Governor John Kasich on Monday signed a bill that steps up public education standards across Ohio and includes a requirement that some third-graders be held back if they cannot read at grade level.
The third grade reading guarantee was the hot-button topic in Senate Bill 316, a multi-faceted education and workforce development bill that the Republican governor signed in Cincinnati.
Kasich said he doesn't intend the new law to be a form of punishment for 8- and 9-year-old boys and girls who want to move on to the fourth grade, but more of a necessary investment in their futures.
"If you can't read you might as well forget it," Kasich said at a bank operations center in Cincinnati where he was joined by state lawmakers for the ceremony. "Kids who make their way through social promotion beyond the third grade, when they get up to the 8th, 9th, 10th grade. . . they get lapped, the material becomes too difficult."
The Kasich administration often refers to a recent Annie E. Casey Foundation report that found that children who cannot read at grade level by the third grade are four times more likely to drop out before the 12th grade.
"No one should be surprised," Kasich warned. "We will not delay any holdback in the third grade if you can't read."
The education bill was part of the governor's mid-biennium review of the state's budget and policy initiatives. Kasich clashed with the bill's sponsor, Sen. Peggy Lehner, of suburban Dayton, after the Senate deemed the governor's initial idea of holding back students who could not read at the "proficient" level as unfair and too onerous.
Lehner opted for a lower threshold that gradually steps up the level of reading required for a child to be promoted as other safeguards are put in place, such as improved teaching standards, more reading intervention and summer programs. That will assure that not all the scrutiny falls on the children but challenges schools to do more to help students learn to read.
Kasich initially blasted his fellow Republicans in the Senate for weakening the bill, but has since relented. He thanked Lehner on Monday at the bill signing for her work on the bill.
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