Third grade is tough. It’s the year that children stop learning to read and start reading to learn.
That’s why it’s so important to ensure that all children read on grade level by third grade. Virginia has had a terrific program to do just that. Studies show that providing struggling readers with just 30 minutes a day more of reading instruction will help them catch up. That’s a smart investment.Â
To date, the Commonwealth has paid 100 percent of the cost of providing remediation to all students in kindergarten. But at grades one and two, only half the students were covered.
Yesterday, the House adopted a budget amendment that cut the funding to extend those services to all the little struggling readers.Â
The reason? Third grade reading test scores are going up.
Well, yeah. The third grade reading scores are going up because of the early reading program.
Compare the cost of a little prevention with the costs–both human and financial–of a kid repeating a grade. This wasn’t smart public policy.
With NCLB, it would be smart to remediate early to reap the rewards later. The students that are in these early grades now will be the students that take the high school level SOLs in 2013-14 when the pass rate will be 100%.
People who are not serious about education want to defund the programs that make our school systems some of the best in the country. Roadblocks and hurdles are all they are interested in creating so they can point to us and say that we’ve failed. Then they will say the only alternative are vouchers that will further decimate our system. I thank you for standing up for educators and I hope that the parents of Virginia schools are reading this so we can vote the men and women out who voted for this shameful legislation.