Five years after former District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee swept into town with a mayoral mandate to fix local schools, the D.C. Council is considering legislation requiring third-graders to be tested to determine whether or not they can read. Such legislative meddling in the school system would ordinarily be unthinkable. But when 56 percent of fourth-graders who spent their entire academic careers in the Rhee-formed system cannot demonstrate even basic mastery of reading on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, intervention has become a moral necessity.
Council Chairman Kwame Brown is well aware that the combination of childhood poverty and an inability to read by third grade has negative lifelong consequences. According to the first national longitudinal study comparing the high school graduation rates of nearly 4,000 students with their ability to read by the third grade, DCPS students are in deep trouble. District fourth-graders averaged 201 (on a 500-point scale) on the 2011 NAEP reading test, lower than the 220 average score of all public school students nationwide. And according to NAEP, performance gaps for black, Hispanic and low-income students in D.C. have not significantly budged since 1992.
“Among children with two risk factors — poverty and reading skills below the proficient mark — 26 percent do not graduate from high school, compared to 9 percent with these subpar reading scores who have never experienced poverty,” Hunter College professor Donald Hernandez notes in his 2011 “Double Jeopardy” study. “The graduation rates improve when poor children are reading at a proficient level in third grade,” he added.
Higher graduation rates translate into higher levels of college attendance, employment and lifetime income and reduced levels of poverty and crime. The inability to read at a basic level by third grade — and according to NAEP, this merely means “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade” — is an even stronger predictor of dropping out than spending at least a year in poverty, the study found. Yet more than half of DCPS fourth-graders are in this category.
The DCPS already spends more money per pupil than any other school district in the nation, including triple-digit financial incentives for teachers to improve test scores. Some progress has been made since 2007, when 61 percent of fourth-graders lacked even basic reading skills. But the council is right to be concerned. At this snail’s pace, another generation of D.C. children will be lost.
