Rockefeller Foundation To Push Reading By Third Grade

A campaign coordinated by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation will result in community grants and legislative policy proposals to improve the reading performance of Arkansas’ third-graders.

The statewide efforts are part of a national Campaign for Grade-Level Reading led by the Annie E. Casey Foundation that has a presence in 124 communities. Arkansas is one of the first to participate statewide.

According to a 2010 report by the Casey Foundation entitled, “Early Warning: The Importance of Grade-Level Reading by the Third Grade,” students not reading at grade level cannot understand up to half of the printed fourth-grade curriculum, while three-fourths of students who read poorly in third grade will read poorly in high school.

The campaign is focusing on three areas: improving early grade school readiness; addressing chronic absences; and reducing summer learning loss. According to the campaign, kindergarten students from low-income families may have been exposed to up to 30 million fewer words than their middle-income peers, and children from low-income families can be nearly three grade levels behind their peers by the time they complete the fifth grade because of summer learning loss.

Arkansas’ campaign involves an advisory committee composed of a number of organizations, including the Arkansas Education Association, the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, and the Arkansas Department of Education.  AETN is developing a media campaign.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families is taking a lead role in formulating public policies that will be proposed during the next legislative session. AACF has been analyzing reading proficiency among Arkansas third graders and is planning to present its findings during a press conference in early September.

Sherece West, president and CEO of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, said the campaign’s goal is for 100 percent of Arkansas third-graders to read proficiently by 2020. In order to discover what strategies work best, grants will be made to communities currently enjoying varying degrees of success in meeting needs. The foundation will be leveraging its own funds with grants at the state and local levels.

The foundation has invested more than $8 million during the past decade in early childhood interventions.

The problem doesn’t just affect lower-income students, however.

On the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 33 percent of American fourth-graders were reading proficiently, and only 17 percent of low-income students were.  In Arkansas, 29 percent scored proficient, ranking the state 35th.

Among Arkansas students eligible for free or reduced price lunches, 20 percent scored proficient, while 42 percent of ineligible students achieved that score.