Florida Retention Policy a Blight on Literacy, Children across US
By Paul L. Thomas, Ed.D. | Originally Published at The Becoming Radical. August 6, 2014
The New York Times headline suggests we are finally poised to read a positive story about education: A Summer of Extra Reading and Hope for Fourth Grade.
But education reporter Motoko Rich’s examination of third-grade retention policies based on the Florida model and sweeping across the U.S. is not about “hope,” but about a disturbing resistance by political leaders, the media, and the public to confront the overwhelming evidence that grade-retention is a harmful policy and that the Florida model has been discredited.
Rich opens with one of the misleading Urban Legends driving flawed reading policies: “Educators like to say that third grade is the year when students go from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn.’”
However, as Anya Kamenetz reports for NPR:
“The theory of the fourth-grade shift had been based on behavioral data,” says the lead author of the study, Donna Coch. She heads the Reading Brains Lab atempathyeducates – Florida Retention Policy a Blight on Literacy, Children across US:
