Schools in impoverished areas tend to have lower rates of reading proficiency. But one Ohio district is bucking the trend: Steubenville City Schools.
The Rust Belt district boasts one of the highest reading proficiency scores in the state despite its high poverty rate.
Chad Aldeman wrote a column last week titled "Why Steubenville, Ohio, Might Be the Best School District in America" for The 74 Million, a nonprofit news organization focused on education. He joined The Ohio Newsroom to discuss what he found.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
On how poverty and a student's ability to read are related
"Higher poverty families tend to have fewer books at home and they have less time to maybe spend reading with their child. And so this shows up in reading scores. And on a generic trend, higher poverty kids score less well on reading scores and there's lots of reasons for that, but that's the general trend that we see across the country in school after school, district after district."
On how Steubenville’s reading skills measure up
"So I started this project for the 74 Million last year, and we were looking for districts that did a good job helping kids learn to read after controlling for district demographics. I happened to start in Ohio, and I saw this district called Steubenville City just jump out at me right away. It was five standard deviations above what might be expected based on its poverty rate alone. Steubenville is in the Rust Belt, it's in the top 5% in terms of community poverty rates in the country, and yet it's getting really high third grade reading scores. Almost 100% of kids are reading proficiently by the end of third grade."
On how the district is achieving those scores
"I'm mostly a data researcher, but I'll tell you what other folks have found. Emily Hanford from the Sold a Story podcast visited Steubenville and found they do a couple things. They've had some stability: so they've been doing the same reading curriculum and program for more than two decades, which is notable. Most districts don't have that... They also have staff stability. So they have low teacher turnover, low superintendent turnover."
"They focus a lot on language. So in preschool programs, which they subsidize for 3-year-olds and above, they have a focus on kids speaking and learning to speak in full sentences. So rather than just saying, 'Johnny, which one do you want?' And then Johnny says, 'The green one,' he needs to respond back, 'I would like the green marker, please.' So just pushing that extra emphasis on speaking meaningful sentences."
"They also have kids read aloud a lot. So once they're in elementary school and starting to learn to read, [pushing them to] read it with expression when they're coming across something that they're not familiar with."
"Steubenville does a lot of focus on practice. So they do this fluency, they do tutoring programs. They also do something unusual where they group students by the child's ability rather than by their age or grade. And so they can focus on the skills that the student needs at the time. And wherever they are, that's the sort of practice that they get."
"If you look over the last 20 years, they have consistently had more than 90% of their students reach proficiency by the end of third grade, which far surpasses the statewide Ohio averages. They also get really high scores for black students, Hispanic students, low income students, students with disabilities – all are reading at really high levels in Steubenville."
On how early education wins translate into future success
"They continue to do well in education outcomes. So they get these really high third grade reading scores; they also do pretty well through the end of high school. Kids are scoring well in math also. They're doing well in biology and other subjects and they have a very high graduation rate. But what you're getting at is that the education that the Steubenville school district is able to deliver is not necessarily an inoculation. It doesn't mean that all Steubenville kids are getting on a path to high-income, high-wage jobs. And partly that's a function of geography. So they're still graduating into the labor market of Steubenville, and there's only so much that the school district can control."
"What I write in the 74 Million is that we should be complimenting the school district for the successes they're having, and yet thinking about other solutions in addition to education. It's not necessarily a silver bullet that's going to change everything. It's doing quite a lot of good for these kids, but it's not going to necessarily do everything either."
