Over the last few weeks, debates about early literacy have dominated headlines in Ohio. Much of the conversation has revolved around the state budget, as Governor DeWine included in his recommendations a bold plan to improve reading achievement in Ohio by requiring schools to use high-quality curricula and instructional materials aligned with the science of reading.
Despite the renewed focus on early literacy, some lawmakers have proposed dismantling the decades-old retention requirement of Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee, which requires schools to hold back students who, based on state assessments or state-approved alternative exams, aren’t meeting reading standards by the end of third grade. Schools must provide these students with intensive interventions such as summer reading programs or tutoring. But House Bill 117 aims to abandon the requirement, and House lawmakers proposed a similar provision in their recently released version of the budget.
This is the wrong move, akin to your optometrist refusing to provide the glasses prescription she knows you need and expecting you to make do with blurry vision instead. For starters, there’s a considerable amount of evidence showing that, when combined with intensive supports, retention has a positive impact on students’ short-term and long-term success. In several other states—like Mississippi, which has been hailed as a learning miracle—retention has been a crucial part of its widespread reading improvement.
But for many critics, these positive academic impacts take a backseat to the harm that they believe retention can have on a student’s social and emotional wellbeing. These aren’t concerns to take lightly. The mental health of students matters, especially in the wake of a pandemic that not only upended the stability that kids often count on from school, but also robbed them of vitally important experiences both inside and outside the classroom. Now, more than ever, it’s important for teachers, parents, advocates, and policymakers to be mindful of how policy and practice impacts the mental health and wellbeing of students.
The problem, though, is that by identifying retention as the only potential source of social and emotional harm, critics completely overlook the significant impact that poor reading skills and illiteracy can have on students who are socially promoted. In fact, nearly every social and emotional impact cited by opponents as a reason to eliminate retention could also be applied to students who fail to achieve reading proficiency by the end of third grade.
Students who are socially promoted but continue to struggle with reading can get made fun of by other children—especially in the older grades, when reading becomes fundamental and a lack of fluency and comprehension becomes glaringly obvious. Struggling readers often experience frustration or boredom in class because they can’t keep up with their peers, which could lead to an increase in disruptive behavior and school discipline incidents. They can also suffer from low self-esteem because they struggle academically, and may feel ashamed that they need remediation. Without a caring adult to notice what’s going on and offer support and encouragement, they may even internalize their academic difficulty as an inflexible marker of their worth rather than a temporary obstacle that can be overcome with the right help.
I know all this from personal experience because, as a high school English teacher, I saw the negative impacts of social promotion every day. Many of my most persistently disruptive students acted out not because they were bad kids—they definitely weren’t—but because they struggled to read and write and keep up with their peers, and were embarrassed and frustrated as a result. On the flip side, some of my best-behaved students were nearly half a dozen grade levels behind where they should have been. They worked hard and participated and followed every rule to the letter, but because they’d been passed on by so many teachers before me, their poor reading skills made it extremely difficult for them to master the content of a high school English course.
On more than one occasion, I stepped in to stop one student from bullying another over their limited reading skills. There were dozens of students who, because they couldn’t read proficiently, were struggling in all their classes. These students needed intensive reading intervention, but my high school—like most high schools—wasn’t equipped or prepared to teach such basic fundamentals. The further away my students got from elementary school, the less likely they were to get the reading intervention and support they needed from teachers and staff who specialized in early literacy.
One instance, specifically, sticks out in my mind. I remember standing in the hallway outside of my ninth-grade classroom during my first year teaching. The mother of one of my students—we’ll call him Sam—had stopped by with her son to ask how he was doing in my class. We’d just finished diagnostic testing, so I told her the truth: Despite being in ninth grade, Sam had the reading skills of a fifth grader. He was certainly capable of catching up, and I was going to do everything in my power to make sure he did, but it was going to be an uphill climb. I’ll never forget the look on her face or how she cried when she told me that no one had ever told her that her son struggled to read proficiently. I’ll never forget that she asked me how it was possible for her son to be in ninth grade if he couldn’t read at a ninth grade level. I had no answer.
Sam was a great kid. He paid attention and worked hard, his mother was involved, and I worked my butt off that year to give him the education he deserved. But by the time he walked through the door of my classroom for his first day of ninth grade, Sam was already six years beyond the third grade make-or-break reading benchmark. He refused to read aloud in my class (and I never forced him to) because he knew other students would make fun of the way he stumbled over his words. His reading struggles had a huge impact on his academic outcomes, both in my English class and in his other courses. But they would impact his life outside school, too. The written knowledge test he would have to pass to earn a driver’s license, the ballot measures and candidate information he would need to read to exercise his right to vote, the daily news he needed to grasp to understand the world—these were basic tasks that were severely hindered by his lack of reading proficiency.
Sam knew all of this. He knew he couldn’t read very well, and he knew it made him different than some of his classmates. He knew how much more difficult his life would be—because it already was. For Sam—and for millions of other kids—the social and emotional impacts of illiteracy are massive and far-reaching, even when those students are “protected” from retention.
Pretending that moving struggling students onto the next grade saves them from social and emotional harm isn’t just wrong, it’s irresponsible. We owe it to students to give them the intervention and support they need to become proficient readers before they go on to middle and high school. Advocates and policymakers need to recognize that because illiteracy has such enormous social and emotional impacts, we should be intervening as early as possible. Retention, coupled with rigorous intervention, gives students a chance to catch up with their peers and avoid a lifetime of struggle. Social promotion doesn’t offer that—and claiming that it does is educational malpractice.
