Altitude Check – Developing Early Literacy Skills is Essential to Later Student Success

Developing Early Literacy Skills – Building A Strong Foundation for ‘High Flying’ Learners

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently released a study entitled “Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students.” I was intrigued to look through the findings since the education world often seems more compelled to study low-performing students rather than those at the upper end. With so many government initiatives focused on increasing the performance of struggling students, I can certainly understand why so much time and energy has gone into analyzing this population. But surely there are pressures and challenges for the high achievers, too, right?

This study followed students over the course of several years: one group was tracked from third to eighth grade and the other from sixth to tenth grade. Results were examined across both math and reading, and also took into account the poverty level of the schools. (Please see study for more extensive findings and implications.) The principal finding was that “a majority of high flyers maintained their status over time, but substantial numbers ‘lost altitude’.” That is to say, nearly 3 out of 5 students meeting the definition of high flyers—determined by scoring at or above the 90th percentile on a designated standardized test—at the onset of the research were still in that category in the final year of the study. Of course, this also means that more than 40% of students did not stay.

While the overall number of students in the high-achieving category actually increased from onset to final year due to an influx of “Late Bloomers” who ascended into the top 10th percentile over the course of the study, the authors made the point that “we’re not seeing…students scrape and claw their way into the high-achieving ranks from the 20th, 30th, 40th or 50th percentiles. Instead students come in and out of the top decile but basically stay within the top third of students.”

So, then, even in this study focused on top academic performers, we see once again that dramatic upward movement from the lower end of the scale is not common. It’s rare to see a low-performing third grader be a high-performing one by eighth grade. Why is this, I wonder?

I can’t help but think that reading instruction has a lot to do with it. By third grade and the onset of standardized testing, teachers are hard-pressed to find time to develop literacy skills. Students missing the fundamental building blocks of reading are left behind—and good luck to them in all the other subject areas that require reading in order to comprehend, too. (Can one really understand the life cycle of a cell, the causes of a revolution, or the proof of a theorem without being able to read?!)

It is critical that students have a strong foundation in literacy by the time they enter the third grade. As I’ve mentioned before, the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that 67% of fourth-graders had failed to achieve reading proficiency. Taking a look at this Fordham Institute study, as well as countless others—do we think those fourth-graders are likely to make their way into the top-performing category by the eighth grade? Or by the time they could be applying to colleges? Probably not.

Instead of focusing on figuring out how to balance testing pressures and instructional needs once third grade starts, let’s do everything we can to help young learners develop literacy skills before they enter third grade. Let’s help preschoolers, kindergarteners, and primary students build the phonetic and linguistic foundation that will set them up to be high-achieving success stories, to be high flyers in the third grade—and to stay that way.

Read The Thomas B. Fordman study,  “Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude?  Performance Trends of Top Students” here