Nancy Flanagan takes issue with the reformer idea of failing kids who can’t read by the end of third grade. Holding them back will not help them, she writes, and will almost certainly hurt them. Children learn to read at different ages. Some start reading before kindergarten. Others read later. Years later, it doesn’t matter.
She writes:
Michigan’s third grade mandatory retention legislation is a dramatic but useless remedy to the problem of children who struggle to read when they’re eight or nine years old. We’re not doing kids favors by flunking them. Says educational psychologist David Berliner, regents professor of education at Arizona State University:
“It seems like legislators are absolutely ignorant of the research, and the research is amazingly consistent that holding kids back is detrimental.”
What about the oft-repeated platitude that until third grade, students learn to read—and read to learn afterwards? Perhaps that was true in classrooms 50 years ago, when instruction was solely dependent on textbook knowledge.
Students today learn from an array of media: podcasts, images, hands-on experience, dialogue. The one thing that demands independent reading facility? The standardized tests that pigeon-hole children.
What to do about children who are not confident readers in third grade? We could begin by taking the resources it will cost to retain them for a year (minimally, $10K per child) and spending it on supplemental instruction: in-school tutoring, libraries filled with easy, engaging books, after-school programs, summer reading clubs and books for children to take home.
We could offer smaller instructional groupings. We could stop the merry-go-round of silver-bullet ‘solutions,’ from emergency managers to charter schools to one-size-fits-all scripted curricula.
We could genuinely invest in our children, believing in their capacity to master not only the skill of reading, but to become an informed, productive citizen.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
FAILING KIDS DOESN’T WORK. DUH….lots of research on this topic. Politicians and the .01%ers are (fill in the blanks).
Do you really want ME to fill in the blank, Yvonne? 🙂
For me RETENTION is like SLAVERY. The RICH WANT SLAVES. Why? Many can’t even change a lightbulb or fill their own cars with fuel. Bet someone even cuts their food for them and chews it.
I rarely comment on this blog, but I can’t help myself on this particular entry. It sounds very much to me that Ms. Flanagan is implying that the need to teach reading is over-emphasized today:
“Students today learn from an array of media: podcasts, images, hands-on experience, dialogue. The one thing that demands independent reading facility? The standardized tests that pigeon-hole children.”
If there’s one thing I want to know about a third-grader, it’s if she can read. I’m not saying fail her if she can’t, but to say that reading is only necessary for reading tests is as gross a misstatement on education as I’ve ever read.
Not implying that the need to teach reading is over-emphasized. Not at all. Of course we want every child to develop genuine literacy. Every single child.
I was only pointing out that children take in information through a wide variety of media these days. Many of them (especially 5 and 6 year olds, who may not be developmentally ready for decoding) feel no particular urgency about learning to read. The third grade ‘threshold’ for failure is an arbitrary one. A child who learns to love reading and comprehend what she’s reading at age 8 or 9 is better off than the child who’s put through endless rounds of Dibels–or diagnostic tests.
If there’s one thing I want to know about a third grader, it’s that she loves to go school and is learning important things there.
Like your “one thing I want to know. . .”
As a special education teacher, I had many students who were not proficient readers, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t learn. Holding them back and making them repeat a year because their reading scores were not high enough would have been counterproductive. They were perfectly capable of absorbing the same material as their peers. They just needed other avenues to access it beyond reading as, frankly, most children do. There is no magic age when every child should be able to read at a prescribed level. There is no magic age where every child does any task to some arbitrarily prescribed standard. It’s like declaring every child who does not reach a certain height by a predetermined age as growth impaired. It is equally absurd.
A truth the reductionist world of testing cannot accept: there is no magic number, there is no magic age, there is no magic statistical truth.
Our students are indeed political pawns that are under the influence of over reaching corporate power. Retention does not help most students, and it does nothing to change a student’s poverty. Proficiency is a convenient term that can be manipulated the to mean what ‘powers than be’ want. It is a biased term.
Many districts that have used Title 1 funds wisely have managed to see positive results when they have spent the money on more fiction, non-fiction and supplemental instruction. Today too much money is being funneled into commercial quick fixes through a variety of software applications. Where is the evidence to support the value of spending so much on these programs?
I was one of those slow kids. I could not read when I started kindergarten. I could not read at the end of the 1st grade so they held me over. The second time around, my mother was told by an administrator that I’d grow up illiterate and there was nothing that could be done for me in school. She was told I was retarded.
My mother, distraught and driven to tears of frustration and depression, went to my second, 1st-grade teacher and asked what she could do. My parents were both high school dropouts and they lived in poverty until my dad managed to get into a union (I was four or five when that happened) where he started to earn a livable wage.
That second, 1st-grade teacher told my mother what she had to do at home and my mother followed her advice. By the time I was ten, I was an avid reader. Throughout high school, I read about two paperbacks a day and still had time to work nights and weekends washing dishes in a resteraunt., I didn’t have much time for school work because I was too busy reading paperbacks and I worked in the high school library one period a day. The only “A’s” I earned in high school was for working in the library. I was the library’s book nerd. By that time, I loved books. Those books saved my life.
That second, 1st-grade teacher refused to tell my mother it was a waste of time to attempt teaching me to read. It was a “useless” administrator that told my mother that.
Learning to read is the issue. If a student can’t read, his or her opportunity to learn is seriously constrained and the gap between readers/efficient readers and non-readers/poor reads widens as all rise from grade to grade – and cancels out the supposed benefits of not being held back. At each level, the teacher or principal will be blamed for the non-readers/poor readers that were socially/politically promoted.
Reading deficiencies require diagnosis. That’s where investment needs to be made: in many cases, teaching decoding skills and/or broaden vocabulary through a rich mix learning opportunities in science, history, geography, literature, music, art, etc. In some cases, esp. where children lack self-control, smaller class sizes are necessary: again, investment.
Krashen’s research has documented the power of recreational reading. Schools that want students to be readers should have a library and librarian. Of course, this also requires an investment.
But some kids aren’t going to be “on grade level” by 3rd grade that will be just fine as they age. Kids age at different rates and it sometimes takes a while for them to develop full literacy.
My younger brother STRUGGLED to read. Fortunately, they didn’t retain him, because it could have easily discouraged him from working to read at all.
My mom realized when my brother was 12 that he was mildly dyslexic. Once he got some help (and not a lot of help–this was the ’80s), he took off in reading. He reads constantly, now has a degree in engineering, and has turned out just fine.
If you know of a child, who has a speech/language/hearing disorder (including dyslexia, or other such problem), please contact the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction. The Rite operates a system of 100 clinics, nationwide. see
https://scottishrite.org/brothers-in-the-community/ritecare-srclp/
The clinics operate on a sliding scale, no child is refused treatment regardless of the family’s ability to pay.
I would like to see more non-government organizations partnering with publicly-operated school systems.
I was slow learning to read and by third grade was considered a poor reader, but by the end of sixth grade I was an avid reader and was testing well above my classmates on vocabulary and reading comprehension. My daughter had pretty much the same experience. I don’t think what a student can or can’t do in third grade is a very good indicator of what he or she is capable of doing. My parents made sure that I had access to interesting books and other reading material(weekly trips to the public library) and didn’t put too much pressure on me–I did the same for my daughter. It worked. The best thing a school can do to encourage reading is to provide a good library with a good librarian. The best thing a parent can do is to provide books and be readers themselves.
E. D. Hirsch says there’s two parts to learning to read: 1. learning to decode; and 2. acquiring the background knowledge necessary to comprehend what one decodes. Thus, teaching content (science, history, art, geography, literature, etc.) IS teaching reading. Therefore the best reading curriculum, post-decoding training, is steeping kids in a knowledge-rich environment that includes a lot of adult talk such as read alouds and show-and-tell. The reason professionals’ kids are usually good readers is that their parents TELL them a heck of a a lot about the world, building large stores of background knowledge. Doubt me? LISTEN to a lawyer talk to her five-year-old sometime. Teachers should act like these parents: they should tell kids stuff. That will make good readers. Unfortunately the current fashions in reading instruction are based on an incorrect model of reading development. They hold that reading is a function of “reading skills” (did you learn these in school? I sure didn’t) and lots of reading practice. Reading programs that rely on these approaches fail to make good readers because they ignore the central importance of building up a child’s foundation of knowledge.
This brings to mind my favorite Peter Senge quote: “Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner”…
Politicians, parents, and pundits view time as a constant and learning as a variable instead of the other way around because we group and asses children based on their age. Standardized testing reinforces this structure and when standardized testing is linked to “promote” students from one grade level to the next by politicians it creates a group of “failures” who in many cases just need time to mature. It would be preposterous to “fail” a child whose physical maturation rate was different from his age peers, but somehow it is “rational” to “fail” a child who can’t learn reading and math skills at the same rate as his or her age peers… especially if that learning is measured by a seemingly precise tool like a standardized test!
It is possible to tailor instruction to meet the unique needs of each child by matching instruction to their rate of learning… but our current structure reinforces the practice of grouping children by age and comparing children to each other, which holds us prisoner to the current factory paradigm.
This 3rd grade retention law is an ALEC law, pre-written by ALEC and distributed to their stooges to be cloned in all 50 states. Its intention is to disrupt and thereby destroy public education. Other ALEC laws govern charter school proliferation, “Stand your Ground” laws, etc. etc. The latest ALEC legislation is the work requirement for Medicaid recipients. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/discriminatory-medicaid-work-requirements-spread-to-3-states.html