California has a state-level crisis in teaching reading. It poses an existential threat to our economy, to social justice, and to our democracy itself. Patchwork solutions won’t fix it – we need a comprehensive state-level plan to improve reading results.

The facts on California’s student reading achievement are grim:

  • Two out of three of low-income Latino 3rd graders are below grade level in reading. For low-income Black students, it is three out of four. These groups make up half of all California students – more than three million children.
  • On the NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, half of all California low-income 4th graders score “Below Basic,” the lowest level of achievement. Even for higher-income students, less than half are scored “Proficient.” For Black students, scores have not improved for 15 years.
  • As Pedro Noguera and Bruce Fuller noted a few weeks ago, 4th graders in Los Angeles Unified, just 9 or 10 years old, are already two years behind their similarly diverse peers in Miami. Even more shocking, these lagging Los Angeles Unified students achieve well above their peers in districts like San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, and Sacramento.

All these results are from before two years of Covid disruption, where many of California’s largest districts offered long bouts of remote instruction. The situation is certainly worse today. And the damage is likely permanent: a student who struggles with reading after 3rd grade will almost certainly struggle in school and in life.

So it is timely that State Superintendent Tony Thurmond created a task force to focus on the early literacy crisis. His stated goal is a good one: that every student be reading at grade level by 3rd grade.

Unfortunately, his proposed solutions are nowhere near up to the task. They are the typical patchwork of spending and programs – library cards, free e-books, grants for dual language programs – that have been applied, over and over, to a system that fails to teach reading to the students who need our schools the most.

Read the full article about California's early literacy crisis by Todd Collins at EdSource.