Third grade proficiency: Students need to find reading success
Published October 13, 2015
Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, October 12, 2015.
It’s baffling and disappointing that a significant portion of area third-graders are having so much trouble demonstrating proficiency in reading. This is a problem that, if not corrected, will curtail future success for the students. We’ve got to figure out what’s going wrong and fix it.
Nearly 900 Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools third-graders were retained at the end of the 2014-15 school year after failing to read on grade level, the Journal’s Arika Herron reported last week. These students — more than 20 percent of the school system’s third-graders — were retained as a result of North Carolina’s Read to Achieve law, which seeks to end social promotion and ensure that children learn to read by third grade, the Journal reported.
The program succeeded in catching those who were having difficulty learning to read before they were moved on beyond their ability to catch up. Some 536 students who didn’t demonstrate the proper proficiency attended a summer reading camp before taking another assessment, but only two of those passed the assessments and were promoted to fourth grade. That’s startling.
Of those remaining, some will repeat the third grade entirely — those who struggled in all third-grade subject matters, not just reading. But the majority has been placed in “transition classes” and will have another opportunity to move up.
What’s going wrong here?
First of all, let’s acknowledge that the majority of third-grade students — more than 75 percent — did well in the assessments and moved up to the fourth grade. They and their teachers should be congratulated on a job well done.
But that’s no excuse to let the rest languish. Reading is such a fundamental, necessary skill — it really does represent the keys to the kingdom of success.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, from parents who haven’t taken the necessary time to impart a love of reading to their children to the state legislature, which reduced funds for the teachers’ assistants who used to be heavily involved in teaching children to read.
Janie Costello, the school system’s program manager for language arts in elementary grades, told the Journal that she thinks some of the failure was because students in the 2014-15 year had fewer opportunities to demonstrate proficiency than those in the previous year, when school districts were given latitude to create their own alternate reading assessment.
But even with reduced resources, the schools need to figure out how to meet this challenge. The school system is pushing for a 90-percent graduation rate by 2018. It won’t happen unless it creates successful readers.
The legislature has opened up summer reading camps to first- and second-grade students and that should help. But it also needs to provide more resources and allow more local control.
Above all, parents, teachers and mentors need to double-down on reaching these children sooner. We can’t fail these students.
October 13, 2015 at 11:15 am
Richard L Bunce says:
Reduced resources is nonsense... the government education industrial complex and their laser like focus on increasing government revenues flowing to them and the failed traditional government schools they control is real and ongoing for decades. Parents, employers, post secondary education officials all know it. Traditional government schools emphasis on social engineering over education easily explains the dismal school assessment scores... not the students... the schools.
Relatively wealthy parents with the resources to send their children to alternative schools are not putting up with and having these issues. Time to greatly expand the NC Education Voucher to provide resources to relatively poor parents to send their children to alternative schools.
October 13, 2015 at 11:18 am
Richard L Bunce says:
Add in Federal and Local government spending on K-12 education in NC and the traditional government school assessment results are not only abysmal but bordering on criminal.
October 13, 2015 at 11:19 am
Richard L Bunce says:
Sorry Tom, posted on wrong article.
