More to Know: Successful Reading by Third Grade Failure to achieve reading proficiency by third grade disproportionately affects children from high-poverty households and communities. Typically, this developmental lag is the result of differences in resources and opportunities for healthy physical, linguistic, cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral development. Children who live with the challenges of poverty have a higher incidence of health problems that interfere with learning, and, what’s more, as their parents work overtime to put food on the table, they may miss rich book-based verbal interactions with their families (Cunningham and Zibulsky, 2014), access to books (Neuman and Celano, 2001, 2012), and the daily read-aloud (Adams, 1990). In her seminal Beginning to Read (1990), Marilyn Adams notes that children from families of means often arrive at school with 1,000 hours of read-aloud time under their belts. In stark contrast, children from high-poverty households may not have experienced a single read-aloud—or, if they have, it more typically adds up to just 25 hours’ worth. In his 2012 study, “Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation,” researcher Donald Hernandez notes that third grade is a pivotal point: “If you haven’t succeeded by third grade it’s more difficult to [remediate] than it would have been if you started before then.” Drawing from the data of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Longitudinal Study of Youth, Dr. Hernandez examined the reading scores and later graduation rates of 3,975 students born between 1979 and 1989. His findings, as reported in the Annie B. Casey Report, are convincing: “He found 16 percent overall did not have a diploma by age 19, but students who struggled with reading in early elementary school grew up to comprise 88 percent of those who did not receive a diploma. That made low reading skills an even stronger predictor than spending at least a year in poverty, which affected 70 percent of the students who didn’t graduate. In fact, 89 percent of students in poverty who did read on level by third grade graduated on time, statistically no different from the students who never experienced poverty but did struggle with reading early on. By contrast, more than one in four poor, struggling readers did not graduate, compared with only two percent of good readers from wealthier backgrounds. Mr. Hernandez found that gaps in graduation rates among white, black, and Hispanic students closed once poverty and reading proficiency were taken into account. “If they are proficient in reading, they basically have the same rate of graduation,” above 90 percent, Mr. Hernandez said. “‘If they did not reach proficiency, that’s when you see these big gaps emerge.’”
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CHAPTER 1: READERS
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