11 states – Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Wisconsin – are assessing general and special educators on evidence-based reading practices.
The report finds that knowledge related to the science of reading is only partially assessed on most state licensing exams. In five states—Alabama, New Mexico, Minnesota, Mississippi, and New Hampshire—general elementary-education teachers are asked to demonstrate their knowledge of the science of reading, but special education teachers are not. In some cases, all teachers can pass their licensing test without having to demonstrate that knowledge at all. While many elementary and special education teacher licensing exams, including New Jersey’s, contain test questions about reading instruction, those questions are often part of a larger section on language arts subjects or other content areas. A teacher candidate could therefore pass the test without necessarily demonstrating proficiency in reading science.
According to NCTQ, “New Jersey’s Praxis Multiple Subjects (5001) test assesses the science of reading but integrates this topic with too many other topics related to English Language Arts to be a reliable measure of a candidate’s knowledge of the science of reading. They recommend a stand-alone test to assess a teacher’s skills in the science of reading.”
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