Sara Mead on how learning to read by third grade is a goal that can organize everything we do for kids:
If you’re reading this, that probably means that someone, once upon a time, taught you to read. Most likely, this happened sometime in your first few years of elementary school — kindergarten or first, second, or third grade — building the vocabulary and language skills you began developing earlier in your life, starting in infancy and even before you were born. Not surprisingly, then, you probably remember little about your laborious progress acquiring the skills that form the building blocks of reading — recognizing the connection between print and meaning, learning to associate printed letters with sounds, putting those sounds together to form words, and developing the vocabulary and background knowledge to derive meaning from words on the page. By now, those skills have become internalized, old hat to you — so much that now, as you read this, you’re hardly cognizant of the mechanics of what you’re doing. Unfortunately, for too many children in the United States today, this story does not have a similarly happy ending.