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Low student scores on national and state reading tests expose the disturbing reality that a lot of children are being promoted from one grade to the next even though they do not have the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed.

Reading is the foundational skill that all children need to do well in school and in life.  Yet, too many public schools are failing to teach young people to read well.

On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress , seven out of 10 fourth graders taking the test failed to perform at the proficient level.

State exams are graded differently than the national exam, but even here a significant majority of students are failing to read well.

In California, for example, nearly six out of 10 third graders--more than 57 percent-- failed to meet grade-level standards on the 2024 .

Yet, with relatively few exceptions, most of these students with weak reading skills are promoted to the next grade despite their demonstrated deficiencies.

This practice of social promotion has devastating impacts on children.  Take the tragic case of Aleysha Ortiz.

Ortiz graduated from Hartford Public High School in Connecticut in 2024 as an honor student even though  nor write.

She says that she had problems with letter, sound, and number recognition from the first grade, but those issues were never addressed, and she kept getting promoted to the next grade.

By the sixth grade, Ortiz said that she could only read at kindergarten or first-grade level.

Shockingly, instead of helping her, Ortiz , “They would tell me to stay in a corner and sleep or draw pictures.”

When she was in the eleventh grade, Ortiz  and told the school that she needed help.  Eventually, the school tested her, and just one month before her graduation the results came back showing that she was dyslexic and required instruction in phonics, fluency, and comprehension, i.e., the evidence-based science of reading that she should have received years earlier.

In the face of this appalling failure by her public schools, Ortiz has recently sued the school district.

“I decided that they had 12 years,” says Ortiz, so, “Now it’s my time.”

Unfortunately, Ortiz is not alone in being socially promoted despite glaring reading problems.

Former Georgia elementary school teacher Missy Purcell  that her school used an ineffective progressive reading instructional method rather than research-proven phonics instruction.  The result was disaster.

Purcell recalled one boy in her class who she said, “couldn’t write a complete sentence and he just went to middle school.” 

Despite having fifth graders reading at just a second-grade level, she said, “I’d put an A in the grade book, but I’ve always felt that was misleading because they were in the fifth grade.”  Yet, those students were passed along to the next grade.

Social promotion does children no favors.  According to the , “Studies consistently find that children who are socially promoted in elementary school continue to struggle as they move through middle school, and they drop out of high school at much higher rates, likely leading to a lifetime of hardship as adults.”

In response, a growing number of states are enacting anti-social-promotion policies, which are succeeding in improving learning.

In 2022, Brown University released a  of Indiana’s anti-social-promotion policy, which found that “third-grade retention increases achievement in English Language Arts (ELA) and math immediately and substantially, and the effect persists into middle school.”

Instead of socially promoting children like Aleysha Ortiz, decision-makers must follow the science and address the individual needs of students even if that means that they must be retained in a grade.  Bureaucratic laziness must be replaced with policies that improve student learning and help our children succeed in life.