Combatting The Third Grade Slump

THIRD grade has always been a hard year for Rahmana Muhammad’s children, and therefore for her. All of a sudden, it seems to this mother of four, their textbooks have fewer pictures, their homework lasts for hours, and their test scores plummet.

That’s how a recent New York Times article about efforts to turn around Newark’s struggling Newton Street School begins. But, unfortunately, it’s not a problem that’s limited to Ms. Muhammad’s children, or to Newton, or even to similarly struggling schools. Across the country–in schools rich and poor; urban, suburban, and rural–too many children’s learning hits a roadblock when they come to third or fourth grade.

We know that third grade is a major transition point in children’s education. It’s when they make the switch from learning to read, to reading to learn. As a result, children who haven’t mastered proficient reading by third grade face a plethora of challenges–not only are they behind where they need to be in reading, but their inability to read well keeps them from mastering essential content in other subject areas, leading them to fall farther and farther behind. This begins a vicious cycle of school failure that can have devastating long-term consequences.

Children don’t fall behind in third or fourth grade because they’re not smart enough to handle third grade content. Children fall behind because their previous years of schooling haven’t equipped them with the foundation of skills and knowledge to master the more challenging work they begin to tackle in third grade. But this fall-off isn’t inevitable. Providing children with an aligned early education experience from pre-k through third grade can can help prevent third grade struggles by ensuring that each year’s learning builds seemlessly on what children learned the year before. Unfortunately, too many schools ask too little–and provide students with too little support for learning–in the early grades before dramatically increasing the rigor of instruction in third grade leading up to all-important third grade tests. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Because third grade is a stumbling point for so many children, PK-3 alignment must be a key strategy for turning around low-performing elementary schools. Providing aligned curriculum, supported by effective professional development and added support for struggling students, is essential to ensuring that students get to third grade with the skills they need to master third grade-level content, perform well on state assessments, and, most importantly, proceed successfully to the next stage of their learning.