Universal screening for reading difficulties has become one of the first boxes states check when they pass Science of Reading legislation, but as district leaders check their own “met the mandate” boxes, a new challenge has emerged.
Districts can satisfy universal screener requirements completely and still have no real answer for what happens to a student below benchmark the week after the results come in.
Laws in most U.S. states now require schools screen for reading difficulties, but screening alone can only do so much. The key is to look at your reading screening, instruction, and intervention together, says Dr. Jan Hasbrouck, a researcher, consultant, and author who works nationally and internationally to help schools design effective literacy programs.
“We’re not going to be able to provide optimal instruction to students if we don’t collect the right data,” she adds. ” If we’re collecting that data and not using it wisely, we’ve wasted time. We’ve wasted energy. We’ve wasted our precious resources.”
We asked Hasbrouck, along with chief academic officers, curriculum directors, and district-level coordinators in districts across the country, to help us break down the most common universal screening mistakes they’ve seen districts make and to share the fixes that have helped close the gap.
How universal screening for reading fits into the Science of Reading
As the Science of Reading movement has taken hold, universal screening for reading has come with it as an accountability element, providing a mechanism that tells a state or a district whether literacy instruction is actually reaching every student.
That pairing goes back to Reading First, the reading-focused arm of the No Child Left Behind Act. The 2000 National Reading Panel report became the evidence base, and federal funding was tied to schools using scientifically based instruction alongside screening, diagnostic, and progress-monitoring assessments. A state couldn’t claim to be following the research without a way to show which students it was actually reaching.
The 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act quickly followed suit, giving rise to the Response to Intervention framework, built to catch students who needed support before they were formally referred for special education. Checking every student became one of RTI’s defining features almost overnight.
Screeners produce a number lawmakers and school boards can point to, so it’s no surprise that as states that began overhauling reading instruction, most have bundled screening requirements directly into their Science of Reading bills. But while screening is one of the easiest pieces to legislate, it’s also one of the hardest to make meaningful.
What is a reading screener, anyway?
In the simplest terms, a reading screener is a snapshot of student’s reading skills that you can use to guide instruction.
Think of it like a thermometer, Hasbrouck says. “It’s a quick measure of: Do you have a fever, do you have a high fever, [or] do you not have a fever?”
Teachers can certainly tell a lot from simply listening to kids read, Hasbrouck says, but screening assessments are critical because they can quickly and easily test key skills like oral reading fluency (ORF) and phonemic awareness.
Typically, screeners are given one to three times a year to every student in a class, grade level, school, or entire district to determine their level of risk or proficiency with certain reading skills.
Choosing your screener
For the most accurate and useful screening data, look for assessments that are widely validated and research-backed such as DIBELS, FastBridge, or Acadience.
The universal screening mistakes districts are making
Districts often have the right screener in place. The question is whether it’s living up to its potential. The mistakes outlined below are common but fixable, usually with a smaller shift than it first appears.
Here’s what the experts we spoke to say to look out for plus their go-to fixes for getting the most out of your reading screener data.
Mistake 1: Building your literacy assessment plan around the screener alone
For many districts, universal screening becomes the centerpiece of the whole assessment plan, says Anna Geiger, author of Reach All Readers and host of the Triple R Teaching podcast, but a screener was never designed to carry that much weight on its own.
“Districts get the universal screener and think it’s going to tell them exactly what to do,” Geiger explains, “but it doesn’t tell us everything.”
A screener answers one question: which students needs a closer look. It can’t tell a district why a student is behind, whether an intervention is working, or how the year actually went for a school. Those are three separate jobs, and if a district’s plan and budget only account for the screener, nobody is covering them.
“The screener is to figure out who’s on track or who’s at risk,” Geiger explains. “And then the diagnostic assessment helps us pin down what to teach next.”
The confusion Geiger sees most often starts at the policy level, not the classroom: a district adopts a screener, satisfies the state requirement, and assumes the rest of the assessment picture will sort itself out. Diagnostic tools end up doing a screener’s job because nothing else was ever funded or built into the plan, and vice versa.
What to do instead
Reading screeners are one part of what should be an entire assessment suite that your district uses to support students who are learning to read. Geiger breaks it down like this:
- Outcome-based assessments — Tell us how we did at the end of the school year
- Screening assessments — Help us figure out who’s on track and who’s at risk
- Diagnostic assessments — Help us pin down what to teach next
- Progress monitoring assessments — Tell us if our instruction is working
If only the first line item shows up in a budget or a board presentation, the other three are happening informally, inconsistently, or not at all. Building all four into the plan from the start, and staffing for them, turns a compliant screening program into an assessment strategy that can actually support a full range of readers.
Mistake 2. Rolling out a screener without budgeting for the training behind it
“A data point is meaningless if you don’t know what to do with it,” says Cassandra Bell, director of curriculum and instruction for Richmond City Public Schools in Virginia. All too often, that’s the position districts put teachers in when training doesn’t keep pace with the mandate.
Stephanie Kennedy, director of English language arts for Fall River Public Schools in Massachusetts, saw this firsthand when her district adopted DIBELS as its universal screener early in its Science of Reading work but training didn’t scale beyond a handful of schools.
“Everyone was using DIBELS, but they were doing it out of compliance, not because they really understood what that offered us,” Kennedy recalls. “It wasn’t driving any decisions.”
Kennedy’s story is far from the exception. When Ignite Reading partnered with Ed Week to provide educators with a webinar about early literacy assessment data, 78 percent of educators in attendance said their staff wasn’t trained to analyze the data they were collecting.
Geiger recalls being one of those teachers herself. “I didn’t really know what kind of data I should be collecting,” she says. “Teachers might not have any idea what to do with an assessment because no one’s telling them, and then it’s completely a compliance activity.”
What to do instead
Training district staff determines whether screening data ever turns into action. Build it into the rollout plan, not around it.
- Train administrators before instructional staff. “Professional learning at all levels of the system means we can all be speaking the same language,” explains Lindsey Gonzalez, M.Ed, director of MTSS for Texas’s Round Rock Independent School District.
- Address both the how and the why. Ongoing coaching, not a single training day, is what gets staff past treating a universal screener as a box to check.
- Build training into the schedule. That’s what moved the needle for the Delsea Regional and Elk Township School Districts in New Jersey. “We stopped treating data as an event and made it a routine,” says Assistant Superintendent Anthony Fitzpatrick, Ed.D.” There is a 40-minute instructional period every single day for my acceleration coaches to collaborate on student data.”
- Bring teachers into the process. In Bell’s district, that means providing “data literacy to support our teachers in understanding how to utilize assessment data to inform their instruction.”
“If we want data to be a priority, and we want education to be responsive, then you have to carve out that time, and it needs to be collaborative.” — Anthony Fitzpatrick, assistant superintendent of the Delsea Regional and Elk Township School Districts
Claudia Salvestrin, Chief Academic Officer at the Shasta County Office of Education in California, sees the same pattern across the 25 districts her office supports. Beyond training, she points to timely delivery as the biggest gap. “What I have seen in practice at times is that we will screen students at multiple times of the year, and we might delay that intervention at the beginning of the year, already knowing which students need intervention based on our data at the end of the year,” she says. Staffing turnover compounds it: districts often don’t have the time to invest in the ongoing coaching that keeps an intervention delivered well.
Tanya Harris, director of elementary education for Alameda Unified School District in California, is working through the same shift as her district pilots a new screener. “We really are looking at that data,” she says. Her team is moving away from a habit that used to be standard practice: “There was this idea that we needed to wait for the first six to eight weeks of school before we started any interventions, and we’re moving away from that as well.”
When districts stop administering screening because they don’t see improved outcomes, the problem usually isn’t the screener, Geiger notes. “It wasn’t producing any outcomes because they weren’t doing anything with it.”
What to do instead
Universal screening data is only as valuable as the action it inspires. So, to get the most out of your data:
1. Conduct a data audit
“Most districts are actually collecting too much data,” Hasbrouck says. This includes overlapping data, data that isn’t actionable, and data that doesn’t really have a purpose.
Hasbrouck suggests kicking off an audit of your reading assessment data with an eye on simplifying.
For example, use “the ORF for screening, some quick diagnostic skills [assessments], and know how to progress monitor. Sleek and simple is going to get you where you need to go.”
2. Empower literacy teams to take ownership of data and collaborate
“If you’re seeing all of the data and the students as belonging to everyone, you can work together to meet their needs,” Geiger says. For example, if multiple teachers have kids struggling with the same skill, “we can pool our resources and help those kids together versus all trying to solve it on our own.” That saves time and creates a united front that benefits everyone.
3. Set a fast response protocol.
“Within 48 hours of any universal screener, we get together and we start making our lists,” Fitzpatrick says. His district holds itself to a 10-day rule: “If a child is struggling, intervention must begin within 10 instructional days, and typically we are within five, because MTSS only works when the urgency of a student need meets the structure that you build around it.”
Mistake 4. Not communicating screening data districtwide
Screening results often live with educators alone, which makes sense since they’re the ones doing most of the daily work, but it leaves families and other stakeholders out of a process where they could help.
Ericka Coleman Washington, coordinator of academic intervention services for the Savannah-Chatham County School System in Georgia, has watched what happens as screening requirements in her state have expanded under the Georgia Early Literacy and Dyslexia Act, HB307.
“It most definitely increased the workload around the screening, communicating with families, the amount of documentation that the teachers are having to do,” she says. Without a strong support structure behind that expanded workload, “the work becomes very exhausting for the schools, and when it becomes exhausting for the schools, the students aren’t necessarily getting what they need.”
What to do instead
Students fare better with increased family engagement, and sharing literacy goals, data, and research is a smart way to get the whole community involved in literacy change.
Bell’s district put a program in place called RPS 200 which gives students at select schools an extended school year to address literacy gaps. Getting the project off the ground meant sharing reading research and screening data, in this case from a Virginia-specific literacy screener, with teachers and families alike. “Walking our teachers through that data and talking to our parents, our community, and our other stakeholders about how we could really utilize that extra school time, we got more and more buy-in,” Bell says.
Washington’s district responded to the added workload by building a support structure that goes beyond handing down a mandate. “That support has to move beyond just looking at the expectations or the mandates,” she says. “We’re actually boots on the ground with the teams, actually leading them through this work.”
Mistake 5. Not screening students for reading often enough
Universal screening isn’t one-and-done. Screening for reading difficulties should be completed several times across the school year to assess students’ growth, and reading screeners should also be accompanied by regular progress monitoring. How often all of this takes place will depend on your district policies and the individual students.
“It’s a perfect analogy to the medical world,” Hasbrouck says. “If you’re a reasonably healthy person, your doctor collects data on you once a year… If you have an illness or you broke your leg or something, that progress monitoring is going to happen more frequently. If you’re in intensive care, progress monitoring happens 24/7. Those differences are based on the needs of the patient.”
What to do instead
It’s recommended that schools do screening assessments at least three times a year (and many states, including Minnesota, Iowa, Tennessee, Florida, and Michigan, have made this a mandate).
A middle of the year screener helps you avoid end-of-the-year surprises and gives you the information you’ll need to be sure students get timely interventions.
Overall, a winter screener is going to tell you three major things:
- Who’s maintaining growth
- Who’s falling behind
- Whether core instruction is working for the majority of students
This is important, not just as a way of checking in, but also for planning. If you’re going to see an influx of students needing support in the second half of the school year, you’ll want your intervention system ready to absorb them without overwhelming your staff or diluting the quality of support.
Katharine Sullivan, executive director of The Big Lift, a countywide literacy initiative in California’s San Mateo County, has watched what it takes to make three-times-a-year screening useful across very different districts. All eight of the county’s partnering districts use DIBELS, administered three times a year, and Sullivan’s team has built dashboards that let a district look at growth by school, by district, and collectively across the whole initiative. “We’re looking at growth over the year, but we’re also looking at year-to-year growth,” she says, “and really thinking about what is going to have the most impact for students.”
Mistake 6: Not using year-end screening data wisely
You got your year-end screening done. The data is in. Now what?
If you aren’t sure how to use that data efficiently, you aren’t alone. If datasets got superlative awards, year-end data would probably be voted most likely to end up locked away on a hard drive forevermore. Results get filed for the state report, staff scatter for the summer, and the data sits untouched until a brand-new screening window in the fall generates a fresh set of numbers to react to.
The costs of this pile up quickly: Districts that don’t act on spring data before summer often end up rebuilding the same intervention groups from scratch in September, weeks behind where they could have started if last year’s numbers had already shaped staffing and scheduling. The students flagged in April are frequently the same students flagged again in September, having lost months in between.
What to do instead
Treat year-end and mid-year data as planning material, not an archive. Ask what the numbers justify before the school year even ends: an extended year, a schedule change, additional intervention seats for the following fall.
When Bell’s district first introduced the idea of RPS 200 and made decisions about how to use the extra school time, they did so by analyzing year-end data. “We used the data from the previous school year to show a case for extending the year,” Bell explains. This included reflecting on student progress and discussing meaningful ways to shore up kids’ reading skills for the subsequent school year.
RPS 200, now in its third year, has become an ongoing part of the district’s larger literacy strategy, along with other proven interventions like high-dosage early literacy intervention from Ignite Reading. As a result, Bell says her district is happy to report “significant increases in their student performance, particularly in early literacy.”
Round Rock ISD takes a similar pro-active approach, Gonzalez says. During the summer, principals are provided with students’ year-end reading data so they can begin planning “before we even get those beginning of year screener results back.”
This means the district doesn’t waste the critical first weeks of school waiting for screening results. They’re already prepared to act.
Frequently asked questions about screening for reading
How often should schools administer universal screening? Most literacy experts and a growing number of state mandates recommend screening at least three times a year: fall, winter, and spring. Progress monitoring between those windows helps catch problems before the next full screening.
Is DIBELS a universal screener? Yes. DIBELS is one of several widely validated, research-backed tools districts use for universal screening, alongside options like FastBridge, Acadience, and Amira. The specific tool matters less than whether a district has a clear plan for what happens with the results.
What’s the difference between a universal screener and a diagnostic assessment? A universal screener flags which students are on track or at risk. A diagnostic assessment digs into why, pinpointing the specific skill gap so a teacher knows what to teach next. Districts need both, not one in place of the other.
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