Don’t promote strugglers

In 1961, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow got a virtual trademark on the term “vast wasteland.” So, although highly apt, it isn’t available now for application to K-12 public schools in the United States.

Yes, there are oases of high-quality education. But the statistics showing our country’s systemic educational failure are too dreary and well known to need further recitation.

While we wait and hope for the kind of sweeping reforms the nation’s schoolchildren desperately need, we do at least know the best place to start. It’s what one looks for when confronted with a daunting and seemingly intractable problem: a step of high leverage, offering significant gains for relatively little investment, that is actionable at scale.

In the K-12 wasteland, the good news is that we know not only where to apply the leverage, but also when. The critical skill is reading, and the critical juncture is third grade, or more precisely the transition from third to fourth grade.

No other variable is more important; whether a fourth grader can read is the “pivot point” in their education. As the saying goes, by then children must learn to read, because afterward they will have to read to learn. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, a children’s welfare organization, has found that kids who leave third grade without reading proficiency are four times less likely to finish high school.

We know not only what to do and when to do it, but also how. Ending the pernicious, self-defeating practice known as “social promotion” is the key. Schools must be prevented from shuffling kids who do not yet have basic reading skills on to the fourth grade and likely failure in the years beyond.

This reform left the realm of theory long ago. In Indiana, when I was governor, a 2010 statute prohibited social promotion of students flunking the statewide reading exam, absent clearly defined potential exceptions for English learners and special education students, or if “good cause” could be shown.

A year after the law was passed and a new reading test was instituted, the third-grade pass rate was 85.7%. The following school year, 20122013, the pass rate hit what turned out to be an all-time high, 91.4%, and held above 91% for two more years. Analyzing the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, singled out Indiana’s improvement as one of the nation’s bright spots.

At least 16 state and D.C. have now enacted social promotion laws. The results have been positive, and swift. States including Florida, Alabama and Mississippi have done so, and now they are national leaders in reading improvement.

Ensuring the brightest future for America’s children, and the nation itself, means working for expanded school choice, better use of technology and the reprofessionalization of K-12 teaching. But while we await such miracles, the simple reform of ending social promotion would have far-reaching, lifelong benefits for millions of students.