Are 3rd grade reading scores really the bellwether we imagined?

by Courtney Luce

In Yong Zhao’s 2017 book What Works Hurts: Side Effects in Education, he writes, “‘This medicine can reduce fever, but it can cause a bleeding stomach.’ When you buy a medical product, you are given information about both its effects and side effects. But such practice does not exist in education.’This program helps improve your students’ reading scores, but it may make them hate reading forever.’ No such information is given to teachers or school principals.”

When I read this, it helped me wrap my brain around an idea that I had been thinking about for the last couple of years. Well, rewind, it all started about five years ago when I worked as a literacy coach for a large school district. During that time, I had been through a significant amount of brainwashing…I mean training…with the paid literacy consultant. While much of what she said seemed viable, feasible, and important (over time I have changed my mind), there was one thing that in the moment struck me as odd. She cited the research that claimed that students who were not reading on grade level in 3rd grade were almost guaranteed to dropout of school and were doomed for a life of poverty and prison! Okay, she cited actual statistics, but this is definitely what I heard. She also made the claim, that I still question, that they build prisons based on 3rd grade reading scores (with a bit of research this claim seems partially true at best).

Since that time I have done a lot of personal research, and 3rd grade does seem to be important, but something has always felt off about this. The reason why began to make sense two years ago. That’s when my own child was in 3rd grade. My own child, the daughter of two reading teachers was significantly below in reading. Was she doomed for a life of poverty and prison? I doubted it; there were way too many protective factors in place. So is it only people without protective factors that are doomed? I also doubted that. I thought back to how her school handled her “Significantly Below Average” reading scores, and I began to hypothesize about what might actually be happening.

Like Yong Zhao’s quote above, when my daughter fell behind in reading around 1st grade, she was prescribed a reading curriculum that made her hate reading. While all of the other kids got to hear authentic stories and read interesting books, she had to go to an intervention class for 90 minutes of phonics based instruction (despite no evidence that her reading issue was a phonics gap). She called it a “baby class.” Perhaps this program would have “worked” if we kept her at that school, but it definitely hurt. By the end of first grade, she hated anything to do with reading and would cry about going to school. It took a long time to de-program that experience so that she loved books and school again. She is in 5th grade now, and still significantly behind in reading, but loves books and is happy to read despite struggling with it. She is also confident and is the student body president of her K-8 school, not likely on the path to prison.

So this experience and my weird feelings about claims with 3rd grade reading has left me with a very large concern. Is it possible that people who make these research claims about third grade are falling victim to a common issue in research: correlation does not equal causation? Maybe it is not the inability to read in 3rd grade that leads to high dropout rates and prison; maybe it is what the educational system does to kids who are not reading on grade level that leaves them feeling hopeless about school and life. And maybe this is wrong, maybe it is the reading scores, but it seems that there are many countries that don’t even start teaching reading until age 7 or 8 (our 3rd grade) and they don’t seem to have nearly the dropout rate or large prison population that we have in the United States.

While I wish this blog had an answer to this problem (and I imagine you do too), I hope I can leave you with some important questions. What does your school, district, or system do when a child is a struggling reader early on? What programs are they exposed to? What is taken away from them? Do they lose an elective, gym, or recess? Now research it. Is the prescription they get for their reading struggles more likely to lead to disinterest in school (one of the leading causes of dropout)? If so, is there an intervention that has a better side-effect?

#ThirdGradeReadingAndPrison#SchoolShouldntHurt#SideEffectsofReadingIntervention