Paul Thomas reminds us that “fixing” literacy by punishing nine-year-olds is not a particularly effective policy.
Reporting on the number of South Carolina third-grade students being retained based on state reading tests increasing from 424 to 1281, Ian Grenier offers without a link a standard argument:
Research suggests that students who can’t read by the end of third grade will struggle as it becomes vital for understanding other subjects, making early intervention essential. Teachers in higher grades usually aren’t equipped to teach the basic literacy skills students are meant to pick up in early elementary school, leaving kids who didn’t learn them floundering.
The hyper-focus on third-grade reading proficiency is not just pervasive, but it mostly goes unchallenged.
“Third grade reading proficiency matters—enormously,” declares Mike Schmoker in How to Make Reading Instruction Much, Much More Efficient for Education Week.
Recently I saw this piece from 2019 pop up on my social media feed, and I immediately noticed the subheading: “Scaling back small-group instruction would have dramatic improvements in literacy.”
Since Schmoker’s article fell solidly in the current “science of reading” crisis rhetoric and misguided reading policy being passed across the U.S., it certainly was poised to create even more harmful classroom level decisions for students and teachers—notably an increase in grade retention as well as fatalistic justifications for using punishment as reading policy, as reported by Grenier:
Requiring weak readers to repeat third grade has long spurred debate in the education world. Its proponents, including education leaders in South Carolina, say it’s an unfortunate necessity.
Two aspects of this argument are compelling and misguided—the standard but false appeal to “third grade reading proficiency” and the prioritizing of “efficiency” for making instructional decisions.
Of course there are well documented correlations between third grade reading achievement and later negative educational outcomes for students (low reading achievement correlated with dropping out and low overall academic achievement, for example), but the traditional response to those correlations has resulted in over-reactions that do far more harm than good.
Left out of this calculation is an important causal relationship between reading test scores and the lives of children outside of school:
Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income.
What if political leaders prioritized a different fact? Children living in poverty into third grade are likely to suffer long-term negative consequences; and thus, policy must address poverty and the home and community lives of children