“Are students failing to progress because they are not learning?”
Former Lee County educator · submitted anonymously through the form on this page, August 2026
HMH, McGraw Hill, Pearson, and the other major education publishers are enormous companies with huge contracts, and schools rely heavily on their programs, assessments, and data systems. When that much money, data, testing, and student placement are tied together, I think it is fair to ask whether these programs are being used the way they were actually designed to be used. This particular concern involves Read 180 and how HMH assessment data may be interpreted for student growth and placement, and I think it is worth a closer look.
Read 180 is an intensive reading intervention program designed for students who are reading below grade level. It combines teacher-led instruction, independent reading, and computer-based work. HMH, the company that publishes Read 180, also provides assessments that are used to monitor student reading progress throughout the year.
One of those assessments is the HMH Reading Growth Measure. Students typically take it at the beginning, middle, and end of the year. The assessment produces more than one score, and this is where the issue becomes important.
The first is the Scaled Score. This is the score designed to track a student’s growth over time. It allows educators to compare performance from one testing window to another and see whether the student is progressing.
The second is the Lexile score. A Lexile estimates the level of text complexity a student is likely able to read and understand. It is useful for matching students to appropriate reading material, but it is not the same thing as a longitudinal growth score.
That distinction matters because Lexile scores can fluctuate. A student may score somewhat higher or lower depending on the passages presented, vocabulary, stamina, attention, testing conditions, or normal variation in performance. A change in Lexile does not automatically mean the student suddenly gained or lost that amount of reading ability.
The concern I raised in my memo was about what happens when the Lexile score is given more weight than the Scaled Score.
If a student’s Scaled Score shows continued or gradual growth, but the Lexile happens to drop during one testing period, resetting that student’s progress (teachers are forced) or preventing advancement based primarily on the Lexile can distort what the assessment is actually showing.
In practical terms, imagine a student who has been making steady progress throughout the year. The Growth Measure indicates improvement, classroom performance is improving, and the student is successfully completing increasingly difficult work. Then the student takes another assessment and the Lexile drops. If that single Lexile decrease causes the student to be moved backward, restarted, or kept in the same instructional band, (teachers are forced) the system may effectively erase evidence of growth that other measures are showing.
For students already enrolled in intensive reading intervention, that can become a serious problem. These are students who may already have spent years receiving additional reading instruction. If temporary score fluctuations repeatedly send them backward, they can end up cycling through similar instruction instead of progressing into more challenging material.
That creates another issue: the data may eventually make it appear that the student simply “isn’t growing,” when part of the stagnation may actually be created by the rules being used to interpret the assessments.
And that is the central point of my analysis.
The concern is not necessarily that Read 180 itself is ineffective. The concern is whether the School District of Lee County is using HMH assessment data appropriately.
The questions I would want answered are: What exact criteria determine whether a Read 180 student advances, remains at the same level, or is reset? How much weight is given to the HMH Scaled Score compared with the Lexile? Can a Lexile decline alone trigger a reset or placement change? Is that procedure required by HMH, required by the district, or created locally by individual schools? Are teachers allowed to use classroom performance, FAST data, and professional judgment alongside HMH scores? And most importantly, are students repeating instructional material because of assessment rules rather than because they have actually failed to demonstrate growth?
If the district is using a secondary indicator such as Lexile as though it were the primary measure of longitudinal growth, then that deserves serious scrutiny.
Are students failing to progress because they are not learning, or are some students being prevented from progressing because of the way the district has chosen to interpret the data?
That was really the purpose of the memo. It wasn’t an attack on HMH. It was a request for the district to explain whether its implementation of the program actually matches the way the assessment was designed to be used.
This is a personal account. The views are the storyteller’s own.