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.