Evansville, IN – According to the state officials, this data is the focus of a new data visualization tool, which was previewed to the State Board of Education and will soon be available to the public.
State officials also said that releasing this new data visualization tool will be essential to understanding where students are today and will provide useful information to support educators, parents and families and community leaders in ensuring all Indiana students can read.
As this tool continues to be developed and improved, over time it will also help to: quantify the number of students in each grade level who are unable to read, track the long-term impacts of illiteracy, evaluate the impact of the state’s current literacy efforts and inform ongoing policy decisions.
Key takeaways from the data presented to SBOE include:
- Indiana’s literacy rates have been dropping for a decade, well before the COVID-19 pandemic.
- While third grade enrollment has declined since 2012, the number of students who do not pass has more than doubled.
- As reading scores have decreased, retention rates have also decreased, causing thousands of students to enter fourth grade unable to read.
- Data show that over 96 percent of students who did not pass IREAD-3 were advanced to fourth grade.
- Of the approximately 14,000 students who did not pass IREAD-3 in 2023, over 5,500 received a Good Cause Exemption
