Want to prevent dropouts? Look to the third grade.

  Nine in 10 students who drop out of high school couldn’t read in the third grade.

  Does the solution to America’s dropout epidemic seem obvious all of the sudden?

  Maybe. But that won’t make it easy. Speaking National Summit on Education Reform on Thursday, City University of New York sociologist Donald Hernandez noted that only one-third of third graders are reading at a proficient level. And there are certainly other predictive factors — in particular, poverty — that correlate to student decisions to drop out.

  But given the totality of the data showing the link between early reading and high school completion, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett argued that that putting accountability on third-grade reading wasn’t just a matter of public policy. “This is 100 percent about social justice,” he said.

  He said that all schools, all districts and all communities across the United States need to say, “we are going to get every one of our children in every one of our schools on a path to academic success.”

  In his experience, that means not passing students out of the third grade until they are reading at level.

  He noted that his triplet daughters were held back. "So this is nothing I haven't done to my own children." 

  There are many objections to holding students back, he said, yet: “I don’t think we’ve gone far enough” — saying that he is of the opinion that not only should third graders not be socially promoted if they cannot read at grade level, but sixth graders should not be promoted if they are not meeting mathematics standards.

  And, he said, many junior and high school teachers agree. Reformers should identify educators like this and “divide and conquer,” he said.