Third grade has become key reading benchmark

Pupils are pushed to read and get ready for tests.
WASHINGTON POST
Journalists almost never know as much as the people they cover. But one day while watching a frustrated third-grade boy struggle over a reading passage, education reporter and columnist Mike Bowler noticed something the boy's teacher and aide had not: The boy had an obscure reading disability, a failure to distinguish similar-sounding consonants, which affected his academic achievement and his behavior.
Bowler recognized the problem because he and several other staff members from the newspaper he worked for at the time, the Baltimore Sun, had immersed themselves in a project called "Reading by 9." For more than four years beginning in 1997, the paper dedicated itself to helping its readers understand how children learn to decode words on a page and emphasized repeatedly that if they didn't do so by age 9, their futures were in jeopardy.
The stories, tutoring by employees of the newspaper and other activities -- including nearly 200 columns written by Bowler -- were a testament to the importance everyone involved in education has been putting on third grade. Research shows that elementary school children who cannot read proficiently by that point are liable to struggle academically for the rest of their school days and lives.
Newspapers have a stake
The project, since duplicated at several other newspapers, remains controversial among journalists. Some editors and reporters say newspapers should inform readers, not try to change the world. But many education leaders say everyone has a stake in teaching reading.
"If you don't," said U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in a recent interview with The Washington Post, "you aren't going to have anybody who can read your newspaper."
These days, everything starts with third grade. It is the first year in which states test pupils in reading and math under the No Child Left Behind law. Many schools have reorganized to make sure those 8- and 9-year-olds get all the attention they need.
83 percent success
At Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy, a public elementary school in Alexandria, Va., for instance, the 49 third-graders have been reshuffled into three different but fluid reading groups -- upper, middle and lower -- for two hours of language arts each afternoon. Each of the three third-grade teachers -- Stefan Fisher, Rebecca Kelley and Sandy Sandoz -- takes a group, including pupils they do not teach regularly. This is a sharp departure from one teacher handling different reading groups in a single class, but the results have been good. Last year, 83 percent of Lyles-Crouch third-graders passed the state reading test, at a school where 31 percent of the families have incomes low enough to qualify for federal lunch subsidies. The principal, reading expert Patricia Zissios, came from Fairfax County, Va., where the slogan was "Success by 8," an even more ambitious goal than the Sun's "Reading by 9."
One afternoon last week in Fisher's reading group in Room 213, 16 pupils were jotting down ideas for persuasive essays on whether they should be required to wear their uniforms, which are white tops and dark bottoms.
Fisher chuckled at one pupil's thought: The school should get rid of uniforms, the boy said, "so you don't get people mixed up."
While most pupils worked on their essays, Fisher convened in a corner a group of six to take turns reading Ronald Dahl's "George's Marvelous Medicine."
"If you have your journal, and you don't understand something, then it's time to write that down," Fisher said.