Maryland’s State School Superintendent Carey Wright garnered national attention for what was described as a reading “miracle” when she was superintendent in Mississippi. Once, that state was second-to-last on a national test. Then fourth grade reading scores rose to the middle of the pack.

Now, she is trying to replicate that success in Maryland.

Wright is proposing a literacy policy that would require students who aren’t reading well by the end of third grade to be held back, as she did in Mississippi.

She also wants to force public schools to provide boatloads of help to struggling readers as soon as they begin to fall behind and until they catch up. And the literacy policy calls for parents to be partners in the process, with notification required within a couple of weeks if a child starts slipping.

The policy — which could result in thousands of third graders being held back — is already drawing criticism from local superintendents and school boards. It’s a severe measure that Baltimore’s chief academic officer Joan Dabrowski called a “radical restructuring” of early reading instruction in the state. And some fear students will have their social network of friends ripped apart, causing them shame if they are held back.

However, some research shows it seems to work in raising achievement.

“We can’t expect children to continue to progress if we continue to promote them” to the next grade, said Tenette Y. Smith, executive director of Maryland’s literacy programs and initiatives, who worked under Wright in Mississippi. “If they can’t read the material they’re being taught, they’ll fall farther behind. All you’re doing is perpetuating the gap in learning.”

The Maryland State Board of Education will discuss the policy at its next meeting on Tuesday and take a vote on it in September. It would not take effect until two years after it is passed, meaning children entering first grade this fall might be the first group that would face retention, the term that educators use for holding back students.

Just how many students would be held back is unclear. In Mississippi, Smith said, about 9% of third graders were held back. Only about half of Maryland’s third graders were considered proficient on statewide tests in reading in 2023, and only 24% of the city’s third graders and 44% of Baltimore County’s third graders. But that test is unlikely to be used to decide which students repeat the grade.

Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have retention policies for struggling readers, according to the Education Commission of the States, but Maryland has never attempted to dictate to teachers and principals when a student should be held back.

Education officials want Maryland to be among the top 10 states on a national reading test by 2027. The state is currently ranked 40th in fourth grade reading on the National Assessment for Educational Proficiency, known as the Nation’s Report Card. It’s a congressionally mandated test given every two years to a sample of students in every state.

Between 2013 and 2022, Mississippi topped the list of states making the largest gains on reading while Maryland came in last because its scores had dropped more than any other state’s.

Maryland’s policy would revamp the teaching of reading from the top down, from requiring universities and colleges to train soon-to-be teachers in a precise way to defining when and how schools intervene with students who are falling behind.

The proposed literacy policy is grounded in a national shift toward teaching the science of reading, which says, at its most basic, that children should be taught the sounds of letters and how to put those sounds together to form words, rather than to guess words in the context of a sentence. Nearly all of Maryland’s school systems have adopted curricula consistent with the science of reading.

Before students are held back, though, the policy calls for all kindergarten through third grade teachers to get comprehensive training in the science of reading, including how children learn to sound out words, read fluently and build vocabulary. Coaches would be deployed to classrooms for on-the-job training for reading teachers.

If the policy is adopted, school systems will choose from a list of state-approved reading tests — some of which may already be in use — to give to students three times a year. When those tests show a student in kindergarten through third grade is falling behind, the school must notify the student’s parents within two weeks and create a reading improvement plan for the student within a month.

What the research says

There’s lots of debate among education researchers about whether holding back students will ultimately put them ahead or harm them, but the research that may be most relevant comes from Florida and Mississippi, the two states with policies closest to the one Maryland is considering.

Martin West, academic dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, studied Florida, which began holding back struggling readers in the early 2000s. “We found that retained students made much faster progress in reading and math than similar students” who had squeaked through and moved on to the next grade,” West said. The size of that academic advantage faded over time, but by high school the students who repeated a grade were still performing at a higher level, were less likely to be in remedial classes, had higher grade point averages and were no more likely to drop out.

But they also weren’t more likely to graduate from high school, West said.

Despite those results, West has questions about what fueled Florida’s rise in test scores. “Was the retention policy responsible for its rapid improvement? I don’t think we can say that for sure, but it was one piece of a package of strategies that together seem to have been successful,” he said.

Last year, Boston University researchers studied the effect of Mississippi’s retention policy and found that students who were held back had significantly higher scores in English than those who had barely passed to the fourth grade.

The researchers saw no adverse effects on the children who were held back.

Marcus A. Winters, one of the authors of the study and a professor at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, believes the comprehensive policies may drive an increase in achievement for all students so everyone’s reading is improving because they are afraid of being retained.

The last time local schools held back large numbers of kids was in 2003, when 19,000 Baltimore City students had to repeat third and eighth grades because they failed to hit a certain mark on a standardized test. Several years later, after a financial crunch prevented them from offering summer remedial classes, the city school board dropped the requirement, but not before hundreds of 16-year-olds remained in middle schools, having been held back more than once. While some hailed the end of so-called social promotion, or passing kids on who weren’t ready academically, some teachers felt it was detrimental to many students.

‘Very high stakes for a child’

Maryland’s 24 superintendents and the local school boards delivered their comments on the policy late Friday. While they support much of the plan, they said they are opposed to holding third graders back. In addition, they expressed serious concerns about who would pay for the many requirements in the policy, such as training for teachers and extra help for struggling readers. And they cited research on the negative effects of holding children back, particularly Black and brown children, on their future academic success.

. Wright was not available for an interview.

“I applaud the state putting a stake in the ground about the importance of children reading by third grade,” said Dabrowski, Baltimore City’s chief academic officer. But, she said, “there are details in the draft policy that need a lot more consideration.”

Specifically, Dabrowski is concerned about what assessment will be used to decide whether a student moves to the next grade and whether it will be consistently used. The state has changed assessments repeatedly in the past decade, she noted. And she wants to know whether children who have been held back will get different instruction to learn to read than they did the year before. “To retain a student has comprehensive implications, not just in the immediate but in the long term,” she said. “These are very high stakes for a child.”

Dabrowski also wants to make sure that students aren’t labeled reading deficient when the problem may be the teaching.

Teachers are not opposed to the new policy, said Cheryl Bost, the president of the Maryland State Education Association, which represents the majority of the state’s teachers, but they are concerned students will not get the support they need if they are falling behind. School systems are already supposed to have additional tutoring for students, but don’t because of a lack of staff. Reading specialists and teachers are in short supply, she said.

“My concern is that I don’t want to retain students if school systems have not been able to put the supports in place,” Bost said.

In addition, teachers say retaining a student is a complex issue that should be made by parents and teachers considering the many factors of the individual child’s issues.

“There is going to be a lot of panic. We don’t want teaching to the test,” said Danillya Wilson, a Montgomery County teacher. In her decade of teaching first grade, she said she has only retained a child once, and that was carefully thought out. The student was young for her grade and had been in the country only two years.

Learning to read, she said, can take longer for some children.

The policy allows for a “good cause” exemption. Special education students as well as those who are learning English as their second language may be exempted from having to repeat a grade. And students who haven’t received two years of additional help also could get an exception. Students would likely be given a couple chances to pass the test before being held back. And no child could be held back more than once.

Wilson said she worries that parents might try to get their child placed in special education to prevent them from being held back.