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February 1, 2010

Anonymous The Kokomo Tribune Mon Feb 01, 2010, 11:35 PM EST

THE ISSUE:The governor’s plan to hold back third-graders who can’t read.

OUR VIEW:The state shouldn’t tie the hands of educators with arbitrary mandates.

At first glance, the plan to hold back any third-grader who can’t read seems like a good idea. After all, a child who can’t read is unlikely to succeed in school. Passing such a child on to the next grade would seem to be asking for trouble.

Gov. Mitch Daniels has a point when he says sending an illiterate child on to the fourth grade is unfair to the next teacher and perhaps even disastrous for the child. Educators freely admit that when a teenager finally loses interest in education, the problem can often be traced back to the child’s failure to master reading in elementary school.

The seeds of any child’s eventual success or failure are often planted young.

Still, it’s important to avoid simple solutions to complex problems.

Can we really conclude that a child is illiterate based solely on his or her performance on a single test? No one test should be that important.

What if the child has other issues? What if he or she simply had a bad day?

Local educators urge the state to leave the decisions about which students should be held back in local hands. Let them look at each child individually, examining the factors and bits of data that say whether a child might benefit from another year in the third grade.

There are other factors to consider in making that determination. How many third-graders, for example, can one school handle?

And there are other ways to help struggling students catch up.

At Southeastern School Corp. in Walton, educators four years ago created a special second-grade class for students who had not yet mastered reading. The students spend all of their class time focusing on reading and math, and educators say the results have been promising.

The governor raises a valid point. Schools should not simply push students from one grade level to the next regardless of whether they’ve mastered the needed skills.

Every child deserves a chance at success, and we should be doing everything we can to make sure students don’t become frustrated and drop out before they finish high school.

But there are no quick fixes.

The state should give schools the tools they need to help students succeed, but it shouldn’t tie their hands with arbitrary requirements.

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