Let’s Quit Failing Kids, Teach Them to Read
Tribune Forum Letter
By Brian Slade
Published: February 7, 2011 12:15AM
This past year I kept reading about the report that two-thirds of Utah third-graders don’t read at grade level, and how this benchmark is critical because through third grade, students learn to read. After that, they read to learn. If we fail them by the third grade, we’ve failed them for the rest of their lives.
The noise about this was so loud, tragic and embarrassing that I thought surely the 2011 Legislature would address this pivotal problem upon which turns so much else, from classroom cohesion to dropout rates to crime and a vibrant Utah workforce.
This is a problem that is solvable: by not promoting students who don’t read at grade level, by paying for tutors or by making students do summer school.
If an epidemic of a life-damaging disease affected two-thirds of our children, there would be a massive, compulsory public health program to stop it. But nothing from our Legislature to stop this reading disease.
We just tread water with more of the same. Since this problem can be solved now, it should be solved now. We can’t wait 10 years and fail hundreds of thousands more children.
Brian Slade
Salt Lake City