In Third Grade, the Pressure to Perform Is On

Students Pushed to Read, Get Ready for Tests

One in an occasional series about the grades that provide the building blocks of a child's education.

Journalists almost never know as much as the people they cover. But one day while watching a frustrated third-grade boy struggle over a reading passage, education reporter and columnist Mike Bowler noticed something the boy's teacher and aide had not: The boy had an obscure reading disability, a failure to distinguish similar-sounding consonants, which affected his academic achievement and his behavior.

Bowler recognized the problem because he and several other staff members from the newspaper he worked for at the time, the Baltimore Sun, had immersed themselves in a project called "Reading by 9." For more than four years beginning in 1997, the paper dedicated itself to helping its readers understand how children learn to decode words on a page and emphasized repeatedly that if they didn't do so by age 9, their futures were in jeopardy.

The stories, tutoring by employees of the newspaper and other activitiesincluding nearly 200 columns written by Bowlerwere a testament to the importance everyone involved in education has been putting on third grade. Research shows that elementary school children who cannot read proficiently by that point are liable to struggle academically for the rest of their school days and lives.

The project, since duplicated at several other newspapers, remains controversial among journalists. Some editors and reporters say newspapers should inform readers, not try to change the world. But many education leaders say everyone has a stake in teaching reading.

"If you don't," said U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in a recent interview with The Washington Post, "you aren't going to have anybody who can read your newspaper."

These days, everything starts with third grade. It is the first year in which states test students in reading and math under the No Child Left Behind law. Many schools have reorganized to make sure those 8- and 9-year-olds get all the attention they need.

At Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy, a public elementary school in Alexandria, for instance, the 49 third-graders have been reshuffled into three different but fluid reading groupsupper, middle and lowerfor two hours of language arts each afternoon. Each of the three third-grade teachers Stefan Fisher, Rebecca Kelley and Sandy Sandoztakes a group, including students they do not teach regularly. This is a sharp departure from one teacher handling different reading groups in a single class, but the results have been good.

Last year, 83 percent of Lyles- Crouch third-graders passed the state reading test, at a school where 31 percent of the families have incomes low enough to qualify for federal lunch subsidies. The principal, reading expert Patricia Zissios, came from Fairfax County, where the slogan was "Success by 8," an even more ambitious goal than the Sun's "Reading by 9."

One afternoon last week in Fisher's reading group in Room 213, 16 students were jotting down ideas for persuasive essays on whether they should be required to wear their uniforms, which are white tops and dark bottoms.

Fisher chuckled at one student's thought: The school should get rid of uniforms, the boy said, "so you don't get people mixed up."

While most students worked on their essays, Fisher convened in a corner a group of six to take turns reading Roald Dahl's "George's Marvelous Medicine."