New ES graduate Gabriel DellaVecchia advocates for equitable, evidence-based literacy policy in Politico article
For a Politico article titled “‘Parents are powerless’: Students face being held back after a year of remote learning,” journalist Carly Sitrin interviewed ES doctoral candidate (now ES graduate) Gabriel DellaVecchia about the impact of mandatory retention policies.
As Sitrin notes, third-grade reading laws were already the subject of fierce debate in education circles before the pandemic. The interruptions to learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have many experts anticipating that significantly more students will be identified as falling short of grade-level proficiency.
Several studies have concluded that mandatory retention causes stigma that damages students’ self-esteem and harms their chances of graduating high school or pursuing a college degree. Sitrin wrote, “In a pandemic that has caused outsized hardship for Black, brown and low-income families, that could mean wealthy, mostly white kids have the benefit of moving ahead with their self-perception intact while others without the means for tutoring, learning pods or parental assistance will be forced to do the year over. Being a year behind their peers could later translate to delayed or lost economic opportunity.”
Michigan’s third-grade reading law is set to take effect for the first time this year. DellaVecchia is co-founder of the Don't Leave Us Behind campaign, an advocacy group that opposes mandatory retention in Michigan. He said that these policies are often passed quickly and without much community engagement.
DellaVecchia was teaching in Colorado in 2013 when the legislature there passed the Colorado READ Act, which identified some 14 percent of the state’s students in kindergarten through third grade as having a “significant reading deficiency,” meaning they were trailing far behind their peers and in danger of never learning to read.
DellaVecchia found that it was policymakers, not parents, who wanted children to repeat a grade. “I had those conversations with families,” DellaVecchia said. “No family selected this option.”
DellaVecchia’s group and Dayna Polehanki, Member of the Michigan Senate, are working to rewrite the law. Polehanki has introduced a measure that would keep existing support structures like literacy coaches and student progress monitoring in place for students who fall behind, but would scrap the retention mandate.