40% of 4th graders cannot read in 2026
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Anonymous
People keep posting about how many schools don’t read books anymore but I’ve never heard of a specific county or town that does this. My 7th grader this year has read Of Mice and Men, The Giver and right now The Outsiders. As for phonetic spelling, students with dyslexia can have difficulty with spelling. Other difficulties have the student seeing the word spelled phonetically as correct. Of course some people are just bad spellers because they don’t put the effort in. And the previous poster said they do very little to nothing with struggling kids which is alarming. These learning programs are not supposed to take the place of the basics. They only enhance what they are learning. And there is an assumption that the students are at where they should be with regard to reading and writing. |
Anonymous
Starting at what age? Mine is in 3rd and has never read an entire book as a class. He's read whole books at home. |
Anonymous
The third graders in our parochial school have already read two Narnia books, and they have no computer or tablet exposure at school except for MAP testing… |
Anonymous
What public school district is this? |
Anonymous
It’s outside of Boston. |
Anonymous
In first grade I think they all read different books according to their ability. My second oldest read James and the Giant Peach with his class in 2nd grade. My middle child is what they call a “reluctant reader” but managed to blend in the middle. My youngest child was home with Covid isolation in pieces of 2nd and 3rd grades and it was chaos. She didn’t have books until 4th grade. |
Anonymous
This is a unicorn. |
Anonymous
| Is there a way to directly compare DC Math, Reading and Science metrics to NAEP averages? |
Anonymous
I’m sorry but this is a horrible attitude. The schools should be responsible for teaching! That’s not a controversial opinion! It worked well for many decades. Kids learned to read, write, do math, they learned facts, and did science experiments, etc. We need only look at the education statistics in past censuses here: https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics 1950 census: children in school were silent generation. Only 34% of adults had a HS diploma. 1960 census: children in school were baby boomers. 41% of adults had a HS diploma. 1970 census: children in school were the youngest baby boomers and oldest Gen X. 55% of adults had a HS diploma. (Baby boomers were driving a lot of the increase in HS graduation rates and they generally did not have school age children by 1970). 1980 census: children in school were Gen X. 68% of adults had a HS diploma. The point is we don’t get to relatively high levels of educational attainment in the US until 1980! Do you really think non-HS graduate mom and dad were extensively working with their kids in 1950 to teach them to read? No, because that was the school’s job. The best you were going to get was parents reading simple picture books to their young kids and not every household even had that. This is to say nothing of the pre-1950s years in educational attainment. Kids in public school often had illiterate parents or parents who could read at a basic level, or immigrant parents still learning English. But they still learned to read in school because the schools actually taught it. |
Anonymous
| The reason why most teachers are not teachers in the truest sense of the word because in order to teach you must first have respect from the student and the institution. Without that there is no teaching or learning. If you try to point out truth dum dums cannot recognize what that means because it's all run by bs, gossip, blame, and excuses. There is no virtue in the this paradigm. |
Anonymous
It's not fair to ask parents to... parent? Please. If you can't spend an hour a day reading to or with your kid, asking them what they're reading, reviewing with them what they learned that day in school, and talking to them about your day, you are failing as a parent. You need to read to your children. Read a lot. It can be in English or in another language. Just read. An hour per day is not a lot to ask. It can be 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night if that's easier. But you, as a parent, should absolutely be spending at least an hour per day "tutoring" (including reading to) your children. |
Anonymous
No. Schools need to teach. There was no way parents were doing all that in the not so distant past, and yet children still learned to read … AT SCHOOL. |
Anonymous
I think most parents do that. They read, play games, watch movies, all helpful. But school is where most of the work should be done. |
Anonymous
My parents taught me to read and I taught my kids. I just read to them and with them pointing out each word and putting educational shows on the tv with closed captioning. Schools don't always. |
Anonymous
Parents need to work with their kids at home. |