Fourth Grade Guarantee

Sorry the posts have been a little light these days. Who knew May would be this busy!

When I read this article in USA Today I couldn't help but remember Ohio's ill-fated fourth grade reading guarantee.

This week the Annie B. Casey Foundation released a report that identified reading proficiently by fourth grade as key to reducing the dropout rate.

If educators want to shrink the number of students who drop out of high school each year, they must greatly increase the number who can read proficiently by the time they're in fourth grade, a key non-profit children's advocacy group says in a new report.The findings, out today from the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation, echoes research on reading proficiency going back decades, but it's the first to draw a direct line between reading and the nation's long-term economic well-being."The bottom line is that if we don't get dramatically more children on track as proficient readers, the United States will lose a growing and essential proportion of its human capital to poverty," the authors say.Ralph Smith, the foundation's executive vice president, says recent research shows that dropouts "don't just happen in high school" but that students give clear indications as early as elementary school that they're on a "glide path" to dropping out. Among the clearest signs: difficulty reading and understanding basic work that becomes more detail-oriented around fourth grade.For students who aren't proficient readers by then, it becomes "pretty hard for them to catch up on anything," Smith says. Recent test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress put the figure at about two-thirds of all fourth-graders.Though intensive remediation may help some, he says, it would be "more effective and certainly less costly to get kids reading the first time."Does anyone besides me remember the fourth grade reading guarantee?

In 1997, the legislature passed Amended Senate Bill 55. This bill contained a provision which became known as the "fourth grade guarantee." Scheduled to go into effect during the 2001-02 school year, the "fourth grade guarantee" required that students attain a passing score on the grade four reading proficiency test as a condition for promotion to grade five. Students could also be promoted if the student’s principal and reading teacher agreed that the pupil is academically prepared to be promoted to fifth grade.

So what happened to the fourth grade guarantee? Well, student performance and politics happened.

In March 1998, 32% of fourth graders did not meet the proficient standard. With the proficient standard scheduled to increase the following year, it was projected that less than half of Ohio's fourth graders would score as proficient.

Faced with the prospect of tens of thousands of students being "held back," state officials undermined and later eliminated the requirement.

Did Ohio miss an opportunity?