March 10, 2026 · Workforce and Higher Education Committee · 15,586 words · 9 speakers · 97 segments
I call the meeting of the Workforce and Higher Education Committee of the House in order. Clerk, please call the roll.
Chair Young.
Here.
Vice-Chair Ritter, checked in. Ranking Member Abdullahi. Representative D'Avila, excused. Representative John.
Here.
Representative Manning. Representative Miller, checked in. Representative Pickle-Antonio, checked in. Representative Richardson.
Present.
Representative Santucci. Representative Timms.
Here.
Representative Williams. Representative Workman.
We have a quorum, so we'll proceed as a full committee. The March 3rd minutes are on your iPads. Please review them. Are there any objections to the minutes? Hearing none, the minutes are hereby approved. At this time, we're honored to have Chancellor Mike Duffy of the Ohio Department of Higher Education to present an overview of the Science of Reading audit. Whenever you're ready, sir, and welcome.
Chairman Yon, members of the Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today on the science of reading audits. First, a little bit of legislative history. House Bill 33, the State Operating Budget Act in July of 2023, established two sections that are really foundational to understanding Ohio's approach to the science of reading, and in particular the High Department of Higher Education's role. The first is 33136028, which defines the science of reading and does this not just for higher education, but for K-12. It was really written for K-12. And it defines the science of reading as explicit, and this is important, explicit instruction in systemic instruction in phonics, phonemics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and writing. It also, importantly, and other states do not have this, It defines the science of reading as not relying on any model of teaching students to read based on meaning, structure and syntax, and visual clues, often known as MSV, including the 3-Qing approach, which is specifically defined in Ohio law. Please note, 3-Qing, for those of you who are not familiar, and MSV are used interchangeably in many of these conversations. balanced literacy and whole language are both approaches that utilize 3-queuing. And MSV can be described as, I think the most relatable way to describe it is guessing a word based on clues such as the context of the word in a sentence or a picture. So say you see a picture of a pony and the child says horse. That would be a guess. That's obviously not decoding the word based on the letters that are in that word. Second section, which really relates to our agency, is 3333-048 and specifically tasks the Chancellor of Higher Education in consultation with the Director of Education and Workforce with establishing metrics for the preparation of educators and developing an auditing process that documents the degree of alignment. It sets a list of responsibilities and dates. I'm going to go through that later in the presentation. And it harmonizes with the previous code section that I mentioned regarding the prohibition on 3-Qing. Why is Ohio a national leader? Well, there are really two components in Ohio's design that are different than other states and unique and make us strong. The first is independent auditing. You made a choice, the legislature made a choice in not enacting a law that said the institution shall self whether they aligned with the science of reading You said the chancellor shall audit the institutions By doing that in the revised code you said it going to be an independent audit and that's the way that we proceeded. For the same reason that independent financial audits are helpful for subdivisions, think of cities, municipalities, school districts, public universities, independent auditing is crucial to have a strong audit process. The second component is high stakes, and program revocation is that high stakes here in the state of Ohio. The statute explicitly makes compliance an exercise in which failure, as the governor mentioned in the state of the state today, results in mandatory revocation of program. In fact, the revised code says the chancellor shall revoke the program if they're not aligned to the science of reading. And that's within one year of completion of the audits, which were December 16th of last year that we released them, and so it'll be December 16th of this year. Just so you can have a sense for what the universe of Ohio's Teachers Colleges, or EPPs, Educator Preparation Programs as we call them, look like across the state of Ohio as you can see on this illustration. On the left are the public universities in the state of Ohio and on the right are the independent colleges that have this reading core that we're so focused on. In the next slide, I'm describing the response from the institutions to the audit process. One thing I'd like to say is this audit process was actually designed by the institutions themselves, by the faculty themselves. The metrics that we're talking about, the 73 metrics, were developed by science reading experts here in the state of Ohio from our faculty. So this is very much something that they bought into at the front end, and they're holding themselves accountable to what the science of reading actually says. some institutions as we know are early adopters in the science reading while others are less familiar and that's natural in any system the nice thing about the process and the way that the legislature enacted it was we had constructive notice in 2023 that this was coming people see it in a bill they see the bill get signed they know it's becoming law they know that there's a one-year grace period in the future they have all these points checkpoints to check in with their own faculty and say, how are we doing? How aligned are we? And that, together with post-audit, having the one year afterwards, gives them so many extra chances to get there. So it's very much about continuous improvement. I detected genuine surprise in fourth quarter of last year when some institutions found out that they were not going to be in alignment on the science of reading. And I can tell you from personal experience, seeing the looks on their faces, that they redoubled efforts. And why is this important? Because we're all humans. We're all trying to make system change. And when we know that we're not in compliance and we see the accountability coming from the state of Ohio, it actually changes the outcome for that institution. So the redoubling of efforts that we saw, I would say, is because we had independent audits and because they were high stakes. And we did not expect every college to be practically perfect in every way, as Mary Poppins famously claimed. Instead, we try to focus on continuous improvement. So I think there was some sense from some institutions that, oh, we're on the bad list or the naughty list if we're not in alignment. And it's no. That's not the case. It's more like a coach working with a team and saying, this is the technique that we want you to have. Let's continuously work towards that. Selection of the auditor. We released the RFP for the science reading audit support on June 27th of 2024. the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, which is here today at the University of Texas was the highest scoring proposal at the time The controlling board released 6 million on September 9th of 2024 As chancellor this is important at the very beginning of our process I instructed the Meadows Center to hold institutions to the highest standard and collect detailed date evidence of compliance and noncompliance So as an agency, when you work with an auditor, you have to set the expectation for how rigorous it's going to be, and we set it very high. We've been pleased with the rigor of Ohio's process and working with Meadows Center. Other states, as the governor mentioned, the state of the state are now evaluating and or seeking to emulate Ohio's approach. Some have approached the Meadows Center. Some have actually called us directly as well. This is a timeline of the science of reading. As I mentioned, July 2023 enacted. You can see when we develop the standards. I'm not going to read all of this to you. The most important points are that in 2024, all institutions had a one-year grace period. That's the exact language that's used in the statute. January 1st, 2025, not just sometime in 2025, January 1st, 2025 is when we were charged by the statute with starting and commencing the audit. So that's when we commenced that. So if institutions say, hey, I was ready in February or I was ready in March, kind of doesn't matter. The law said January 1st, that's when we started. That's when we started collecting all the information. Of course, we published the final audits in December, and they were sent to the institutions and published publicly, and that triggers the one-year date that I provided for December 16th of this year. Now, what was the audit really about? And think about it as two domains of audit determinations and criteria. The first dimension is whether the institution was fluent in the science of reading as measured by what I will call best practices, also known as the 73 audit metrics. For example, this includes demonstrating an understanding of phonics, phonemics, dyslexia, structured language, decoding, interpreting NAEP scores, etc. Second, whether the institution engaged in the prohibited practices that the General Assembly specifically specified, also known as 3Qing defined in the revised code. Now, I'm not going to go through all of the audit metrics, but I want to show you the level of detail of what we looked at. You can see 1 through 50 on this slide, and on this slide you can see the remainder through 73. Categories of alignment. So think about it as essentially three broad categories that an institution could be scored into. Some institutions that were in alignment actually were perfect, 14 of them out of 48, and so they have no additional post-audit review. but 33 were in alignment. To reach the status, they must have met 71 out of 73 metrics. So that's a 97%, and they must have zero, zero, 3-queuing. None of the partial alignment institutions had any 3-queuing either, but they would have missed more than two metrics. The not-in-alignment institutions all had a 3-queuing example, and we'll talk about that in a second. this is a color-coded chart that just shows all of the institutions it's ranked from most compliant to least compliant the the ones in kind of the pinkish orange you can see are they not in alignment institutions if you see the metrics missed it is literally labeling the metric and the exact metric that they missed if you wanted to look at that I can provide you with a spreadsheet outside of committee if this is not readable for you but this is an understanding of the total realm of who participated in the audit and then this is just a simplistic breakdown of that same analysis So 69 of institutions being in alignment 10 partial and 21 not in alignment Detail on best practices So this is briefly, I said I wasn't going to read 73, but I am going to highlight a couple that several institutions missed. For example, metric two, teacher knowledge. Interpreting current NAEP scores, the National Assessment of Educational Progress data on student reading outcomes, and understanding the impact on subgroups. So if an institution couldn't demonstrate that they didn't understand how to do that, they missed that. And we were pretty generous with institutions. If they could demonstrate some awareness of that, we tried to give them credit for each metric. Metric 42, reading fluency, appropriate uses of assistive technology for students with serious limitations, such as speech-to-print translators or audiobooks. Metric 58, writing, awareness of assistive technology, when and how to use them. This gives you a sense of the nature of some of the metrics that institutions would have missed. Examples of three cueing violations, and these are from the actual audits, so these are actual snapshots. I'm not mentioning the institution, but a tips for word recognition handout promotes the three cueing approach by encouraging students to use context, pictures, and prior knowledge to identify unfamiliar words, emphasizing whether a word, quote, makes sense or sounds right instead of focusing on decoding. This relates to the analogy that I gave earlier about child sees pony, they say horse. Teacher might say, okay, good enough. We would say, no, that's not explicit instruction. That's not phonics and phonemics. This is the second example. You can see picture clues on the left. This is yet another example of a visual clue that has been a discredited practice nationally. Next one is seeking middle ground, analyzing running records. If you hear running records, they're generally related to one of the non-supported discredited practices. And so it's kind of a signature in that as well. Examples of three cueing on the next one. This is from some text that happened in one of the audits. You can see summarized in the box are some pieces specifically from Pinal and Fountas, Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University, featured prominently in the Soul to Story podcast, and the Balanced Literacy Framework. So these are some examples of what we've caught as well. Next one is an example of the Meadows Center looking at an LMS, a learning management system at an institution. So you can see that the detail that we looked at is not just what books, but specifically what pages of what books were assigned, which chapters were assigned. We cross-referenced that against the LMS to know that, in fact, pre-service teachers were being taught 3Qing. Science of reading exemplars. It goes without saying that we had 14 institutions that had perfect audit scores. Miami University scored 73 out of 73 metrics, zero 3-queuing violations. They were one of 14 institutions that require no post-audit review. In the report for Miami University, we cite commendations for exemplary practice with future teachers for having opportunities to apply evidence-based practices in field settings, for example, and that this is different from other institutions in the way that they engage with their students. Or for assigning core textbooks around it in evidence-based literacy practices and avoiding discredited practices. We have two types of recommendations that happen. They are mandatory recommendations and they are advisory recommendations. Even a perfect institution like Miami has advisory recommendations that they develop a hiring process that's focused on evaluating alignment with the science of reading and offering professional development to their teachers. And even in the audit process with them, we noticed some variance in the level of expertise and knowledge of faculty, and that's why that recommendation came out. Next one is the University of Akron. Scored a 73 out of 73 on the audit metrics, 0-3 queuing violations, one of the 14 again, commendations for exemplary practice and ongoing professional development. And they recently started a Center for Structured Literacy that we think is a great best practice across the state of Ohio and that we funded with funding from the Ohio Department of Higher Education, close to a million dollars, and recently received the International Dyslexia Association's accreditation plus status, and they are our first in Ohio to achieve that. Even they had an advisory recommendation to verify faculty have relevant experience to provide the highest level instruction. So we were constantly focused on continuous improvement. The next one is something that if I were a legislator I would want to know about, which is how do you make the science of reading really relatable? How do you understand kind of what it meant to you as a child growing up? And the example I like to think about is the Electric Company, which was out between 1971 and 1977. Some of you may remember the silhouette blends where two people facing each other would sound out a word. So they would do the digraph ch and then the letters A-R-M with consonants to, with a specific vowel leading to a consonant, to say charm as a word. So this is explicit instruction teaching graphemes, letters, and phonemes sound in a fun way that students can learn. And fun fact, this is actually Morgan Freeman on the left in this picture. So post-audit review. Ohio's success through independent audits is being lauded nationally. We're getting calls from other states, as we mentioned. We intend to maintain the rigor in our post-audit review with institutions. Our RFP closed on February 23rd. I'm pleased to announce that the Meadow Center was the highest scoring to continue the work with our agency. And between April and September of this year, we will conduct post-audit reviews with those institutions. Now, remember, the law requires them to be compliant by December 16th. But what you're hearing from me is that I intend to be done well before that. And so as an institution is ready and we know that they are compliant and our review is complete, we will issue that announcement that they are complete and that they are compliant when we know for certain that that is the case. Beyond the audit. Separate from the independent auditing process, we are asking institutions annually to review and document that the institution itself has reviewed its courses, syllabi, text, and materials for alignment with the science of reading. This is important because courses, texts, and faculty change frequently. No later than March 31st of 2026, all institutions will be required to submit their plan for annually reviewing their own courses, syllabi, texts, and instructional materials. We're asking them to explain how they will approach onboarding new faculty and continuing education. And per the revised code, there will be future audits. The revised code says that programs must be reviewed every four years. So in conclusion, Ohio's approach to the science of reading and the audits of teacher colleges is different than most states because first, our audit process was independent and second, it was high stakes. This process, although uncomfortable for some institutions, has verifiably resulted in swift changes based on the evidence that the institutions had missed on their own review. Ohio is receiving praise and admiration nationally within science reading circles for our rigorous process and other states are now reaching out And we had multiple checkpoints So this has never been a gotcha process for them It been very much here what the law says You know that the law is coming. Now it's been signed. Now you have a one-year grace period. Now we're doing the audit, and even after the audit, you have another year to comply with the law. That concludes my presentation. I'm happy to take questions. I know that we have the Meadows Center testifying the remainder of the process immediately following me.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chancellor. This is absolutely amazing. When you work hard as a committee and you get something like this in the budget, and it took us a couple years to get here, right? Put it in the runway, and then we finally got it done. To see this type of design and input and then the outputs that show us a true picture of what we're seeing in higher education to teach teachers to teach is extraordinary. It really is, in my opinion. Are there any questions?
Representative Williams. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you, Chancellor, for being here. Thank you for the work, not only of you, of your team of getting the science of reading implemented across the state, especially at our institutes of higher learning that are teaching our teachers how to teach the science of reading. We heard from the governor earlier about the accomplishments that we have now with the science of reading since its implementation. And I can only think that that's going to get better as our teachers are more well trained on it, especially our young teachers that are currently being taught, plus their continuing education. But what I heard from your testimony was not only did we put in a plan, we were reactive to the low reading scores that we had from our students. We changed the way we're going to teach reading. But we also were proactive, and some people may even say heavy-handed. with the institutions of higher learning. And it seems like that's been effective to be able to make that change in a short period of time. And it doesn't seem like there's that, I don't wanna say big of an issue, but that they've been more compliant, I'll say it like that, when they have more skin in the game. They were either compliant or they shut down their programs. Do you think that that was effective, that made Ohio unique, and that we had the independent audit system, but then they had skin in the game. They were gonna lose their programs if they didn't comply. Do you think that was effective in getting the universities to comply with what the General Assembly wanted? Through the chairman, to the representative,
absolutely the case. Because there has to be accountability, there has to be consequences, and consequences are uncomfortable in our lives, for ourselves, for our children, for anyone in a classroom, on grades. There's accountability, and so this law, the way that you enacted it, that the General Assembly enacted it, has consequences, and it has an independent process, which is not just we decided that we get an A on the score. It's done by a teacher, the auditing process, who is working with the institutions. And so, yes, absolutely, that is the case. Yes, of course. Thank you, Chairman.
One last follow-up. Did you see any difference between the way that our public universities approached this new structure, the independent auditing, and the threat of their programs being dissolved compared to the private universities? Was there any difference in attitude, difference in procedure, more reluctance by the private universities compared to our public universities?
Through the chairman to the representative, I would say what we know is that every institution today exists as an extension of what it was. And so for the institutions that have a history with balanced literacy or whole language it is steeped in their culture And this process is more challenging for those institutions And there are more of those institutions as a percentage of the institutions on the public sector side than we seen on the private sector side We've had some private sector institutions that have been really leaders in the science of reading for many years, well before this process. And so it was easier for them. But of course, we saw some public institutions that were well aligned as well. And so I would say it was directly an experience of the way that we were 10 years ago was what we observed during the auditing process.
Any other questions?
Representative Richardson. Thank you, Chairman, and thank you, Chancellor. It's good to see you again. I will just make a comment that I was sitting in this very room in the finance committee when we were discussing the cost of the science of reading. And I know it's a substantive investment. So I truly appreciate you coming and returning to tell us about how that investment is demonstrating its value. So I thank you for being here, and I applaud you. You say we're thorough, independent, swift, and we're being praised statewide, I mean nationally. I think we couldn't really ask for more. My question is just simply, how is this approach being received? Do we have buy-in? And even more importantly, how is it being received at the K-12 level?
Through the chairman to the representative, I think it's being received well now. But it is the firmness of the state's position on this and of the General Assembly in the law that really allows it to be that way. I think if you had a softness of the approach by the state, it would lead to more arguing about that level of detail. So I would say we're mostly there. it wasn't a comfortable process for any institution to not be perfect, right? That is just the nature of humanity. But we see a very strong commitment, especially because during the auditing process, I would say what that results in is the highest levels of leadership. The boards of trustees, the presidents, the provosts paying attention in a way that they previously might have deferred to an individual college and dean and said, I think you've got this. Do you have this? and then the audit comes out and you say, okay, I'm going to get personally involved. And so I don't see any risk there. I can't speak to K-12. You do have Dr. Melissa Weber-Mayor from ODUW will be able to speak on the panel briefly about K-12 implementation. One thing I would note, though, is that K-12 in Ohio is much more local control, and this approach to what we did in post-secondary is not that. This is a defined standard for the state of Ohio that we've implemented.
Any other questions? Great. I would like to say that in regards to your question, Representative Richardson, take heed and perhaps out of these hearings and when we have the universities come next week, we will understand what kind of leverage we'll have to take and make at the local level. And I have a little tidbit. Morgan Freeman was on the electric company and he was doing it full time, so on and so forth, and he auditioned for Driving Miss Daisy and got an Academy Award right after that. You guys remember that? Yes, I do. It was pretty cool. I do. So thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Chairman. Or Mr. Chancellor, thank you.
We'll call the Meadows Center presentation. Dr. Jennifer Schnackenberg, and I very excited to hear this Extraordinary work Extraordinary work Whenever you ready Thank you Chairman Young Okay.
I will go ahead and get started as the presentation is being switched out, but my name is Jennifer Schnakenberg.
I was one of the principal investigators and the director of the audit here in Ohio for the Science of Reading. Thank you for having me here today. The Meadows Center is an organized research unit that's housed in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. We receive funds locally, statewide, nationwide, and federally to conduct large-scale research projects, as well as work through translational research projects, which is a lot of my work that I do, where we take research and we translate it into practice. For this audit specifically, we also partnered with Gibson Consulting and Resources for Learning. These are two groups in Austin with whom we work very closely and who have conducted many audits as well. This was our first audit together, and so we feel like we knocked it out of the park. So thinking about the audit team members and who we had, in the statewide report you can see this listed as well, but we had reviewers of textbooks. We had syllabus and course material reviewers, and this included syllabi, course schedules, assignments, rubrics, presentations, assessments, and the learning management system that the Chancellor spoke of. We had field auditors. We visited all of the institutions of higher education in order to observe instruction and to interview. We had phase two audit analysts that once we went through phase one, which I'll speak to more clearly later, we had them analyze our outcomes at that point before we synthesized our data. We had panel review members. We had quality assurance reviewers and quantitative research scientists. We also specifically had a scientific advisory committee and an implementation advisory committee. These are experts from across the nation. The scientific advisory committee, exactly what it says, they advised us on the science of reading to make sure that everything that we did was tied directly to science of reading every decision that we made, so we went to them often. And then we also had an implementation advisory committee. The lead committee members for the implementation advisory committee were those who led the higher education audits in Mississippi and Alabama. The chancellor spoke to the science of reading, so just quickly I will say that certainly we know that this is what informs us, how our students learn to read and write. And Steven Pinker is a neuroscientist, and he says language is a human instinct, but written language is not. Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on. The basic fact about human nature should be the starting point for any discussion of how we teach our children to read and write. And the science of reading is what is that phonics core that was talked about earlier, that you think about painstakingly bolting on the print to the oral language. As Louisa Motz likes to say, she's a famous researcher for reading, teaching, Reading is rocket science. So for our Ohio audit methodology, we entered into a multi-tiered course review. We had three tiers of review. Tier 1 was looking at and reviewing carefully the 12-hour reading and literacy core instruction requirement. Within Tier 1, these ratings for the 12-hour reading and literacy core were based on alignment with all 73 audit metrics that were introduced by the Chancellor, and this review also identified course adherence with Ohio Revised Code. Our Tier 2 multi-tiered course review looked at our three-hour reading and content course requirements here in Ohio, as well as the reading endorsement. These were not held up to the audit metrics, but were held up to assess compliance with Ohio Revised Code. and then all other literacy-related courses in educator prep programs, be them undergraduate or graduate, were also analyzed for their compliance with Ohio Revised Code. Drilling down into the Tier 1 review with the 12-hour reading and literacy core courses, it was a very comprehensive review where we looked across all course syllabi, assigned readings, assigned textbooks, instructional materials, assessments, assignments. We also rolled up our faculty interviews, our ed prep program leadership interviews, and our classroom observations into this tier one review. As the chancellor mentioned, the 73 audits metrics go across these nine domains looking at teacher knowledge and then the five components of reading, known as phonological awareness, decoding and encoding, also called phonics, vocabulary and oral language, reading fluency, reading comprehension. We also have domain seven, which is writing. Domain eight, which is collaborative problem solving in MTSS, which is multi-tiered system of supports. And then domain nine was high-quality instructional materials, As was mentioned, evidence of noncompliance based on Ohio revised code looking for the three-queuing approach. All course sections that were uploaded were reviewed to make sure that there was no evidence of noncompliance. And as we bring these two together for a quick recap for our overall audit rating criteria, we have in alignment, impartial alignment, and not in alignment. It was a two-prong alignment process, so 97% to 100% of the audit metrics met with all literacy-related courses complying with relevant provisions of Ohio Revised Code. Impartial alignment, still in alignment with Ohio Revised Code with 50% to 96% of the audit metrics met. and then not in alignment, the two-prong approach there were any IHEs who met fewer than 50% of the audit metrics and also, excuse me, or, there's a big or there, it's folded, there was evidence of noncompliance with the Ohio Revised Code in one or more literacy-related course sections. We happy to say that none of the institutions that were not in alignment met fewer than 50 86 was the lowest amount of audit metrics met here in Ohio For our audit activities they were quite broad as you might imagine given the size of Ohio and the number of ed prep programs that you have here in your lovely state. I have been here quite a few times now, so it's great to be back. Our audit timeline actually began in October of 2024. On October 30th, we met with the chancellor and the Ohio Department of Higher Education wherein we were given our marching orders. And that was to make sure that we were held to the highest standards, holding IHEs to the highest standards, and really digging into that Ohio Revised Code. It did modify our methodology at that time to have the two-prong approach so that we were analyzing all course sections, the 12-hour, the 3-hour, the reading endorsement, and any undergraduate and graduate course related to literacy and reading. The audit was conducted in three phases when it began January 2025. I will go across this with the timeline as I move through the phases. I will say that pre-audit site visits were something that we did. We thought it would be very good to start a relationship with the IHEs that we would be coming into to audit. So in October and November, we conducted pre-audit site visits. These pre-audit site visits included all IHEs, and 24 of them were conducted in person, and 24 of them were conducted virtually. It was the option of the IHE to have them face-to-face or virtual. As I move across the rest of the timeline, I will start with Phase 1. This was audit initiation and data collection. We systematically collected all information from every IHE. into our Ignite system, meaning that every core course for the 12-hour, 3-hour content, reading endorsement, and all other courses were uploaded by the universities and colleges. They had until January 31 to upload and to attest to the upload, that everything that was being taught at their college and university was uploaded into Ignite as it related to literacy and reading. We actually had some IHE's begin as early as October 28th, uploading items into the Ignite system. And we had every item, and we closed Ignite on January 31 at close of business. This included, but was not limited to, things I had mentioned earlier, so assessments, assignments, syllabi. Every textbook that was used on the IHE was also uploaded, not the textbook itself necessarily, but the title of the textbook and author and edition number. And then what I can say with the data collection piece is as we were starting to work through and audit all of these pieces, that's when the observations and the interviews took place. And what that looked like is we would arrive – well, of course, we had everything planned out. They began November 12th – excuse me, that's not right. That was our pre-audit site visit. they began and ended between February 10th. Now I'm actually just thinking about when I got on a plane to come up here to do it. February 10th, because you all were closed, because it was Veterans Day, the first observation took place February 11th, and the last observation took place May 2nd. And yes, I have lived this, which is why I'm able to just think, when did I fly up so I apologize for that all of the observations looked like moving into the classrooms and we had an observation rubric So 45 class up to three courses and multiple courses were observed across multiple campuses. The smaller universities and colleges had at least one observation. And then after the observation, either immediately following or the next day, we did interview the faculty member we observed. We also interviewed the EdPrep program leadership team. So every IHE did have a minimum of two interviews. Moving on to data synthesis, then we reviewed the evidence across the data sources to determine whether each metric was fully, partially, or not addressed within the 12-hour core courses. And then we also took that interview data and incorporate it into the contextualize the findings and to clarify instructional intent. We also had a major panel review. 80 of the course sections that were still outstanding were brought to panel. So what that means is that once we had done all of our data analysis and we were synthesizing our data, we had 80 course sections that still stood out as not in agreement with the audit team. We brought 30 people together and dug deeply for three days into those 80 course sections to ensure that nothing was missed. That included going back to the textbook pages that the Chancellor spoke about, including going back into the original rubrics for the syllabus, for the assessments, for the assignments, the observation data. We had all the interviews transcribed if we were allowed to record, so digging back in there and then digging back actually into the original recordings. This panel review was used to reexamine all relevant data to make sure, like I mentioned, nothing was missed. We were very, very thorough to make sure that if the audit metric had partial evidence, that it was assigned as partially evident and that it was assigned as a yes to the IHE. We also did one yes after panel review, and you're like, okay, Jennifer, you did it, but no, final quality assurance check. What we did here is that we took every single course section that had a flag of noncompliant, of using prohibited practice, and we dug in deep for three weeks. We did not want to say anyone was not in compliance or not in alignment due to evidence of noncompliance if we had missed anything. So we dug deeply into these 30 course sections looking for if the evidence was assigned. There are several institutions who maybe were using a textbook, but they hadn't assigned Chapter 7, and that's where the prohibited practice was. So making sure that there were no mistakes made so that we could be sure that we were 100% accurate as best as we could, barring human error. So all evidence of noncompliance was confirmed to be assigned as a part of our audit. Phase 3 was the data analysis and reporting. so we used statistical code to analyze and roll up what we called the course section information to calculate alignment and compliance rating across IHE's and these findings are clearly described in the reports that each IHE received and this included the commendations and recommendations many commendations and recommendations also came out of our interview process the The Ohio Statewide Report was written to summarize the audit findings across the IHE's, and when all was said and done this was the data collected and analyzed So across 48 institutions of higher education here in Ohio 613 course sections were audited along with 253 textbooks 65 site visits, more than 100 trips, 176 observations, 55 leadership interviews, and 144 faculty interviews, as well as the survey of over 3,500 students. So, how did your IHEs prepare for the audit? A lot of work went in from the IHEs to prepare for this audit, including creating and uploading a program compliance crosswalk for all applicable courses. This meant looking at the standards and the metrics and crosswalking them. They prepared and uploaded all course section materials, and they reviewed their submissions into that Ignite system for accuracy, and then they approved them to us. Many of your IHE's also went to great lengths to have faculty and leadership engagement in the audit. Course content revisions took place prior to the audit, and supports for realignment efforts went into the work they did on the university and college campuses to prepare. Mostly from the interviews, we determined that faculty and leadership engagement included that 88% reported that faculty from all levels worked to engage in alignment efforts. 78% reported that leadership supported preparation through content area expertise and administrative guidance. 30% of your IHE's actually collaborated with other IHE's. And oftentimes this was done regionally, but sometimes it was done because of who knows who. And then 22% did hire external consultants to help support their alignment efforts, reviewing their course syllabi, their course sections, et cetera. Course content revisions looked a little bit like this. 96% conducted a targeted revision of existing courses. So it's a pretty large number, meaning that they went through, and if there were changes to be made, they worked hard to make sure that those changes were made in the existing courses. 22% actually created new courses, 14% overhauled existing courses, and then 12% of your IHE's phased out courses prior to the audit. When thinking about the supports for realignment, there were funds available through the Ohio Department of Higher Education. About 50% of your IHE's relied on that, and about 33% used internal or external funding. And about 75% used ODHE resources to facilitate alignment efforts. And several of these self-reported that they did not use the resources necessary because they had already been doing the science of reading for quite some time. So as you do know the results of the audit through the statewide report and the individual IHE reports, What is some further alignment in Ohio that comes out of these reports? So for the mandatory recommendations for anyone who is using the 3-Qing approach or any discredited practice, that's the first mandatory recommendation is that they address the use. This needs to be eradicated from their ed prep programs and from how they're teaching teachers how to teach reading. The second piece is the supporting IHE's and addressing all metrics. As the Chancellor mentioned, 14 of them were gold star perfect. There are still others that are missing one or more metrics that need to be met in that 12-hour core course. And then one major outcome that we saw that bubbled up in a lot of interviews, a lot of observations, was expanding faculty expertise. This was listed often as something that needs to take place here in Ohio. That was in EdPrep program leadership interviews as well as in faculty interviews where they self-reported that they would like some more professional learning, some more professional development to have a greater understanding and grasp of the science of reading. So this leads us to the next steps beyond the audit. I know that the Chancellor spoke about that at length, but thinking about all of the work that has been done here in Ohio to make sure that we are holding the IHE's to the science of reading. And I'm thinking about how easy it is to kind of backslide when things get more comfortable. And so what will it be that we will do here in Ohio to keep these IHE's in alignment and moving forward so that we can ensure that children in Ohio have the opportunity to read? And I think about what an important goal and what an important opportunity this was for the IHE's in the state of Ohio. I wish this would happen in Texas, to be honest. And Ohio is now a verb. I'm not sure if you've heard that, but people are calling us asking if we will Ohio their IHE programs. So I think that's a pretty big testament to what has been said here already today and thinking about what that means for next steps. but also how you are a leader in this field because others are reaching out and Ohio, asking us to Ohio them. I think that's all I have to say. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It's pretty awesome.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
I think you forgot a couple of things I want to ask you about.
I'm joking.
Okay.
Okay.
Wow. Does anyone have any questions? Okay, Representative Workman.
Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Doctor, so much for coming in. Incredible amount of work, and we are so grateful for that and all of the thorough evaluation you've provided here. So I guess my question is related to some patterns or themes that you may have identified in the process. What is the pattern of success versus the pattern of failure that you may have identified, if any?
Yes. So I think the way to answer that is to start with the 14. And sorry, I'm not a politician, so I know I'm supposed to say through you to you, but sorry. One to merit.
Thank you.
When we look at those 14 Gold Star examples and we sit down and we talk to them, we find out that they've been doing this not just in the last two, three. I mean, we had some who actually worked over the holidays to be able to get us what we needed by January 31. That was not the case in those who met in alignment and who really had taken the time, made hard decisions with existing faculty, and took time to make sure that the courses were completely aligned. But it didn't happen overnight for them. It had already been happening.
Follow up Thanks Anyone else Yeah ranking member Abdellahi Thank you Thank you Chair Thank you for your testimony And my first question was going to be exactly that. So my next question is IHEs may have to hire new staff with expertise with the science of reading. Has this transition led to any firing of faculty or staff, or have IHEs largely been able to retain people?
when we were conducting our interviews it was mentioned that several faculty members had determined that this was not the place for them or that it had been determined that this was not the place for them so then they're not there anymore and yes in a specific instance of a college I was at they had just hired two new adjunct faculty who came straight out of a school setting one of them was an assistant principal and one of them was a classroom teacher and all science of reading. And so I think that is something to that you will see happening continuously.
Yes. Follow up. Yeah. Just quick follow up. Do you think the retention was greater than the folks
leaving or? Oh, absolutely. I mean, nobody in order to be able to do the pre audit site visits, everyone had to agree to that. So the no IHE turned us down. I'll say that. So I think that the retention number is higher. And sorry that I missed that. Thank you.
Representative Richardson. Thank you, Chair, and thank you so much for your testimony. I'm over here. I think you just addressed a little bit of the buy-in question that I had because you just did express that there was some resistance and some individuals did leave as a result of not wanting to learn and teach the new materials. So I thank you for that candor. Mine's just a simple question. When you were preparing for those interviews, were any of them surprised? Did you just, or did you schedule those, or did you kind of just walk in and say, okay, I do think surprises are more effective, but I'll let you answer.
We did not have any surprises in this audit as far as coming onto campuses, being invited onto campuses. So all of the interviews were prepped and planned. There was one that had to be rescheduled because of snow, but otherwise everything was set up ahead of time, yes.
Follow-up? Yes. Did the institution get to select which individuals were going to be interviewed?
They did not. That was the question that they asked at the beginning, is if they could decide what course we would observe and what individuals we would interview, but we did not allow the selection to take place. Instead, it was mostly around the 12-hour course where we tried to do most of our observations and interviewing.
Thank you. No further questions.
I'd like to preface the discussion in regards to the universities. They'll be here next week. We'll be interviewing six of them. And also, those of you who were on the Higher Education Committee last year, we had extensive hearings with all the public universities, interviews and private universities, and got them on record that they would be committed to adhering to the law. And that was really important. The decision for noncompliance was debated heavily. At first we were thinking about money, right? But we did not feel that that was the right decision because it could vary in any type of administration going forward. So we decided that you don comply you don have an education department And that was in essence the hammer that we will use right So that being said I would like to ask this I was very interested in the 3,502 students that you interviewed. I did not expect that at all. Could you comment a little bit about that and what you asked and what the purpose was? Sure.
So we put together a survey to ask them how confident they felt to be able to teach elements of the science of reading. And so in the statewide report, the students who have been reported out are the students who came from those 33 that were in alignment.
And so the confidence levels are very high across the board.
And secondly, when we closed with saying expanding faculty expertise, can you expand on that a little bit, well not a little bit, just tell us really what that means and how we get there. So a couple of things come to mind when you ask that question. The first is about this word remediation. So we talk about remediation in K-12 all the time, pre-K-12 all the time. Once we get students into second grade who are falling behind, we need to remediate. Then once they get to fourth, fifth, they've missed that early foundation of reading, we need to remediate. Now they're in middle school, we need to remediate. Now they're in high school, which is a lot more expensive to remediate in high school, although it has been successfully done. This audit to me is remediating at the start point. We want to make sure that our teachers who are coming out of our ed prep programs in the state of Ohio have gotten what they need to be successful to go out into the workforce. So right there kind of gets a little bit of your question. The other part of your question, the answer is that there are lots of science of reading experts housed here in Ohio in your institutions of higher education. I think this idea of sharing the knowledge is wonderful. I think this idea of what was mentioned earlier regionally, but for K-12, could also be regionally done for institutions of higher ed. Faculty who are especially not steeped in the science of reading don't feel confident teaching to the science of reading. There are also universities that use graduate students to teach these courses, and they need more training because they're coming out of a program and perhaps their graduate studies aren't even in science of reading. And so making sure that we reach them where they need to be and then help them grow and understand what science of reading is from the pedagogy to the actual knowledge of the science of reading, five components in writing.
Great, thank you. Any other questions? Thank you for coming.
Thank you so much for having me.
Great job.
Appreciate it.
Appreciate it.
Thank you. Now we have an esteemed panel. If you would all come forward. And we have Dr. David Brobeck, Research Associate at Systems Development and Improvement Center at the University of Cincinnati. Welcome, sir. Dr. Rebecca Tolson, Director of the Akron University Center for Structured Literacy. Brett Tingley, Founder and President of Parents for Reading Justice and O.H. Kidd. And Dr. Melissa Weber-Mayer, Chief Academic Officer at the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. And we will start with Dr. Brobeck.
How about that Okay Am I live Yeah, you're live.
Thank you.
I appreciate the opportunity to be here today, Chairman Young. I work as a research associate at the University of Cincinnati System Development and Improvement Center. I do want to help you understand that UCSDI, we are not the ed prep arm of the University of Cincinnati. We work as a center. We're located in Dublin, Ohio, and a big part of my job is to work in coordination with both the DEW and ODHE and to try and bring all elements of the K-20 continuum, which is one of our programs, the K-20, or the P-20 literacy collaborative, 20 being the number of years it would take to get a doctorate. So if you went continuously, it's not age 20. We have a couple things that we do that we think are helpful with this program. It started with the Ohio Deans Compact, which was formed in 2013. They met as a way, and you didn't have to be a dean, but it was a way to try to bring K-12 and other agencies together across the state. In 2019, they decided they needed a literacy collaborative, and the P-20 Literacy Collaborative was created. The Ohio Dean's Compact also includes other key state agencies. So there's both of the teachers unions are part of it. They reach out to pretty much any group that we think can help promote academic achievement in the state of Ohio. From what we're working on this year and with the audit, one of the support pieces that we added was the faculty literacy exchange. A year ago, I think I heard Jennifer mention that some of the institutions received mini-grants, and we helped facilitate and bring some people together. For example, I did get a call from one university, and it was my belief that the best place to help them was the University of Akron. So I referred them to Dr. Tolson as a way to get them help because the expertise they were looking for was another North Ohio institution was close at hand. I understand that took place, and that's the type of work we do within the P20. The Faculty Literacy Exchange bore out of a support group for an incentive grant that came through the Dean's Compact of, I think it was 11 universities, that were working on internal auditing processes so that when we got through all of this, they would be able to continue to try and keep the development going in a positive direction. Those institution faculty members said, boy, this was really helpful. Do you think we could continue something? So in the summer, we came up with the idea of the Faculty Literacy Exchange, launched it in September. We currently meet monthly. It is also a way that we help with the collaboration piece. That was also mentioned that 30% of the institutions have collaborated. Sometimes that is done through the Ohio Deans Compact. Sometimes that is done through the P20 Literacy Collaborative. but it's all under this umbrella of a systems development and improvement center that we operate here in Ohio. I actually feel pretty lucky because I have worked with everybody in this panel in one capacity or another in a collaborative manner. So that's pretty much, you know, what we're about. We do have a site that we think is exciting, the All Ohio Literacy and Learning Science website. on that website. We have 48 modules and growing, and something we just had approved, the International Dyslexia Association has approved moved a program from the AllOhio module site to allow institution membership or anyone who signs up for it to take a K-Peria exam and earn a structured literacy classroom teacher instructional piece. I have been in contact with two universities asking, we're getting ready to launch, how can they participate and partake in this and use it as part of their development program. That's an overview. Thank you.
Brett Tingley.
Let's see if I can go up. Is it on? Chair Young, Vice Chair Ritter, Ranking Member Abdullahi, and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. My name is Brett Tingley. I serve as the president of Parents for Reading Justice and OHKID, Ohio Kids Identify with Dyslexia. Voice for Reading Justice is a literacy advocacy nonprofit that instructs and supports grassroots parent groups to hold the education system accountable for evidence-based literacy instruction. OHKID represents parent groups across more than 20 Ohio school districts, serving over 185,000 students. I have devoted the last decade of my life to ensuring Ohio's children learn to read. I'm here today to put a face on the cost of not getting the science of reading right. Sometimes when I say that following the science of reading saves lives, people think I'm being dramatic. I do not say that lightly. I will never forget attending the funeral of my dear friend's son, an undiagnosed dyslexic who died of an overdose in his home while his family slept. When children struggle to read for years without support, the consequences reach far beyond the classroom. Literacy is not just an education issue. It saves lives. I am here as a mother, but I am also here as a business professional. I hold a master's degree in engineering and an MBA, and I pride myself on being solutions-oriented. I don't want to simply identify problems. I develop solutions that can benefit families, schools, and the state as a whole. Literacy is both a human rights issue and a workforce issue. When children learn to read, every part of our state benefits families, school districts, communities, and employers. Quite simply, if only one-third of our children read proficiently, Ohio cannot compete in a global economy. I commend Governor DeWine, Chancellor Duffy, and this legislature for showing real leadership on literacy. For years, we talked about the science of reading, but accountability was missing. You have begun to change that. Parents are often forced to hold districts accountable when schools fail to follow the science. But the recent audit conducted by the Ohio Department of Higher Education represents a powerful shift. For the first time, universities are being held responsible for whether they are actually preparing teachers to teach reading. If the 10 universities identified in the audit do not come into compliance, they will lose accreditation. That is real accountability, and Ohio families deeply appreciate it. Our literacy crisis does not begin in the classroom It begins in teacher prep programs If teachers are not taught the science of reading before they enter the classroom schools are forced to play catch for years and it costs taxpayers millions of dollars each year. One idea I urge you to consider is requiring teacher prep programs in Ohio to obtain accreditation from the International Dyslexia Association from here on out. IDA accreditation is widely considered the gold standard for science of reading alignment in teacher prep and would help ensure universities remain in compliance moving forward. This was actually an idea suggested by Dr. Tolson and I strongly agree with it. IDA accreditation is a low-cost, high-impact solution. By requiring a higher teacher's prep program to become IDA accredited by 2030, the state could permanently align teacher training with the science of reading at a minimal cost. Taxpayers won't have to pay for another audit. Another way to lock in the science of reading into Ohio, beyond any single administration, is to raise the foundations of reading exam pass score to a meaningful level. Currently, Ohio's cut score is so low that the measure is almost meaningless. We should ensure that the exam actually reflects whether teacher candidates are prepared to teach reading effectively. We could also publish and widely share first-time pass rates for teacher candidates by institution of higher ed. First-time pass rates tell us exactly how well a teacher preparation program is doing its job. If candidates consistently need multiple attempts to pass, that is a clear signal that the program is not adequately preparing them. Taxpayers and prospective teachers deserve to know which universities are effectively preparing educators to teach reading and which are not. Another option would be to tie a portion of state funding to first-time pass rates. Additionally, I would encourage the legislature to rely on the Ohio Dyslexia Committee as a trusted resource. This is a nonpartisan committee made up of stakeholders across the education system who have deep expertise in the science of reading. For example, I have encouraged the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to consult with the committee to narrow their list of approved curricula assessments and interventions to a smaller number of truly evidence-based options. I would recommend the same collaboration for the Ohio Department of Higher Education and the legislature. In conclusion, the governor, Chancellor Duffy, and this legislature made a bold decision to hold universities accountable. There were powerful financial interests pushing back against the science of reading. But Ohio chose children, their futures, and their opportunities. Parents across Ohio see that leadership, and we thank you for it. Parents and advocates across the nation look to Ohio as a leader in science of reading accountability, as the governor mentioned a few minutes ago in his State of the State. When we get reading right, everything else becomes easier for our children, our workforce, and our future. Because when a child learns to read, you change the trajectory of that child's life. And when a state gets reading right, you change the trajectory of the state itself. Thank you, and I'm happy to answer questions at the end.
Thank you.
Dr Tolson let go with you Very excited to hear about your new effort there structured literacy
Pretty cool. Thank you, Mr. Chairman Young. I appreciate, and the committee for inviting me to be part of this work group. At the Center for Structural Literacy, we've improved our teacher preparation program through the IDA accreditation process, and I'm going to share a little bit about what that was like. That is something that could be scaled, as Brett Tingley was mentioning. Also, we focus on structured literacy certification for teachers so that they know an apprentice for teaching literacy at the onset with their bachelor's degree. Also, we have implemented a supervised field practicum in structured literacy. So when they go into the classroom for their field work, they're teaching a struggling reader to read, and sometimes more than one, and so they know what that's like before they enter the classroom, and they know how to remediate, they know how to teach from the onset. We at the center also support IHEs with their coursework and preparation. So due to private funding, funding, we were able to train our faculty first. And by training the faculty first, and the faculty not only did the coursework, they did the field practicum. So they went in and taught a struggling reader using structured literacy, and that whole experience got us all on the same page as a faculty. So we trained three full-time faculty and three part-time faculty. And so that was a great experience.
So that's a little bit about the Center for Structured Literacy, and I'm going to elaborate a little bit more on our future work, upcoming work this summer. So at the center, we believe reading proficiency is equal to workforce readiness. So this in the county, in Summit County, we have some exciting things going on because we do believe that it's going to impact our entire county and our workforce, and we have private funding to launch a summer program that's training teachers in masses. So I'm going to share that with you, and I have a flyer at the end for you to look at. Adult literacy correlates with employment stability, earnings potential, and reduced social service dependency. And so we have a community behind us. We have community meetings. Our president at the university is behind this. Our provost, our dean is behind this. We have our philanthropy in the community. We have a project going on with preschools and with the pilot program in the county that's supported by the mayor. So not only do we have, we had everyone around the table talking about literacy in Summit County. So, as I transition to our vision, because we have a lot of people at the table looking at what the Center for Structured Literacy can do in our county that we could scale statewide with this expertise, with this experience, because we dug deep into our coursework to say how are we preparing teachers before the audit. Now when we did that we aligned our coursework to the knowledge and practice standards for teachers of reading That published by IDA the International Dyslexia Association So we had already looked at it and said do we align the same as the metrics So when that came down, we were ready. We had already done the crosswalk that she was talking about. There's a difference between science of reading and structured literacy, and I want to make sure everyone understands that difference. So science of reading is the interdisciplinary body of research. And we have a center for science of reading at another institution here in the state. So when they asked us, what kind of center could you run at the University of Akron, my specialty area when I was brought to the table is structured literacy, which is the translation of that evidence base into the classroom. And so what I specialized in was translating and applying the science, the latest and greatest in teaching what to teach, all the components of reading. You don't get a choice. It's built in. You have to teach it so that it works and how to teach it. So we have experts on explicit instruction. We have experts on direct instruction, cumulative practice. How much practice? It is an exact science, but we have to translate that. So that's the difference. So now I feel and the university feels that we should give every teacher that knowledge at the onset. It shouldn't be a question. So I didn't have that at the onset. So for five years as a new teacher, I struggled with teaching struggling readers. I had to go out and get that myself. I don't want any teacher to graduate from a university in Ohio and feel that they have to pay extra to learn how to teach reading. To me, that's malpractice. So when I stumbled on basically structured literacy, all I know is it worked. It worked to intervene. It worked to remediate, and I did that for almost 30 years. So here's what our vision is. We believe, and we have a model in Summit County that we have private funding for. So we are really lucky because the community has come around us in Summit County and said, we are on board. What we are going to do is launch a teacher professional development that includes coaching and support and practicum and field work so that teachers this summer, no cost to the district, no cost to the teacher. In fact, there's a stipend for the teachers. And the higher the certification level they want, the more money they're going to pay them. I'm not going to pay them. They're going to pay them. So the books are included. And we are offering at the university non-credit to credit, which means that they could apply that toward graduate credit and get bumped up on a scale for their salary. So there's so many advantages. Here's what we adhere to. We talked about IDA accreditation. There's a company or there's an organization, a sister organization that offers certification in structured literacy and science of reading. It's called Center for Effective Reading Instruction. So for us, these teachers can sit for an exam based on those standards, and they It can do the coursework, they can do the field work and practicum work, and they can either get a structured literacy classroom teacher certificate to say that they have applied this to their classroom. They can also become a structured literacy dyslexia interventionist, which means they've done the practicum and field, and they've actually supervised, been supervised, to know the effectiveness of the data that they've helped a student. So to me, this is about accountability. Not just I have the knowledge. We know we have the knowledge. Can we apply that? Is it helping kids? So this is launching this summer, and you have a flyer at the end of the handout, at the back of the handout for you. So to me, I believe a vision for the center and for the state should be to incentivize IHEs to get that IDA accreditation, because every five years you have to reaccredit. So it's accountability toward those standards in the science of reading and structured literacy. You get both. So it's a win-win. I believe at the center, our team is working diligently toward transitioning from our undergrad program being accredited to our reading endorsement and our master's program so teachers have a pathway. They can keep learning at the University of Akron. They can keep learning if they want to get their reading endorsement. That would include structured literacy and science of reading. If they want to get a master's degree, they can become a structured literacy dyslexia specialist along with that. So it goes along with certification in this area, a stamp of approval. So to me, we could track that. We could see how many teachers in Ohio have that. What is that data? How are our students doing? So to me, our next is transparency, accountability. We work close with the department. I'm the current chair of the Ohio Dyslexia Committee. We work very closely, very closely with the Department of Education and Workforce on implementation and systems. They have an IMTSS model, and to me, we now have to get the systems right. That literacy and the systems working together is a formula for success. So to wrap up, I did put some policy recommendations down below for you to consider, and I just thank you and the committee and chairman for your time allowing me to be here.
Well, thank you very much. Love your passion for this. I really appreciate it. Melissa Weber Mayor.
She's not higher ed, but she's ODUW and a little different take on what we're doing here.
Yes, Chair Young and representatives, thank you for having me today. I have to follow this one with a passion, so I'll try to keep it in here too. But as you heard this morning in the state of the state, The governor continues to be all in on the science of reading and really looking at how literacy makes a difference in the lives of Ohio students. So you heard Brett talk about literacy saves lives. You heard this morning in State of the State, Liam, one of the students up in Wapakoneta, and how learning to read as a sophomore in high school changed his trajectory. He had one plan before. He felt like he was a good reader He has a different plan now and even owns his own home So it truly truly does change lives So just to share with you where we are with the Department of Education and our support with the implementation You've invested a lot of money in Ohio's districts, a lot of money across our state. And so I want to give you an overview of where we are and where we hope to head with your support. So first, the goal is that every student in Ohio reads at grade level. So yes, we have a hard and fast focus on preschool through grade three, with reading by grade three. But we know that historically we have passed children on to fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade who were not proficient at third grade. So we are committed to ensuring that every teacher, not just in K-3, but in four through five, middle school and high school, have the knowledge and skills to be able to help every student that sits in their classroom, whether they are a social studies teacher, a science teacher, or the ELA teacher. The state's focus has been, as you know, on aligning instructional materials and the selection of high-quality instructional materials, also in professional learning. As you heard Dr. Tolson say, she wasn't taught this way or came out of university knowing all that she knows. When I graduated, I didn't know all that I know. My first year of teaching in Columbus City Schools, it was all balanced literacy until I realized I had a group of third graders that did not know how to read. And so luckily I went to Catholic schools growing up who taught phonics, and so I switched into my phonics mode and added it in there, but I had to do it myself. So the investment now has been really, really critical to Ohio's teachers. And Chair Young, would it be okay if I answered Representative Richard's question earlier to the Chancellor?
Sure, absolutely. Sure.
because you had asked how well the higher ed audits were received by the K-12 community. What I have heard anecdotally when I talk to superintendents and even building principals is that it's been very well received. We were getting stories where the districts were putting the pressures on local universities to change their practices to match the practices in the buildings. They are excited to have better candidates to choose from when they interview new teachers coming in based on these changes. So it has been a positive that I haven't heard any negatives on don't change this.
You're welcome.
Okay. Thank you, Chair Young.
So to continue, I'll give you a little overview of where we are with the science of reading professional development. So as you know, the state law required educators and administrators to complete professional learning in the science of reading. We had an approved list, which was from the International Dyslexia Association's list. But we also were directed to create free courses at the department for educators to take. So we had seven different pathways that teachers completed. And the completions to date are 118,000-plus educators have completed the state-developed courses, and they range between about 20 hours to about eight hours, depending on what kind of educator you are or administrator. We've had 9,500-plus administrators complete the administrator course. The administrator course is not as lengthy as the teacher course. So I have a breakdown of that for you that is in your notes that you have there. We are also required to develop refresher courses in the science of reading. Those are under development now They will be in two modules They will be shorter And the first one will be a review of science of reading and digging deep into the structured literacy approach which really gets at the teaching practices that need to be put in place. And we're also looking at then educators. So you have to complete that module first, and then they'll move into selecting the next module that would be more pertinent to their population of students. So they could select a module that is focused on students with disabilities and raising achievement there, focused on multilingual learners and raising achievement there, focused on middle school and high schoolers, et cetera. So we're trying to tailor that again to meet the needs of our students, of our, excuse me, not our students, our educators. When we move to the high-quality instructional materials, all districts and community schools and STEM schools are required to use materials from the approved list. We have a core instructional material list for kindergarten pre-K through grade 5 and approved e-reading intervention programs preschool through grade 12. We do have a quite lengthy high-quality instructional materials list, as Brett Tingley alluded to. We have 17 preschool materials, and we work with the Department of Children and Youth with alignment there with their programming. We have 30 core comprehensive. That means it covers everything, all of those components of reading plus writing. And then we have three no-core foundational materials. that means they're not addressing phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency as it pertains to decoding words. We have also 89 approved intervention materials, and we're really looking closely at these. The reason why those numbers are so high is because some of the intervention materials that are submitted to us may be second-grade phonemic awareness, so they're not as widely across grade bands. As far as compliance, I have some percentages as of December. 98.5% of reporting districts in preschool through grade five are using approved core materials. Anybody who is not compliant has received several communications from the department and offers of help to support in identifying from the lengthy list that we have. 81.2% are reporting using approved intervention programs. We are not surprised about this. We knew that this would lag a little bit behind because we want to get those core instructional materials in place first to see what materials might be more appropriate for intervention. Ongoing monitoring is we have 105 selected schools and districts across Ohio that have been randomly selected for a survey to look at the curriculum materials that they served and the funding spent purchasing those materials. Also in that legislation, there were waivers for any district who would wanted to use the three queuing approach with a student. So those had to be submitted to the department individually. We received zero waivers for any districts to teach three queuing.
Okay.
The other thing that I want to mention is we have, that's not in your notes, is we have developed a high quality instructional materials for English language arts dashboard on the website. So make sure you get that as well, where you can look at the state and click over a district or a community school, and it will show you what curricula materials they using Yes very cool Okay so the last thing that I have to share with you is the Read Ohio coaching work which gets at the implementation and the high-quality teaching that we want to happen now. You have the materials. You have the training. You need to implement it with students. So the state's investment has supported coaching across our state within Ohio's lowest proficiency, literacy proficiency rates. All of our coaches had to meet minimum requirements in their knowledge and skills. They all received additional training in reading science and structured literacy approach, as well as implementation. The coaching model includes four levels. The levels are a universal level, where everybody gets a little touch of information around the science of reading within the building. We have what we call self-guided. Think of that as office hours, where the teacher says, I want to learn more about X, Y, or Z with the coach. And then we have small group coaching and one-on-one coaching. And I will share with you the most requested coaching is one-on-one in classrooms and small group. And when we look at the outcomes of the coaching, we see similar outcomes for the small group coaching, which is like second grade teacher-based team meetings and individual teachers. And the two highest things they're asking for help with is the implementation of high-quality instructional materials and the use of data to drive their instruction. And we're actually super excited that those are the two things they're asking for help with. When we look at our coaching force, we'll call it the force, the group of people that go out there and are really helping with implementation. In year one, we had 33 coaches that worked in 53 schools. In year two, we were able to add coaches. We had 84 coaches working in 124 schools, and today we have 97 coaches working in 151 schools across the state. And as you heard this morning, the governor has now tasked us with adding an additional 50 coaches across the state. So we will get into even more. Some of those coaches support more than one school, more than one school in the same district, or if it's a small community school, they may serve more than one community school. And you have a table in your notes that shows the breakdown of where we have these coaches, because they are in K-5 schools, middle schools, and high schools. So our evaluation results, I mentioned a little bit about, they're implementing the model, the four-level model, with fidelity or integrity, I like to say. The small group in individuals is showing the most positive gains. And what we did was we looked at the teachers and what they're teaching from beginning of the year to middle of the year to end of the year. And we compared if they were changing their practices to their student scores beginning of the year, middle of the year, end of the year, to see if there was a correlation. And there is a correlation. So teachers that receive more coaching and change their teaching activities, we saw greater gains in the students in those classrooms. In closing, we are seeing very meaningful, measurable improvements in teacher practice and in the literacy system statewide. Our long-term commitment at the Department of Education and Workforce is there. We are mirroring what many other states have been doing, and they've been doing it much longer than we have. The focus remains on results, effective implementation, and I can't stress effective implementation enough and ensuring that all students benefit from strong, strong, strong, the strongest literacy instruction. regardless of if they're in kindergarten or sixth grade or 12th grade. And so in closing, we need to be focused on children, I'm going to say, children first over the desires of adults. Our data is changing for students. We are seeing it in Ohio. We cannot give up on this work from preschool through higher education as we move forward into this next school year. And we just, we have to keep paying attention. Thank you very much.
Are there any questions to the panel? Representative Manning.
Thank you all for this information. When I first started teaching, I was teaching ITA and transition ITA. I'm not sure any of you are familiar with that, but I often wondered what happened to those poor kids. But I did have my opportunity to go to University of Aquaman for my master's in reading, and thank you for that because I taught phonics and fluency, but a lot of it is not what you're teaching, it's how you're teaching it. And so hearing about the coaches, and I remember being at a school maybe a year or two ago, and they shared their coach with me, and she was fabulous, but they were worried about funding. Could you tell us, are we funding coaches?
Through the chair to Representative Manning.
We are funding these coaches currently. Some of them we fund through IDEA dollars. Yes. And then the others are funded through the last budget, $29 million. You all approve to continue to fund the literacy coaches in the second budget.
Okay, thank you. One more question. And the other one that I have is no one talks about Steubenville. And I don't know anything about it. I've read the articles. I wanted to go down and see them, but to do another two-and-a-half-hour drive down to Steubenville and then back home did not excite me, but I would love to have them come up and talk to us and explain what they do. But why we're not looking to them of the way they shut down everything for an hour, hour and a half, and everybody teaches reading for that hour? I mean, we should all be doing that to have the kind of success stories they're having.
How many people love Steubenville?
Okay, you can comment on it. They use a program called Success for All, and it's very, very evidence-based, developed by two researchers. It has a full wraparound. It's very structured literacy. They do, everybody has the same hour and a half so that you go to a very small group to learn exactly what you need. And then when you're done with that, you get to move to kind of the next group. They have a huge emphasis on first grade. They also have a big thing on oral language. They have the preschool. Eighty percent of their kids go to preschool, full-day preschool. The most anyone pays is But the beautiful thing is that by the time they hit fifth grade the lowest reading group of all the fifth graders are fifth grade And I'm in Upper Arlington, Ohio. We're doing very well. We adopted the science of reading years ago, partly because of parents pushing it. We cannot say that. So we all should be looking to stoop and move.
Chair Young, may I ask you?
You guys are the panel.
Speak up anytime you want. Okay.
I would, through the chair, to Representative Manning, I would like to add, my family is from Steubenville. But also, I think in addition to what Brett shared about Steubenville is they have been using the same curriculum materials for over 20 years. They have not wavered. They have not changed. They have a very low turnover of teachers and administrators within their district. So they have a system in place that has allowed them to sustain what they've been doing. If you listen to the Sold a Story podcast, or there's a new one out called Reveal, I think, that talks about Steubenville, when they were asked about balanced literacy or Lucy Calkins or Fontes and Pinnell, they said, who? So they have been very kind of isolated with using the curriculum that they've been using that is on our approved list. But not only is it the consistency, they have an entire system around if a student is absent, they have a staff member that goes and finds the student and brings them to school. It's a small, if you've ever been to Stubo, you haven't been there, along the river, it's a very small steel mill town. And so the entire community, much like Akron has wrapped around the work that they're doing, the entire community in Steubenville, as much as they can, it's very impoverished, is helping that implementation as well.
Any other questions? Representative Richardson.
Thank you, Chairman. I could see my colleague processing, really listening. And I just wanted to say, you know, earlier, too, in my line of questioning, I don't want you to think that I don't absolutely 110% applaud your efforts to ensure positive outcomes for our kids. It's just my job to ask the tough questions. And this one isn't so tough. This one's pretty simple. Who are the coaches?
Through the chair, Representative Richardson.
and excuse me, the coaches are hired. So the way the law was written is that the department will direct the work, but we will not hire the coaches. So we put out a request for applications for educational service centers or universities to apply to house the coaches. But we also wrote various tight and strict job descriptions and roles and responsibilities for the coaches that included minimal qualifications that you could have When those and there are five educational service centers that were awarded those contracts When they have a coach that they want to hire they send it to me and they send the application and the candidate recommendation as well as their resume, to me and my team. We review that resume, and in most cases, we've said, yes, this person looks amazing, get them in schools as fast as possible, but we have on occasion said, this is not the right person.
A follow-up?
And when we think about coaches and our long-term goals, I'm going to make the assumption that as we transition into this new science of reading, we need exponentially more coaches. But the plan is to really try to pull them back at some point, I hope, right, in the near future. Is that correct? Yes.
Through the chair, Representative Richardson, exactly.
And we have, some of the coaches that we have in place, that we've had in place for three years, have moved from one building to another building because that building is on a good trajectory. But we didn't say goodbye and good luck. We have our state support teams and our educational service centers continuing to follow up with them. In addition, this morning you heard the governor also require us to expand not only just the number of coaches, but the opportunity for district-hired coaches to participate in the Reed Ohio coaching training that we have. And so we will continue to offer that. But the goal is we need less coaches, not more coaches eventually.
Thank you.
Thank you so much. No further questions. Any other questions? I have a few.
One is, Dr. Tolson, you gave us some recommendations on policy.
What I would like you to do is help us help you and expand on those bullet points, if you would. And then you have targeted funding. We hear that term quite a bit. and I'd like to have more of an expansion on that if you would do that as well. That would help us help you. Any of you who feel that you have policy ideas, we really need it. Because if we're having, as a result of this kind of work, we know how it's being spent, right? We know what you're doing with our taxpayers' dollars. the hope is in the future this type of thing goes away because we will have all of our teachers teaching all of our students in the classroom learning whether they have dyslexia or not and the teacher will be able to identify it and not remove a child from a room with their friends I don't know how long that will take but I like to have some feedback from all of you as to how you see this This is our first real implementation year correct But I want you to think a little bit bigger and dream a little bit and help us to say if we achieve this, this is where we should be comparatively. If we achieve this and we go here, give us a timeline. A target that you have very high standards, obviously. And give us a timeline on what your high standards are. And raise the bar. And let's get there. I do have something for Melissa Weber Mayer. I did interview some kindergarten teachers. Great kindergarten teachers. And they talked about the modules. And they called me, you have modules, I guess, for them. I had kindergartners. And I think they're 20 minutes, I think, the modules are. They think that it's just something to think about. They don't have all-day kindergarten, a lot of people don't. And so their question was, we love this, we want to do this, but to keep the kindergartner in a very short period of time to try to get their shift done for the child. Was it designed for part-time kindergarten, full-time kindergarten? Is there something that we need to look at there? That's all. I just wanted to throw it out there. They want to do it. It's like the modules are a little too long for their interest in just part-time kindergarten. Most schools don't have that privilege to have full-time kindergarten. I think we're trying to get there. In my district, everyone wants to get there. But if you'd just take a look at it. And I can give you some teachers' names if you want to talk to them, too. This has been awesome. I am extremely grateful for your good work. And I'm grateful for my committee. and if we can continue to work together and set the bar high, this will change the trajectory of our state in the workforce and our future endeavors in every single aspect, whether it's tech, two-year, four-year, and lifelong learners. The data that the governor told us today about young people not reading just floored me. But we've got to make it interesting, fun, challenging, and that's what the adults need to do. And we need to ask them what will make them read again. Thank you all very much for coming. Workforce and higher ed is hereby adjourned.