High-stakes year begins for kids still learning to read

ATLANTA (AP) — Five of the 19 students in teacher Chelsea Grant’s third grade classroom are reading below grade level.

When it’s time to read aloud on a recent Friday, the students show vastly different levels of skill and confidence.

“Remember you read with expression, feeling and fluency,” Grant told her Atlanta students. “I want to feel it.”

Two girls puff up their chests and read like they’re trying out for the school play, while the rest stay seated. Some read slowly and haltingly. Many trip over tricky words – “phosphorescent” and “radiance” – and a few get stuck on simpler ones. Others don’t volunteer at all.

Grant’s students -– “my babies” as she calls them –- spent the better part of the 2020-2021 school year learning from home. It was first grade, a crucial year for learning to read.

Many are still far behind.

Mounting evidence from around the country shows that students who spent most of the time learning remotely during the 2020-2021 school year, many of them Black and Latino, lost about half of an academic year of learning. That’s twice as much as their peers who studied in person that year.

Third graders are at a particularly delicate moment. This is the year when they must master reading or risk school failure. Everything after third grade will require reading comprehension to learn math, social studies and science. Students who don’t read fluently by the end of third grade are more likely to struggle in the future, and even drop out, studies show.

“Those students are very vulnerable,” said John King Jr., former U.S. Secretary of Education and president of the Education Trust, a Washington, D.C., think tank that advocates for improving access to high-quality education for low-income students and...