Unfortunately, the prevalence of nonreaders moving through our public-school systems is widespread. Here in North Carolina, in a typical year such as 2017–18, 55.7 percent of public-school students in grades three through eight fail North Carolina’s end-of-grade reading test. On the most recent reading tests administered by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), our so-called Nation’s Report Card, just 36 percent of North Carolina fourth-graders “performed at or above the NAEP proficient level.” Sixty-seven percent performed at the basic level — meaning that a third of all students did not. Lest you think this is a North Carolina problem alone, both measures were on par with, and in fact a little above, the national average.
The significance of this can’t be overstated. If students haven’t learned how to read proficiently (or in some cases read at all) by the time they enter fourth...