State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced a statewide initiative Tuesday to ensure that all students learn to read by third grade by 2026.
Thurmond said he plans to form a task force comprised of education and literacy experts, researchers and advocates as well as students and parents to determine strategies that will help students learn to read.
Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, D-Oakland, will also introduce legislation next year that will support the literacy initiative, Thurmond, Bonta and other state officials and education experts said Tuesday during a virtual briefing.
“We already know that when students learn to read, they can read to learn anything, that this is a gateway skill that can carry them to any point in their life, in their career and in their journey,” he said.
Thurmond argued that students who learn to read by third grade are less likely to drop out of school and less likely to enter the criminal justice system.
Improving literacy is also a matter of equity, he said, noting that while roughly half of the state’s students read at their grade level, that figure can drop into the 30s and lower among Black, Latino and Native American students and students whose families struggle with poverty.
“We know that our students can learn, and they can overcome obstacles, but we have to give them the resources to do that,” Thurmond said.
Students, parents and others who are interested in participating in the literacy effort are encouraged to contact statewideliteracycampaign@cde.ca.gov.
46 comments
What a great idea! What would we do without a government that comes up with the idea that we use the schools to teach children to read.
Public education in this state is broken and beyond repair.
That would be nice!
For right now some kids in high school can’t even read. The California schools have failed them.
Their parents are to blame.
Perhaps I’m more ignorant than I had thought, but aren’t students able to read in the first grade? How do they do homework or in class assignments without a most basic level of literacy?
Are there many students not able to read by the third grade?
My thoughts exactly.
But then I looked at the stats and according to NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) report, in 2019 only 34% of 4th graders were proficient in reading. In CA it was 32%, which is around average.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/states/achievement/?grade=4
I think the test itself is part of the problem.
If you look at the example
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/sample-questions/?grade=4
grades for question 2 (evaluate story character and support opinion) are conspicuously low. And of course the question and evaluation guidelines are terrible, which explains the grades. Evaluation assumes students must reason about the change in the character of a protagonist. While the question asked nothing of a kind – only whether the protagonist changes in the course of the story. Which he obviously does, because he ages 10 years.
Whoever designed this test shouldn’t be in the teaching profession because their own thinking is muddled. I don’t know how CA assess reading proficiency, but I expect it’s based along the same lines.
Our two grand daughters were both reading before kindergarten.
Their dad (my 42 year old son) taught himself to read at 3 1/2 !!
If kids can’t read by the 3rd grade; they are going to be way behind from there on. Sad.
Uhhh, didn’t we all learn to read in First grade?
Wait a minute.
Isn’t that pushing kids into something they may not consent to?
Do the parents agree with this?
Why steel away a child’s natural development by forcing them to read, of all things.
I was forced to read before I went to kindergarten and it has ruined my life.
My peers hate me when I ask for food by name rather than just picking a number by the photo.
It’s tragic.
I have even gotten jobs offered by white supremacists because I could fill out a job application better than others.
The horror of it all.
Don’t force kids into learning before their time.
Is this a joke? Most states have their children reading halfway through first grade. And in NY and MA kids are reading in kindergarten. Seems to be a teacher problem and not a kid problem.
Let’s call it what it is, bringing down the bar…I recall my child reading by the end of kindergarten.
This is a joke right?
Is it April 1st?
Are kids in 3rd grade not 8 and 9 years old? What exactly have they been getting taught if they cannot read, surely they need to be able to read in order to learn most other subjects, or did teaching/learning really change so much since I was at school?
This is really shocking!
That’s sad, it should be first grade. Then they can hold them back one year if necessary or remediate through summer school/tutoring.
I think that would be a lot tougher to do to a third grader-especially hard on them emotionally/socially to be held back.
You lower the standards year after year in California and dumb down the education system to make it more equitable. How is that working for you?
Also, if the parents would put some effort into reading to their toddlers and encouraging them to read, there’d be a 180 degree change.
My adult daughter (and all of her classmates) learned to read in kindergarten while attending public school in SoCal. Why not try to achieve the desired “equity” by bringing struggling students up instead of all students down.
It’s not the kids. This article is from YESTERDAY. Worthless Teachers Unions getting all the money and leaving their students in the rear view mirror:
Western Journal: “In Baltimore alone, 41 percent of high school students averaged less than a 1.0 GPA during the 2020-2021 school year. In one public school in the city, a high school student was ranked near the top half of his class with a 0.13 GPA. All of this happened despite the fact that the district spent $18,000 per student, 40 percent more than the national average.”
What is wrong with everyone these days? No need to learn reading, writing and arithmetic as long as you have ears to hear and absorb CRT indoctrination to help you become a successful leftist voting citizen.
Wait!! The lottery is going to fix the school system, you’ll see.
this is so depressing…I was reading in Kindergarten and was reading books like “Tuck Everlasting” by 3rd grade…what happened to the school system? What happened to parental responsibility.
Note – Many kids I grew up with were advancing at a similar rate. This is not bragging about being a nerdy kid, its about how far we have fallen in the last 20-30 years.
Don’t get me wrong I love my kids sports, but if parents spent as much time on kids reading, they would all reading in 1st grade.
Rule in our house is no sports until they read 30 minutes a day. Both kids were reading at 3rd grade levels by 1st grade.
BTW In second grade we lived in Europe, was reading proficiently in 2 languages.
Do you need to read to post pictures of yourself dancing on Tik Tok?
I had to look at the calendar to check if it was April 1st because this has to be a joke. Hmmm. Let me see… reading is already taught in kindergarten. They start out with simple 3-letter sight words and also learn the ABC’s. Guess Newsom missed the memo. He’s a joke.
… by 3rd grade? Calif schools have deteriorated that much?! We were reading by end of 1st or middle of 2nd grade…. disgusting! kids should have been held back then – or the teachers fired..
Reading by the 3Rlrd Grade ? I, like my Son, were reading much earlier than the 3rd Grade, I know, it’s complicated, it always is when not getting results have no consequences
No kidding. I thought they did that a hundred years ago. So what have they been doing all this time?
As a current educator for students with learning differences I am disappointed by many of the comments here. Hundreds of millions of individuals world wide have dyslexia. In the US alone 10’s of millions of kids have various learning differences. Perhaps not looking at just your own experiences or your children’s experiences with reading and learning would be helpful to understand this initiative.
As a parent screwed over by the school system here, I will disagree with you. First, where in the above do you see anything, anything at all, about learning disabilities. You don’t. Learning disabilities are individual, while the story above looks more like a school equity issue where he wants to shift resources from good performing schools to badly performing ones. I think this is a woke equity thing. Do you really see learning disability in that story? Where? Oh, and per my screwed over words, we had a kid with learning disabilities and basically had to find our own therapists and OT and teachers and pay for it all ourselves to bring our kid up to speed. The school gave us a talk that we are entitled to the Chevy of resources and not the Cadillac of resources, and they did basically nothing useful and actually did more harm that good sticking kid in learning center which was just baby sitting. I will never ever forget the slimeball school rep who talked down to us so satisfied with themselves how they weaseled out of anything and we were on our own. Yet, they still got my property tax money.
Special Needs, and IEPs are not new. If teachers could teach children to read in kindergarten 30 years ago – why can’t they do it now?
From CA public schools I managed, along with 30 other kids, to flunk the 3rd grade. Was at a Catholic school for a short time that wanted to send me back to their 2nd grade. Off to New Mexico, one room reservation school, one teacher, grades kindergarten to 8th. Best teacher ever! Taught me how to read with comprehension, do basic math, write in scrip. The basic stepping stones all kids need to not just learn what is being taught but so they can continue learning on their own. Came back to CA public schools for the 5th grade and was the “smartest” kid in class. One really good teacher can do wonders. We need more of them. I do have to admit that she was not able to teach me proper spelling, for that I depend on spell check.
How in the hell does a teacher promote a child from grade to grade when they can’t read ? Oh wait ….. California.
+1
Is this an onion article?
Like “Senior center creates new policy to help 80+ residents get their first job”
One more reason to keep homeschooling…
+1
The politically correct solution to every problem is to create a task force or committee or new government department to STUDY the problem. In other words, grow government and bureaucracy. That is also Mark DeSaulnier’s solution to gun violence. All these problems have been studied ad nauseam so, if these studies have not come up with the solution by now throwing more money at new committees will not help.
“Thurmond argued that students who learn to read by third grade are less likely to drop out of school and less likely to enter the criminal justice system.”
It kills me how these politicians suddenly “discover” things that intelligent adults have know all along. Thurmond is apparently amazed to discover that grade school children should learn to read! Now that he has made this startling discovery he needs to “argue” this to someone (presumably people who were so clueless that they didn’t know children should learn to read) and as a bonus, appoint a task force to study this revolutionary idea.
If reading by third grade is an equity thing, then that’s the kind of equity that will keep these kids in last place.
And they wonder why they can’t compete with charter schools or home schooling.
How about basic arithmetic?
I hear it’s racist, but it sure has come in handy over the years.
Since testing is inherently culturally biased and unfair and we will never be able to determine proficiency in a fair and unbiased way. I say we just declare that children have an innate ability at birth to read and be done with it.
But seriously, according to the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 32% of fourth graders have reading proficiently. These results put California below the national average and behind 25 other states.
I’m sure the solution is to raise taxes and throw more money at the problem since that seems to be a panacea for everything wrong in California… I know, maybe Pfizer or J&J can come up with a vaccine?!?
California should set a more realistic goal of teaching kids to read before they graduate high school…
Seems late. My sons could read before kindergarten
Third grade…mine was reading in kinder and sounding out letters in tk . Can’t blame the schools and teachers or government…it starts at HOME. If a child isn’t encouraged at home to love learning and is only given tv and iPad time, how is it the school or governments fault! Parents need to step the eff up and stop complaining.
lolz +1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3043740/
Maybe the headline should read, Teach third graders to read at third grade level, etc. I’m sure I was reading way before the third grade, although that was a long, long time age.
Wait, what? My kids began reading at ages 5 and 3. By the time they were in third grade, they could read anything and everything, much to my dismay.
Then again, my kids were homeschooled, so….
When my child was born I decided to put large labels on most of the items in the bedroom and spell the item’s names in big simple letters, like CUP – BOX -BOOK – LAMP, ETC. Did some simple teaching… had my kid reading pretty well before starting preschool.
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