Ohio’s school report cards were recently released and while math proficiency scores statewide improved about 2% over the previous school year, the current proficiency rate still stands at 55.3%.
Reading scores saw little to no improvement over the last year. But Dayton Daily News education reporter Eileen McClory says education leaders believe a recently implemented program called the "Science of Reading" will lead to higher proficiency scores in Ohio.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Eileen McClory: This is the first full school year that teachers will be fully trained in the Science of Reading. So when I was talking to the Ohio Department of Education workforce officials asking, 'Why do you think the reading scores have leveled off?' they said that they believe that reading scores will continue to rise in the next school year.
The state started implementing the Science of Reading curriculum, which essentially is a science-backed way of teaching reading that works with young children's brains. They started to implement that in I think it was 2021-22 school year; the first year that that was started to be talked about. Some local schools have already implemented it and they are seeing a lot of results. Northridge is a big school district that comes to mind that has seen a lot of results with implementing the Science of Reading from what they were doing before.
Jerry Kenney: Is there an example of an approach that would kind of tell us how the Science of Reading works?
McClory: Essentially, there is a long history of how students were taught to read. There was something called 'cueing' that was very popular in like the 1990s, early 2000s. The teachers would teach kids to use pictures and words that they already knew to go through and quote-unquote read what the words said. The Science of Reading is different in that it teaches kids more about how the sounds relate to the letters, and that seems to help kids be able to sound out words more efficiently, and it also seems to make them understand how the sounds and the words link together into sentences that make sense. Again, I am really simplifying this.
Kenney: What other highlights from your look at the state report cards do you think our listeners would be interested to know?
McClory: Yeah, so the biggest thing that came out of the state report cards was that chronic absenteeism, which is the number of kids who are missing at least 10% of the school year, went down very slightly. So once the pandemic happened, the chronic absenteeism rate in the state really jumped. Pre-pandemic, the chronic absenteeism rates, so this is for the 2018-2019 school year, that was 16.7% in the state. The school year after the pandemic, so 2020-21, the chronic absenteeism rate jumped to 24% and the year after that, it actually got even worse, and it went up to 30%.
So last school year, so 2024-25, we hit 25% of kids are chronically absent. So that means one in four kids are missing at least 10% of school hours for any reason, but that is really significant because it means those kids are not in school learning. And I think we can all remember some kind of day where we maybe weren't in class, and we missed something significant. So to have one in four kids missing that much school is going to be really difficult to move the academic needle to where it needs to be.
Kenney: We're speaking with Eileen McClory with the Dayton Daily News, and you are an education reporter in your long list of reporting on the Dayton Daily News website. I also see that you may have gotten behind the wheel of a bus recently. Did you drive a school bus?
McClory: Yeah, Kettering schools offered me the opportunity to drive a school bus. It was really fun. I had a great time. There is a real problem of there just are not enough bus drivers in the state and Kettering let me get behind the bus. I was only in a parking lot to be clear, and I didn't have kids, because... I couldn't have kids for legal reasons, but it was really fun to see how a school bus worked and pretty much every school district in the area is hiring bus drivers. So if it is something you're interested in, you can definitely reach out to your local school district. And if you want to watch a video of me driving a school bus, you could go to DaytonDailyNews.com.
Kenney: Eileen McClory with the Dayton Daily News. Thank you so much for all the reporting you're doing in the way of education. We're certainly being educated through those articles, and our listeners can check those out on the Dayton Daily news website. Eileen, thanks so much for the conversation.
McClory: Thank you for having me.
