Nine Years Old and Stumped By Words on Paper

Zocalo — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 08:19:40 +0000

This year, Arizona joins 13 other states by implementing a law to hold back third-grade students who haven’t yet learned to read. Supporters of the law feel it prevents children from being educationally abandoned in fourth grade, where teachers don’t know how to teach reading and can’t provide the extra help those students need. Critics of these laws argue there’s no proof that repeating a grade helps students learn better and warn of the disproportionate impact on low-income students. They also point out that children who fail a grade are more likely to drop out of high school. But will either solution work? Perhaps a more basic question is why so many measures of student achievement have moved so little over the past few decades. In advance of a Zócalo/Arizona State University event, “Why is Arizona Failing Third Graders?”, we asked education experts to address the following question: Why, despite all the experimentation in education, have statistics on third-grade reading proficiency shown so little improvement?

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Nine Years Old and Stumped By Words on Paper