by Anne Grosso de León

Literacy skills involve more than being able to decode words: the ability to sift through the richness of language to understand meaning and develop an effective vocabulary needs to begin in the early elementary school grades.

Why do reading experts—an otherwise sensible-shoe, button-down lot not given to hyperbole—tend to use dire metaphors like “fourth grade slump” and, more alarmingly, “eighth grade cliff” to describe the current state of literacy in America’s upper elementary and middle schools?

Recent reform efforts have yielded positive results in improving reading achievement for the nation’s children in the primary grades, they say, but U.S. children are not moving beyond basic “decoding” skills even as they advance to the fourth grade and classes in history, mathematics and science. The slightly larger desks waiting for fourth graders when they return to school in the fall are designed, after all, to accommodate more than their growing bodies. Piled high on their new desks are a variety of new academic subject texts as well as samples of what is now called “literature.” Their storybooks a fond memory, the children will be expected to read these new texts, laden with content and new vocabularies, not merely to demonstrate that they can sound out the words, but to demonstrate that they understand what they read. In short, they are now reading to learn.

But are they?
Apparently many of America’s fourth graders are not succeeding in making this transition from decoding to reading to learn. According to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) on achievement in fourth grade reading, 37 percent of America’s fourth graders read below the “basic” level and only one in three can read at the “proficient” level. Maybe “fourth grade slump” is not hyperbole after all but a crisp metaphor that captures the nub of a growing crisis in American education.

An Orphaned Responsibility?
The reason children have so much difficulty in making the transition from learning to decode text to reading it in order to learn appears to be that teaching children to read to learn is pretty much an orphaned responsibility in the K-12 world. The perception of teachers in the upper elementary grades is that the teaching of reading is an early elementary responsibility.

“The higher the grade level, the more prevalent this view is,” observes reading expert Michael L. Kamil. “Moreover, many of the teachers responsible for ‘content areas’ do not have substantial knowledge of how to teach reading.” Kamil is Professor of Education; Language, Literacy and Culture; Learning Design and Technology at the Stanford University School of Education in Stanford, California.

Despite the fact that students are largely not receiving instruction in reading for comprehension, an assumption prevails that—somehow—the children will automatically learn to read the more complex, content-laden texts that are set before them in the fourth grade. That “somehow,” however, turns out to resemble a large, black hole into which an unconscionable number of America’s children fall and are ultimately lost.

Next page: Students who slip into the fourth grade slump often find themselves headed for the eighth grade cliff, when academic content becomes more complex.

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