It's Thursday, August 10th, 2023, and this is the Daily Article Podcast.

I'm Chris Elkins with the Denison Forum, narrating today's article written by Dr. Ryan Denison.

In the wake of school shutdowns, remote learning, and a host of other complications caused by COVID-19,

student test scores have continued

to lag behind their pre-pandemic levels. To complicate matters further, many states are

continuing to experience delays in reporting the test results necessary to gauge whether progress

is being made. In Texas, for example, most students won't know if they pass the previous

year standardized tests until they've already started the fall semester. Still, a delay in results

does not mean that districts have set aside evaluating their schools, and one high-profile

example has been making headlines in recent days for all the wrong reasons.

When LeBron James helped start the IPS, the I Promise School, in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, back in 2018,

the stated goal was to help those students who are already falling behind and in danger of falling through the cracks.

To that end, it opened with 243rd and fourth graders and has since added additional grades up to 8th.

Every year, the school holds a lottery to add 115 more students who are set to enter third grade

and fall into the bottom 30% of reading scores.

The goal, as explained by Tamico Hatcher, Akron's director of specialty programs, is to help

students improve at the rate of a grade and a third every year so that students who are two

years behind upon entering will be caught up by the time they

reach high school. Initially, the school showed great promise in achieving that goal. According to the

Northwest Evaluation, its first group of students were in the 99th percentile for the rate of

increase in their test scores. While a good bit of work remained, it appeared that the

school's approach of supporting kids in school and their families outside of school was going to

...