EdNC. Essential education news. Important stories. Your voice.

Search ednc.org

Perspective | NC’s Teacher of the Year recommends moving from retention to instructional support for students who struggle with reading

Share this story

Our republishing policy

EdNC is a nonprofit, online, daily, independent newspaper. All of EdNC’s content is open source and free to republish. Please use the following guidelines when republishing our content.
  • Our content must be republished in full. If your organization uses a paywall, the content must be provided in full for free.
  • Credit our team by including both the author name and EdNC.org in the byline. Example: Alex Granados, EdNC.org.
  • If republishing the story online, please provide a link to EdNC.org or a link to the original article in either the byline or credit line.
  • The original headline of the article must be used. Allowable edits to the content of the piece include changes to meet your publication’s style guide and references to dates (i.e. this week changed to last week). Other edits must be approved by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
  • Photos and other multimedia elements (audio, video, etc.) may not be republished without prior permission. Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you are interested in sharing a multimedia element.
  • If you republish a story, please let us know by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you have any questions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Canonical tag

Please include the following canonical tag in the <head> of the republished story.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ednc.org/perspective-ncs-teacher-of-the-year-recommends-moving-from-retention-to-instructional-support-for-students-who-struggle-with-reading/">

HTML content

This includes the title, byline, content, and tracking pixel required for republishing this story.

Copy & paste HTML
This story is tagged:
Courtesy of Mariah Morris

Recently, the issue of our Read to Achieve law with specific concern to how districts are retaining students who do not meet the Read to Achieve pathway after the third grade has been brought up to the N.C. State Board of Education.

As the 2019 Burroughs Wellcome Fund North Carolina Teacher of the Year, I serve on the state board in an advisory role.

I was asked to share what Moore County Schools does with regards to retention as well as analyze the law to make recommendations for how to better fit third grade students who do not meet proficiency.

Retention misses the mark when it comes to how to help students improve their reading. Every educator that you bring to the table can tell you retention is just one part of the puzzle when it comes to students who are not reading proficiently. Instead of focusing on retention and putting students back in third grade and doing more of the same, I think every educator across North Carolina can really speak to the importance of providing deep, meaningful instructional support for our students who struggle.

We need to shift our focus and our conversation away from retention as a remediation tool and toward a three-pronged approach of providing substantial, statewide instructional support.

Professional development, personnel support, and curriculum support are the core functions of what we are called to do as educators to help meet the needs of all our students.