Transcription
Here's one of the strongest predictors of whether you're going to achieve success in life. Whether you make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn by the end of third grade.
If you don't make that transition at that age, your chance of achieving success in life falls off a cliff. Your chance of ending up in jail goes up several fold. Your chances of ending up in poverty or ending up on government aid goes through the roof.
And yet, if you do make that transition, you are likely to be well on your way to still living the American dream. So, that should intensify our focus on doing the obvious thing. Make sure our students are actually able to read by the end of third grade.
A lot of this does start in the family. If you're not even starting exposure to literacy by the end of kindergarten, chances are you're going to have an uphill climb. And that starts with the family. But schools make a difference, too.
And I'll tell you one experience I've had here in the state of Ohio visiting one such school in Dayton. It's called the Greater Dayton School where they're serving only a Medicaid-only population, kids of Medicaid parents. And this is something that's a tough population to deal in, parents who are coming from tough school districts. And yet, despite many of those kids having broken or tough family backgrounds, by bringing rigor to education, by taking the school day to 4 p.m., by paying teachers and compensating and rewarding and promoting teachers based on how well they're actually doing, by having a principal who's really driven like an entrepreneur to achieve a mission, by integrating even AI to be able to tailor education to individual kids, you now have students that are outperforming even normal public school benchmarks on math, reading, and writing.
It's a beautiful story and I think it's an example of what's possible in our education system and we've got to turn this ship around because the number one issue our country faces in the next 20 years that nobody's really talking about is fixing the educational achievement crisis that we're in. We're entering an era of AI, quantum computing, automation. Yet today, the average seventh grader in the United States is performing at the same academic standard as a third-grade student in China. That's unacceptable. We're going to have to turn that ship around.
For my part, we're going to turn it around in our own home state of Ohio. But I think this is America's modern Apollo mission. This is the Apollo mission of our generation. Fix that educational achievement crisis. It starts with a third-grade reading guarantee. If you can't read by the end of third grade, you're not going to fourth grade until you can. Passing along a kid like a little widget on an assembly line is not true compassion. That's a form of cruelty. True compassion is giving our kids with standards the toolkit that they actually need to succeed.