Once upon a time small children read fairy tales full of magic, about princesses and royalty ruling their far away kingdoms; stories engaging not just their imaginations but the critical parts of their developing brains used to learn an all-important life skill – reading.
Now, the story emerging from the school district that rules Cochrane, Airdrie, Bragg Creek, Chestermere, Crossfield, Springbank and Langdon is one of a sad failure in teaching reading skills.
And the school administrators don’t want parents to hear the tale of woe.
If the numbers coming from a leading researcher are true, more than two thirds of elementary school students in RVS are not learning to read properly. And the school division has stubbornly refused to abandon a measurement program ostensibly designed as an early-warning tool to flag students who aren’t meeting the reading standards expected by the Province.
The bedtime ritual of reading with parents begins in preschool and carries over into elementary school where for decades it was considered the most important of the “Three Rs” students learned, as it obviously was a major factor in how students were able to learn other subjects en route to Grade 12.
In Cochrane elementary schools, which are administered by Rocky View Schools (RVS), students and parents may be fighting a two-headed dragon.
In addition to the normal challenges involved to make meaningful progress in reading, they are being forced to fight the system as well.
The irony is an institution that touts the importance of evidence-based learning is hitching its wagon to a reading assessment tool not supported by evidence.
The first step in addressing substandard reading skills is to identify who is having trouble.
Since RVS has a policy forbidding teachers from including information highlighting that their kids are not meeting reading standards in report cards, the parents may be the last to even know there is an issue. The same goes for math, which means RVS students are falling behind in two of the three “Rs” (‘Reading, Riting and Rithmatic.’)
A Cochrane woman who’s grand daughter is having trouble in school has surveyed teachers in three area elementary schools. They reported: “75 per cent of my students are reading below grade level.”
The tool in question to measure reading skills is called the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System. It has not only been a lightning rod for criticism among professional educators and researchers globally for being ineffective, it has been singled out for actually doing kids more harm than good.
The discredited program has been abandoned by experts around the world including medical doctors, neuroscientists, educational psychologists, linguists, and speech pathologists. It has been proven to be so ineffective it was decommissioned by the Calgary Board of Education, Calgary Catholic Schools, boards in Ontario, many U.S. states, and all of Australia and New Zealand.
Dr. Georg Georgiou, a professor of education at University of Alberta is also director of the J.P. Das Centre in Developmental and Learning Disabilities and the director of the Reading Research Laboratory.
He struggles with RVS’s continued use of the Fountas and Pinnell system.
He doesn’t understand why RVS is digging in their heels in the face of the evidence against the controversial approach.
“Actually in the U.S. right now there is a lawsuit against the company that publishes it, because they have been advertising it as an evidence-based assessment, and they have no evidence that it is effective,” he said.
He agrees with critics opposed to the system for its lack of efficacy, and because it causes harm.
Georgiou said when the Fountas and Pinnell program was released a few years ago, there were not many such assessment tools on the market, so it provided teachers an easy way see how their students were doing in literacy.
“And it allowed teachers to share with parents that their child was at level B or Level C, so it was easy to report,” he said.
At the time there was not much research into how effective the system might be. Once that research started pouring in, it quickly became clear something was wrong.
“They soon realized this program does not accurately identify struggling readers," said Georgiou. "And in fact, in 2016, a study found that if you had 100 kids who needed reading intervention, the F and P system accurately identified about one third of them.”
“So it misses two out of three kids needing intervention," he added. "Imagine your doctor saying ‘I misdiagnosed two out of three individuals.' This is astonishing.”
If that number holds true in RVS, that would mean things are actually much worse than the troubling statistics reported above.
Georgiou said another independent study in 2024 replicated the results of the 2016 study – only 32 out of 100 kids were correctly identified.
He said that was when Alberta Education eliminated the Fountas and Pinnell assessment tool as an authorized methodology, but that hasn’t stopped RVS from relying on it.
“It’s really mind boggling for reading experts – why would anybody invest money on an instrument that misdiagnoses two out of three kids?”
Literacy is about more than just reading
“We see firsthand how literacy impacts a child's confidence and ability to engage with their schoolwork. When children have strong reading and writing skills, they're better equipped to tackle any challenge that comes their way,” said Carmen Erison at the Cochrane Public Library.
“Literacy is not just about teaching kids to read. It’s about recognizing words, and truly understanding what they are reading. That's essential for following instructions in class, grasping complex concepts, and succeeding on tests.”
Ashley Tisdale, a Cochrane post-secondary instructor and mother of a struggling Grade 3 student at Elizabeth Barrett Elementary school, has spent the last three years trying to get answers to why her daughter can’t get the math help she desperately needs. She decided to go public with her concerns about lack of supports after she learned from her teacher that her daughter was “silently crying” in class whenever faced with math problems.
She uncovered the F and P story as another example of a system-wide dragon she says is dramatically undermining kids’ chances of learning.
“When 80 per cent of the students at RVS aren’t meeting the grade standard, that’s a problem," she said. "RVS doesn’t fail kids, so you end up in Grade 10 and the teachers say, ‘Why do you keep pushing these kids through? They can’t read.’”
On the subject of accountability and transparency, RVS gets an “F.”
As jarring as the statistics are, Tisdale said she was appalled at RVS’s lack of responsiveness when she embarked on her fact-finding mission three years ago. She said she was stonewalled at every turn and when she did receive responses, they came in the form of talking points in emails that didn’t answer her questions.
The Eagle has been requesting interviews with either Superintendent Greg Luterbach or board chair Fiona Gilbert for weeks, to no avail. The request for Gilbert was not responded to at all, and outgoing Superintendent Luterbach, (who announced his resignation recently, effective in August) also was not made available to answer why he introduced the discredited Fountas and Pinnell measurement system in the first place, and why it has not been abandoned.
So there may be precious few “happily ever afters” concluding the stories for a majority of elementary-age RVS students, at least in terms of how well they’re learning to read.
And the class valedictorians and other whiz kids on display at high school graduations may represent a tiny proportion of the majority of students who start off in the early grades struggling to keep up.
