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Ohio’s recent focus on early literacy is largely thanks to Governor DeWine’s budget recommendations, which contain a bold plan to boost reading achievement in Ohio. His proposal would require schools to use high-quality curricula and instructional materials aligned with the science of reading, and would invest millions in state funding to help schools purchase said curriculum and provide professional development and literacy coaches to support teachers.
The governor’s proposal, however, is just the first of many steps in the state budget cycle. Anything he proposes must also earn the approval of the House and Senate before it becomes law. The good news is that House lawmakers preserved many of the governor’s recommendations in their recently released version of the budget, including the adoption of high-quality reading curricula. The bad news is that they also would eliminate the retention requirement of the Third Grade Reading Guarantee.
Over the years, we at Fordham have repeatedly explained why moving away from retention-and-intervention would be a huge mistake. But we’d be remiss not to also point out that backing away from a rigorous policy intended to help kids and hold schools accountable for student progress is very on brand for Ohio lawmakers and leaders. In fact, Ohio has a long history of going all-in on big education policy changes and then backing off when it comes time to implement them.
Last year, during yet another attempt to eliminate third grade retention, I wrote an analysis of how two of Ohio’s most significant education reforms to date—graduation requirements and school improvement efforts in the form of Academic Distress Commissions—mirror the current roller coaster of third grade reading retention. Since lawmakers are back to their old tricks, it unfortunately seems necessary to revisit that analysis of Ohio’s very bad habit of sidestepping high expectations and accountability. Let’s take a look.
Graduation requirements
In 2009, in an effort to address how many students were leaving high school with a false impression of their own readiness for future success, Ohio lawmakers tasked the state board with drafting a new set of graduation requirements. In 2014, the General Assembly passed legislation that offered students in the class of 2018 and beyond three pathways to a diploma. The primary pathway required students to accumulate a certain number of points by passing newly created End of Course (EOC) exams, which replaced the far too easy Ohio Graduation Tests (OGTs). The other pathways required students to achieve a certain score on a college admissions exam or meet career-technical requirements. But by 2016, district superintendents were sounding the alarm about an impending graduation “apocalypse.” They warned that, because the new EOCs were more demanding than OGTs, as much as a third of the class of 2018 might fail to meet graduation standards.
Much like they’re currently doing with third grade reading retention, legislators opted to ignore the reasons they changed the law in the first place and swooped in to “save” the day. They did so by following recommendations from the state board and allowing students to graduate based on alternative pathways such as school attendance, course grades, a senior project, or volunteer hours. These pathways were of abysmal rigor, and several districts took advantage to inflate their graduation rates.
The good news is that, after plenty of additional debate, the state enshrined improved graduation requirements into law. But the roller coaster ride could have been avoided if legislators had stuck with the initial plan.
Academic Distress Commissions
Academic Distress Commissions, or ADCs, are a state-level initiative that required Ohio to intervene in chronically underperforming school districts. For the most part, debate over ADC policy followed an identical pattern to graduation requirements. First, state leaders—including former Governor Kasich—recognized that there were several districts failing to improve academic outcomes, and their persistent underperformance was negatively impacting students. Next, lawmakers significantly strengthened the law by lessening the power of local school boards and empowering CEOs with managerial and operational authority to devise and implement a district turnaround plan. And then, when raising expectations and implementing intervention efforts were met with a firestorm of pushback, lawmakers scrambled to back down.
In 2021, lawmakers used the state budget to create an easy off-ramp for the three districts that were under ADC oversight: Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland. The law removed the CEOs, returned power to local school boards, and charged each board with developing an academic improvement plan that contains annual and overall improvement benchmarks with minimal specific requirements. Unfortunately—but predictably—the approved plans don’t actually promise much improvement. Results from the most recent state report cards offer some bright spots—like Lorain’s four-star rating on the progress component—but mostly indicate that these districts still aren’t improving as quickly as they need to be. For all intents and purposes, they’re right back where they started, and kids are no better off.
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Recent efforts to repeal third grade reading retention mandates are ill-advised. They ignore a trove of research proving that retention, when coupled with rigorous intervention, can benefit students in the short and long term. They ignore the social and emotional impacts of social promotion. Worst of all, they solidify Ohio as the kind of place where leaders and lawmakers talk a big talk about improving education but repeatedly fail to walk the walk. This is likely why the Buckeye State has made so little progress over time on measures like the Nation’s Report Card. Ohio’s students deserve better than this.
A common concern in evaluating computer-based testing is the perceived differences between students writing by hand and those writing by typing. Historically, typing has been seen as more difficult for students to master—especially younger kids—thus rendering computer-based assessments intrinsically “harder” than pencil-and-paper versions, even when the test material is otherwise identical. But much of the research around the topic is almost a decade old, predating the explosion of online and computer access even our youngest kids (and their teachers) experienced since then, as well as newer research that supports the idea of typing being easier than handwriting. That is, one keystroke—using only one finger most of the time—renders a complete letter rather than a multiple and varied number of pen strokes needed to handwrite any given letter, any one of which can go awry–even for experienced little fingers.
Onto the pile of (almost) up-to-date information we can add brand new findings from Norway. State-run schools in the country were asked to adopt either a handwriting-first or digital-writing-first approach to instruction ahead of the 2018–19 school year. A group of researchers from Volda University College exploited the natural experiment created by comparing the development of writing composition skill among students in five first-grade classes. Half of the children learned to compose text by handwriting on paper and the other half learned by typing on a digital tablet using word-processing software, based on the policies adopted by their schools. All students were evaluated at five separate points during the year by completing the same scheduled narrative writing tasks. All narratives were evaluated in terms of a range of text features capturing both transcription accuracy (spelling, spacing, punctuation) and syntactic and compositional sophistication.
The best news is that all students tended to show strong and similar increases in the accuracy and complexity of their syntax, in the detail and sophistication of their narratives, and in the length of their texts over the school year, with negligible differences based on learning modality. More accurate spelling and word spacing were observed among students in the digital learning group, which the researchers attribute to the software’s inclusion of a text-to-speech function. This allowed students to hear what their typed words sounded like spoken back to them, highlighting misspellings and any words mistakenly strung together or improperly split. Interestingly, students in the digital modality showed lower accuracy with periods, questions marks, and exclamation points than the handwriting group. The researchers surmise that both groups were likely close to the same level of accuracy but that stray marks in the handwriting mode could have been counted as periods by graders, whereas no such moderator existed for kids typing their sentences.
All in all, the researchers suggest that the data represent an even outcome, with both learning modalities proving successful at increasing student growth and achievement in writing. They suggest a number of limitations of both the study design (in 900 hours of instruction over the year, for example, could digital-first teachers have reverted to handwriting for some kids during some lessons?) and the generalizability of their findings (English language instruction with its multiple irregular word structures, they say, would be a very different context to test). They also spend some time discussing the value of the text-to-speech functionality and whether it really represents a positive learning support or a sort of “cheat” for students who use it. On the other hand, might there be some analogous version of that feedback to be incorporated into handwriting-first instruction? Could that then make handwriting superior?
All of this takes on greater significance after years of pandemic-required remote learning and the ongoing utilization of online resources in its wake. At a minimum, it seems, the old mindset that handwriting is an inherently easier learning mode needs to be retired. But beyond that is the future, in which we can merge all the tools and modalities available to provide the very best learning opportunities for students.
SOURCE: Eivor Finset Spilling et al., “Writing by hand or digitally in first grade: Effects on rate of learning to compose text,” Computers and Education (April 2023).
Led by Governor DeWine, the science of reading movement is taking off in the Buckeye State. While the push is new in Ohio, the reading science isn’t. Rather, it is a return to tried and true methods of teaching children to read through a focus on the five pillars of effective literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. At the same time, state leaders are working to root out ineffective “whole language” and “balanced literacy” approaches that have permeated too many Ohio classrooms.
To add fuel to this movement, the governor included significant literacy reforms in his budget proposals. Among them are a statewide requirement that Ohio schools adopt high-quality literacy curricula aligned with the science of reading, and tens of millions of dollars in state funding to support the implementation of scientifically based instruction. The House’s initial version of its budget bill wisely kept intact the governor’s key literacy proposals, though it reduced some of the funding for the initiatives.
So far, so good. But as we touched on in a recent piece, lawmakers should do more to shore up the literacy plan by adding transparency and enforcement provisions. These would ensure that parents and the public are informed about schools’ curricula decisions and deter schools from refusing to shift to scientifically based reading instruction. Because a number of states have already passed science of reading legislation—Ohio is late to this party—lawmakers can look towards other jurisdictions as models. This piece takes a deeper dive into the sunshine and non-compliance provisions in Colorado and Arkansas.
Colorado’s curriculum transparency law
It’s hard to hold schools accountable for using high-quality curricula when no one knows what’s being used. Unfortunately, program selection remains a black box across most Ohio schools. While the budget bill would require schools to report their grades K–5 reading curricula to the Ohio Department of Education (ODE), there’s no requirement to make that information public. It could simply sit hidden in a state database.
To ensure full transparency, Ohio lawmakers should require the department to publicly report schools’ reading curricula, exactly as Colorado does. Under its reading laws, not only must the Colorado Department of Education collect information about reading curricula, but it also has to post it on their website. Furthermore, local districts and schools are required to provide a link on their own websites to the state’s curricula webpage.
Thanks to this sunshine provision, we learn that Colorado’s two most popular core literacy programs in grades K–3 are Houghton Mifflin’s Into Reading, which receives strong marks from EdReports, and Amplify’s Core Knowledge Language Arts, another highly-rated curriculum that substantially boosts student achievement. We also see that Denver’s schools currently use Core Knowledge, while Boulder Valley disappointingly uses the Fountas & Pinnell whole-language-based curriculum (though recent news reports indicate it’s transitioning under pressure from the Colorado Department of Education).
Arkansas’ enforcement provisions
Public transparency is an important first step in making sure that schools are actually following the reading science. But it’s possible that sunshine will only go so far. In cases when schools are refusing to use evidence-based curricula or playing reporting games, state authorities should step in. Here in Ohio, the state budget bill’s curricula requirements would implicitly give ODE authority to enforce the law. It’s certainly possible that the agency will stringently do this, just as in Colorado. But the Ohio legislature could put even more oomph behind the effort by setting a clear expectation for enforcement and delineating penalties for non-compliance.
On this count, Ohio legislators could take a page from Arkansas’ science of reading legislation, which has particularly strong language on enforcement. First, the state’s Right to Read Act expressly states that its department of education is “vested with the authority to and shall enforce” the state’s reading law. Moreover, state implementation rules describe specific actions—including withholding funding—that must be taken if a district violates the law. Here’s the key language:
If a public school district, including an open-enrollment public charter school, fails to remedy its violation [of state reading laws] within sixty days of notification of its failure to comply, the state board shall direct the Division to withhold a maximum of ten percent of the monthly distribution of state foundation funding aid to the public school district.
Once the state board determines that a public school has complied...the Division shall restore the monthly distribution of state foundation funding aid to the public school district.
This clear legislative directive to enforce the reading law, along with concrete repercussions for non-compliance, signal to schools that Arkansas is serious about strongly implementing the science of reading. They also give the department of education political cover when and if they have to take the difficult step of sanctioning in a local district or school. Finally—and perhaps most importantly—establishing clear penalties for non-compliance is likely to result in quick action in schools that are not following the science.
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Governor DeWine and state policymakers should be strongly commended for their support of scientifically based reading instruction. The budget bill offers an excellent start in removing ineffective instructional practices from Ohio schools and shifting to evidence-based approaches. With some critical finishing touches, lawmakers will make certain that all schools are truly following the science of reading.
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News from Ohio
The Fordham Institute this week released a new report examining Ohio student achievement data from the 2018-19 to 2021-22 school years, showing that pandemic learning loss remains a huge issue across the state and offering four recommendations that can help accelerate student learning toward recovery. You can read or download the report here. One of those recommendations involves use of high-dosage tutoring for students, of the type which Ohio Wesleyan University students have been providing this school year at a number of schools in Franklin and Delaware counties. This includes one charter school—Columbus Bilingual Academy North—which is additional good news.
Legislation we’re following
Indiana Senate Bill 391, which would, among other things, require traditional districts in four Hoosier counties to share a portion of specific local tax referenda with charter schools located within their borders, was approved in the Indiana House of Representatives this week. Next stop: The Senate. Meanwhile, Florida Senate Bill 190 was approved by the entire legislature this week. If Governor Ron DeSantis signs it, charter school students would be allowed to participate in sports far beyond the confines of the district in which they live, including teams fielded by private schools.
The research says…
While a longstanding funding gap between local charter schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) shrank by 13 percentage points following implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula in the city in 2013, a sizeable gap remains today. That is the topline finding of a new report by researcher Patrick Wolf. On the downside, the current funding model is one that has been held up as a best practice for money sharing across the country over the last two years. On the upside, Wolf believes that research in this vein will help highlight the weaknesses that remain and how to fill the gaps once and for all.
Budget cuts
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s proposed budget includes substantial funding cuts for online charter schools in the state, with the argument that such schools have fewer facilities and thus need less money. School choice advocates are ramping up their response to try and avert the proposed cuts and students, families, and online school leaders brought their stories to Lansing earlier this week.
Last call for registrations for a great virtual event coming up
Join School Choice Ohio, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and The Buckeye Institute virtually on Monday, May 1, from 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ET, as EdChoice’s Marty Lueken, Director of the Fiscal Research and Education Center, and Mike McShane, Director of National Research, discuss their recently published report “K-12 Without Borders: Public School Students, Families, and Teachers Shut in by Education Boundaries,” which examines what a K-12 education system with fewer school district borders would mean for students, teachers, and taxpayers. Register today!
The final word
It feels like the final word this week should be “petty.” How else to explain why Worcester Public Schools would suddenly ban all student field trips to historic Old Sturbridge Village in the wake of its partnership with a new charter school scheduled to open in the area this August? “We as an organization with a substantial budget…do have a responsibility to ensure that those resources are being used in means that are ethical, and to support activities and organizations that are ethical,” said School Committee Member Tracy O’Connell Novick by way of explanation. That’s a lot of words for not much explanation; but at least there’s a shorter way to say it.
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The National Commission on Excellence in Education’s release of a report titled “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 was a pivotal point in the history of American education. The report used dire language, lamenting that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Using Cold War language, the report also famously stated: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
The report ushered in four decades of ambitious education reforms at the state and federal levels. Those reforms included landmark policy shifts like George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program and major state reforms in areas including teacher quality, school choice, and test-based accountability for schools and teachers. But what is the legacy of “A Nation at Risk” forty years after its publication? And what are the implications for school reform in the coming years?
As a scholar of education who specializes in standards-based reform and accountability, I believe important lessons can be learned about American education by examining what has taken place since the release of the report. Here are three:
1. Education reform has improved outcomes, but progress has slowed or reversed in the past decade
The U.S. has had major challenges with educational performance that long predate “A Nation at Risk.” One is that too many students are not mastering grade-level material. Another is that not enough are enrolling in and completing college given the benefits of college to individuals and society. Additionally, large gaps exist in both of those areas based on race, ethnicity, and income.
Since the report, students from all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups have continuously made achievement gains, and gaps have narrowed considerably since the 1970s—especially in the early grades. Yet low levels of achievement and gaps in achievement remain. For instance, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, 34 percent of fourth graders scored below the “basic” level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, meaning they weren’t reading at grade level. Since Covid-19, national assessment results in reading and math indicate the pandemic erased two decades of achievement gains; for instance, in eighth grade math the number of students scoring below basic increased from 31 percent in 2019 to 38 percent in 2022.
The nation has also made tremendous progress in outcomes beyond academic tests. For instance, the high school dropout rate has plummeted, dropping from about 14 percent around the time of the report to about 6 percent now. Meanwhile, the proportion of twenty-five to twenty-nine-year-olds with a four-year college degree has doubled to about 38 percent.
2. The reforms did not address the root causes of the problems
The report spurred four decades of intense reform led by states and the federal government. But these reforms have largely not addressed the major causes of poor educational performance—poverty and other factors outside of school, as well as highly decentralized educational systems that thwart meaningful school improvement.
For example, child poverty is still widespread; many students lack access to quality early childhood education; and many children live in polluted environments that affect their learning.
The result of these factors in the early years is that only about half of children enter kindergarten healthy and ready to learn, and even fewer among children from low-income families.
While schools can help lessen these disparities in school readiness between more and less advantaged children, the report failed to look beyond schools for solutions to problems that stem from social inequality.
The narrow view of “A Nation at Risk” is notable because the widely accepted wisdom of the time, especially among Republicans, and going back to the 1966 Coleman Report, was that schools aren’t a primary driver of inequality. After all, the Coleman Report found that differences in school resources, like money and books, didn’t account for differences in student achievement between more and less advantaged children.
Even the education efforts since the report have not been able to address the structural barriers in U.S. education to large-scale improvement. For instance, in a recent book I show that state and federal policies over the past thirty years that focus on improving schools through better and clearer standards have only modestly improved teaching.
A big part of why standards and other education reforms have failed has to do with the fact that school systems in the U.S. are remarkably decentralized. About 13,000 school districts and their individual teachers exercise substantial control over what actually happens in classrooms. The inability of policymakers at higher levels—such as states or the federal government—to meaningfully change school practice partially explains why other major reforms have failed to achieve real results. Examples include the Obama administration’s US$7 billion school turnaround plan and teacher evaluation reforms. In a more centralized system, policies enacted at the state and federal levels could be implemented as intended; that is rarely the case in U.S. education.
3. The political coalitions that brought reform have fallen apart
As on other topics, Americans are highly polarized on education policy. From “A Nation at Risk” through even much of the Obama administration, many aspects of the education reform agenda had bipartisan agreement. Governors of both parties came together to enact standards and testing reforms that set expectations for student learning and measured student progress against those expectations in the 1980s and 1990s. Congress voted overwhelmingly for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, calling for more rigorous standards and more frequent testing to drive educational improvement.
And some versions of school choice—especially charter schools—were supported by Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington and nationwide. Even the now-controversial Common Core standards, which aimed to create consistent expectations for student learning in math and English nationwide, were originally bipartisan. That is, they were created and endorsed by leaders from both parties.
This broad reform coalition is no more.
Debates over what to teach children in schools are driving a partisan wedge between schools and parents. Republican states are removing racial and LGBT-related topics from the curriculum. Meanwhile, Democratic states mandate their inclusion.
And expanding choice programs continue to drive down public school enrollment in states across the nation. Over a million students have been lost from public schools, and private school enrollment has increased 4 percent since the onset of Covid-19.
The result of these trends is that the reform consensus that brought about a broadly national approach to education reform is splintering into red state and blue state versions. I expect red state reform will likely emphasize school choice and a back-to-basics curriculum focused on reading, math, and the avoidance of controversial topics. I expect blue state reform will likely emphasize whole-child supports like mental health, social-emotional learning, and curriculum that is intended to reflect the culture of the nation’s increasingly diverse student body.
The problems raised in “A Nation at Risk” remain as important as they were in 1983. In my view, national leaders need to continue to improve educational opportunity and performance for America’s schoolchildren. Improved education benefits individuals—those with college degrees have longer life expectancies, higher earnings and wealth, and even more happiness than those with a high school degree or lower. Education also benefits societies, leading to greater economic growth. But forty years after the report, policymakers don’t seem to have learned the lesson that schools alone won’t solve the nation’s educational problems. And if that’s true, the nation remains at risk.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The Conversation.
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Over the last few weeks, debates about early literacy have dominated headlines in Ohio. Much of the conversation has revolved around the state budget, as Governor DeWine included in his recommendations a bold plan to improve reading achievement in Ohio by requiring schools to use high-quality curricula and instructional materials aligned with the science of reading.
Despite the renewed focus on early literacy, some lawmakers have proposed dismantling the decades-old retention requirement of Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee, which requires schools to hold back students who, based on state assessments or state-approved alternative exams, aren’t meeting reading standards by the end of third grade. Schools must provide these students with intensive interventions such as summer reading programs or tutoring. But House Bill 117 aims to abandon the requirement, and House lawmakers proposed a similar provision in their recently released version of the budget.
This is the wrong move, akin to your optometrist refusing to provide the glasses prescription she knows you need and expecting you to make do with blurry vision instead. For starters, there’s a considerable amount of evidence showing that, when combined with intensive supports, retention has a positive impact on students’ short-term and long-term success. In several other states—like Mississippi, which has been hailed as a learning miracle—retention has been a crucial part of its widespread reading improvement.
But for many critics, these positive academic impacts take a backseat to the harm that they believe retention can have on a student’s social and emotional wellbeing. These aren’t concerns to take lightly. The mental health of students matters, especially in the wake of a pandemic that not only upended the stability that kids often count on from school, but also robbed them of vitally important experiences both inside and outside the classroom. Now, more than ever, it’s important for teachers, parents, advocates, and policymakers to be mindful of how policy and practice impacts the mental health and wellbeing of students.
The problem, though, is that by identifying retention as the only potential source of social and emotional harm, critics completely overlook the significant impact that poor reading skills and illiteracy can have on students who are socially promoted. In fact, nearly every social and emotional impact cited by opponents as a reason to eliminate retention could also be applied to students who fail to achieve reading proficiency by the end of third grade.
Students who are socially promoted but continue to struggle with reading can get made fun of by other children—especially in the older grades, when reading becomes fundamental and a lack of fluency and comprehension becomes glaringly obvious. Struggling readers often experience frustration or boredom in class because they can’t keep up with their peers, which could lead to an increase in disruptive behavior and school discipline incidents. They can also suffer from low self-esteem because they struggle academically, and may feel ashamed that they need remediation. Without a caring adult to notice what’s going on and offer support and encouragement, they may even internalize their academic difficulty as an inflexible marker of their worth rather than a temporary obstacle that can be overcome with the right help.
I know all this from personal experience because, as a high school English teacher, I saw the negative impacts of social promotion every day. Many of my most persistently disruptive students acted out not because they were bad kids—they definitely weren’t—but because they struggled to read and write and keep up with their peers, and were embarrassed and frustrated as a result. On the flip side, some of my best-behaved students were nearly half a dozen grade levels behind where they should have been. They worked hard and participated and followed every rule to the letter, but because they’d been passed on by so many teachers before me, their poor reading skills made it extremely difficult for them to master the content of a high school English course.
On more than one occasion, I stepped in to stop one student from bullying another over their limited reading skills. There were dozens of students who, because they couldn’t read proficiently, were struggling in all their classes. These students needed intensive reading intervention, but my high school—like most high schools—wasn’t equipped or prepared to teach such basic fundamentals. The further away my students got from elementary school, the less likely they were to get the reading intervention and support they needed from teachers and staff who specialized in early literacy.
One instance, specifically, sticks out in my mind. I remember standing in the hallway outside of my ninth-grade classroom during my first year teaching. The mother of one of my students—we’ll call him Sam—had stopped by with her son to ask how he was doing in my class. We’d just finished diagnostic testing, so I told her the truth: Despite being in ninth grade, Sam had the reading skills of a fifth grader. He was certainly capable of catching up, and I was going to do everything in my power to make sure he did, but it was going to be an uphill climb. I’ll never forget the look on her face or how she cried when she told me that no one had ever told her that her son struggled to read proficiently. I’ll never forget that she asked me how it was possible for her son to be in ninth grade if he couldn’t read at a ninth grade level. I had no answer.
Sam was a great kid. He paid attention and worked hard, his mother was involved, and I worked my butt off that year to give him the education he deserved. But by the time he walked through the door of my classroom for his first day of ninth grade, Sam was already six years beyond the third grade make-or-break reading benchmark. He refused to read aloud in my class (and I never forced him to) because he knew other students would make fun of the way he stumbled over his words. His reading struggles had a huge impact on his academic outcomes, both in my English class and in his other courses. But they would impact his life outside school, too. The written knowledge test he would have to pass to earn a driver’s license, the ballot measures and candidate information he would need to read to exercise his right to vote, the daily news he needed to grasp to understand the world—these were basic tasks that were severely hindered by his lack of reading proficiency.
Sam knew all of this. He knew he couldn’t read very well, and he knew it made him different than some of his classmates. He knew how much more difficult his life would be—because it already was. For Sam—and for millions of other kids—the social and emotional impacts of illiteracy are massive and far-reaching, even when those students are “protected” from retention.
Pretending that moving struggling students onto the next grade saves them from social and emotional harm isn’t just wrong, it’s irresponsible. We owe it to students to give them the intervention and support they need to become proficient readers before they go on to middle and high school. Advocates and policymakers need to recognize that because illiteracy has such enormous social and emotional impacts, we should be intervening as early as possible. Retention, coupled with rigorous intervention, gives students a chance to catch up with their peers and avoid a lifetime of struggle. Social promotion doesn’t offer that—and claiming that it does is educational malpractice.
