Giving Compass' Take:

• Education Next makes a proposal that could help high-poverty elementary schools produce better student outcomes: adding a level after second grade and before third grade.

• Education progress often requires bold action, but is this idea viable? It may assist some students who fall behind, but what are the downsides for others?

• Here's more on the importance of grade-level reading proficiency and how donors can help.

Even with high-quality preschool, and even with a fantastic elementary school, even with longer school days and years, there’s just not enough time in the six years from kindergarten through grade five to help all low-income kids catch up to the grade-level expectations they will face in middle school. The impacts of poverty and related social challenges are just too overwhelming. This is particularly the case for reading, where the slow, gradual, and cumulative process of building content knowledge and vocabulary simply cannot be rushed.

So why not give them more time?

Imagine if high-poverty schools were able to add an extra grade to elementary school — call it grade 2.5. Students would enter elementary school at age five, but instead of leaving at eleven they would exit at age twelve. In effect, schools would create a default policy to retain most students after the second grade.

This is a cousin of policies that many states have implemented to “end social promotion” and retain a small sliver of students who cannot read with fair fluency by the end of the third grade. The research on most of those efforts is somewhere between mixed and disappointing, which isn’t surprising given the way those policies are usually implemented (though Florida is a notable exception). For the kids, it feels like a punishment and a mark of shame, and all they get is a second helping of the same curriculum that didn’t work for them the first time. Meanwhile, the vast majority of kids are socially promoted anyway, even though they haven’t come close to mastering grade-level standards.

Read the full article about adding an extra grade for high-poverty elementary schools by Michael J. Petrilli at Education Next.