We Are Writing You to Request a Few Moments of Your Time

Federal

Address

Dear

We are writing you to request a few moments of your time. As Winston-Salem/Forsyth County K-2 Educators with over fifty years of experience collectively in the public education system we would like to express several concerns regarding the use of DIBELS in our public schools. Having researched DIBELS we are aware that the creators of DIBELS, Goodman and Kaminski, intended DIBELS to be used as an indicator of the acquisition of early literacy skills. We believe as educators that when DIBELS is used for its intended purpose, it can be an effective tool that provides additional information in order to differentiate reading instruction.

DIBELS is one of the most common tools used to assess student early progress in learning to read. Reading, Goodman explains, is an ultimately qualitative act: making meaning from text. But DIBELS reduces reading to discrete skills that have at best minimal connection to actual reading. It then further shrinks these skills to a limited set of purely quantitative measures. As a result, focus on improving performance on DIBELS is likely to contribute little or nothing to reading development and could actually interfere with it. We have concern about the misuse of the term fluency that is attached to each of the tests. None of the DIBELS instruments are tests of fluency, only speed. Teachers are required to group learners and build instruction around the DIBLES scores. Consequently, academic and life decisions for children, starting in kindergarten, are being made according to DIBELS scores. The consequences of its use include drilling to nonsense words; focusing on narrow slices of what reading is; reducing if not eliminating the reading, writing and discussion of real stories; confusing students; and demeaning if not de-schilling teachers.

We also feel that the tasks that students have to complete in a time period in DIBELS is not developmentally appropriate. The administration of DIBELS testing is not reliable and consent across schools and systems. Some schools send in teams to DIBEL students’ and some schools have classroom teachers DIBEL their own students’. This does not show consent and reliable results between states due to the fact that DIBELS in not administered in the same way. We feel that a uniform procedure should be set in place for the administration of DIBELS so that all students will be assessed in the same way. This would only benefit the children and provide evidence for teachers to support instructional decisions.

A final concern is the use of DIBELS scores as a teacher evaluation instrument. The effectiveness of a teacher should never be based exclusively on a single test, especially one that is neither valid nor reliable for these purposes. Recent proposals indicate DIBELS scores will be used in the near future to determine merit pay. This would be an injustice to teachers, was never the intention of DIBELS, nor is it recommended by the creators.

In conclusion, we believe that DIBELS should be used as an indicator, a piece of information which we can use to help us plan a complete literacy program for our students. We believe that DIBELS should not be used as a measure by which teachers are evaluated. Finally, we believe that, in order for scores to be valid, the method by which children are tested should be the same across our school system.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to our concerns. We hope that you will give them your consideration so that the students of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools are given every opportunity to develop the skills necessary to become successful readers.

Sincerely,

Cathy Ryan, Angie Somers, Ruth Ann Timmons, Marlee Wright