MORGANTOWN – A House bill to require third-graders who fail a statewide test measuring math and reading skills to be held back for a year hit a wall in the Education Committee on Monday, as members on both sides of the issue floundered over questions of why kids aren’t succeeding and what good the bill would do.
In another committee room, delegates divided over a bill to modernize state distracted driving law.
HB 4510 is the third-grade retention bill. The original is only one sentence long. The committee took up an expanded version specifying that third graders who fall short on math and reading skills in the statewide summative assessment test could not advance to fourth grade.
It includes directives for the state board reporting requirements and for informing parents and guardians and providing the tools to help their kids.
An amendment was offered to soften the bill, replacing the phrase “shall be retained” with the phrase “may be identified.” And that’s where the questions piled up. The two main questions were what good does holding kids back do, and what exactly happens if struggling kids are merely identified?
One argument raised against the amendment was that teachers already have the authority to hold kids back, so a bill to require them to identify failing kids accomplishes nothing and just voids the intent of the bill.
Drew McClanahan, with the state Department of Education, told the delegates that based on the bill’s requirements, for the 2020-21 school year, 72% of third-graders would have to be held back for failing the math skills portion of the test, and 60% for falling short in English/language arts.
In 2018-19 61% fell short in math, 54% in English/language arts.
Teachers are expected to intervene in those cases, he said. The department already has some interventions available, and Superintendent Clayton Burch is working to launch some more.
Delegate Buck Jennings, R-Preston and lead sponsor, asked McClanahan how they fix the problem without holding kids back. McClanahan answered that research shows the best solution is teachers providing high expectations, while holding kids back tends to be counterproductive, contributing to social delays that fail to close the learning gaps.
Delegate John Kelly, R-Wood, commented that, given those test numbers, there appears to be a bigger problem than just holding kids back.
Monica Dellamea, director of early and elementary learning for the DOE, said the statewide testing data is never available until August, so third-grade teachers wouldn’t have it in time to decide who to hold back at the end of the year.
She had no numbers for how many West Virginia third-graders are held back, but said nationally the figure is 5% to 9%.
Student success, she said, boils down to teachers doing a good job. The summative assessment is a one-day snapshot and doesn’t say if kid can read or can write an effective paragraph. Teachers work with formative information they collected daily, and success derives from how they grade, share information and use interventionists.
Delegates repeatedly asked what’s wrong and how to fix the problem. Given the choice between the bill and the amendment, Delegate Ed Evans, D-McDowell and a retired teacher, said, “I don’t like either way.”
As the questions kept circling back to how and why, committee chair Joe Ellington, R-Mercer, paused the meeting for a recess and a GOP caucus. When they returned, he announced the bill was off the agenda and they’d come back to it another day.
Typically, that indicates the bill will be rewritten or left to die.
Distracted driving bill
House Technology and Infrastructure took up HB 4066, which updates law regarding driving with cell phones passed in 2000 to take into account all the current capabilities of smart phones and other handheld electronic devices.
It makes holding a device and operating it for any purpose – talking, typing, scrolling through a playlist and so on – a criminal offense. It distinguishes between holding a device whole legally parked from holding a device while sitting at a traffic light.
It subjects someone who causes physical harm or death because of distracted driving to up to a year in jail.
Some delegates objected because people also drive holding food or cans of soda or other objects in their hands, and this doesn’t address that.
Delegate Marty Gearheart, R-Mercer, mentioned going to jail for using a cell phone and said, “I cannot think of anything going further out of bounds than that.”
Delegate Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, supported the bill, referring to the 2020 case of Robin Ames, 37 and a husband and father of two, who was struck and killed by a woman who told police she didn’t see him because she was looking at her phone.
Hansen said, “I think this is a deadly serious bill.” The woman, he said, was sentenced to nothing more than community service and still hasn’t performed that service. He would like to see the law evolve further, to make this level of negligent homicide resulting from distracted driving equivalent to a DUI.
The bill passed in a voice vote and goes next to Judiciary.
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