Lesson not yet learned: There are no warranties on students

Several governors ago, the state of Ohio decreed that by 2001 every fourth-grade student would be able to read at grade level, or they wouldn’t be promoted to fifth grade.

It sounded like such a great idea at the time. Every parent, teacher and principal in the fall of 1996 knew exactly what the state’s expectation was for that year’s kindergarten class: After four years, every child would be reading like a fourth-grader.

And as the years passed, more and more of those students fell behind. And when the day of reckoning arrived in 2001, Gov. Bob Taft, who inherited the guarantee from his predecessor George V. Voinovich and had taken the challenge so seriously and personally that he recruited thousands of volunteers and even tutored under-performing students himself, had to admit defeat. The numbers had improved — at one time more than half of the state’s fourth graders were failing the reading proficiency test — but the failure rate was still so high that local school districts wouldn’t have had the teachers, classrooms or money to accommodate all the students who were about to fail.

And so the Legislature rewrote the law, spread some of the mandatory proficiently tests out over different grades and essentially turned the guarantee into an aspiration.

Regardless of what the state’s elementary students learned or didn’t learn, Ohio’s grown- ups should have learned that it’s easier to give a guarantee than to make good on it. And somethings in life just can’t be guaranteed.

Here we go again

And yet, here we are, a little over a decade after the failure of that grand experiment in over-reaching, and once again the governor, John Kasich, and the General Assembly (which even includes some members who have been able to finesse their way around the state’s term limit law and are still in Columbus) are about to give Ohio’s parents and students another guarantee. Only this time, they’re proposing to do the job even quicker. This will be a third-grade guarantee. And schools aren’t being given from a student’s kindergarten year to improve their reading. Kasich would bar next year’s third-graders from being promoted; the Senate amended that to give them an extra year.

Oh, and the Senate set aside a whole $13 million for grants to help schools meet the goal.

If it were that easy and that inexpensive, we’re inclined to think that Voinovich and Taft and their state superintendents would have gotten the job done. Or Ted Strickland who followed them. All valued education and all had state superintendents who were bright, conscientious and would have happily added a line to their resumes that read: “In a year, I made good on a guarantee that every third-grader in Ohio could read at grade level.”

We’re in a business that values literacy — a business that depends on literacy — and would dearly love to see every student reading well and enthusiastically throughout his or her academic career. Few factors determine whether a student is going to graduate from high school more than whether they can read at grade level in third grade. Except one: poverty.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation points out that three decades of research suggest that children with low third-grade reading test scores are less likely to graduate from high school than children with higher reading scores.

But “Double Jeopardy: How third-grade reading skills and poverty influence high school graduation,” a report for the Casey Foundation by Dr. Donald J. Hernandez of the City University of New York, points out some sobering statistics. For instance: About 16 percent of children who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade do not graduate from high school on time. Only about 4 percent of proficient readers don’t graduate. For children who were poor for at least a year and not reading proficiently, failure-to-graduate rises to 26 percent. And for those living in chronic poverty, the proportion jumps to 35 percent.

The lack of reading skills for primary-school students is but a symptom of a larger problem. And announcing that Ohio’s students will be able to read at a third-grade level next year or the year after or else — and throwing $13 million into the bucket — is not going to solve the problem.