If a Child Can’t Read by Third Grade, the Prison System Has Already Started Counting

There is a fact about American governance so grotesque in its implications that most people, upon hearing it, assume it must be an urban legend or a mischaracterized anecdote or, at minimum, an exaggeration crafted for rhetorical effect. It is none of these things. It is documented public policy: several U.S. states use third-grade reading scores as one of the data points in forecasting future prison bed capacity. The departments of correction in these states have determined, through actuarial analysis, that the number of children who cannot read proficiently by the end of third grade is a reliable predictor of how many prison cells they will need to construct a decade later. They are not hiding this. It is in their planning documents. They have concluded, based on the data, that a child who cannot read by age nine is so statistically likely to end up in their custody that it is fiscally prudent to begin building his cell while he is still learning to tie his shoes.

Now consider this number: according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress — the NAEP, also known as the Nation’s Report Card — 82% of Black fourth-graders in the United States read below the proficient level. Eighty-two percent. Not in Mississippi. Not in the lowest-performing school district. Nationally. Across all fifty states. In the richest nation in the history of human civilization, more than four out of every five Black nine-year-olds cannot read at grade level. And somewhere, in a state corrections department, someone is updating a spreadsheet.

The Third-Grade Cliff

The importance of third-grade reading is not a theory. It is not an aspirational benchmark chosen for its symbolic convenience. It is the point at which the educational trajectory pivots — the moment when children stop learning to read and begin reading to learn. Every subject from that point forward — math word problems, science texts, social studies readings, standardized test instructions — assumes reading competency. A child who cannot read at grade level by third grade is not merely behind in one subject. She is locked out of the entire academic enterprise, and the lock gets harder to pick with each passing year.

Donald Hernandez, a sociologist at Hunter College, published the definitive longitudinal analysis on this question, tracking the educational and economic outcomes of nearly four thousand students over two decades. His findings were unambiguous: children who are not reading proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school than proficient readers. For children who are both non-proficient readers and living in poverty, the dropout rate approaches one in four. For Black and Hispanic boys in poverty who cannot read by third grade, the dropout rate exceeds 25%. These are not risk factors. These are near-certainties, statistical probabilities so strong that they approach determinism.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation, which commissioned Hernandez’s research, titled its landmark report on the subject Early Warning! — as if the nation simply needed to be alerted, as if the problem were awareness rather than will. The report documented that approximately 16% of children who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade do not graduate from high school on time, compared to 4% of proficient readers. When poverty is added as a variable, the numbers become staggering. Among Black children in high-poverty schools, the nonproficient reading rate exceeds 90% in some districts, and the downstream consequences — dropout, unemployment, incarceration — follow with the reliability of gravity.

How We Got Here: The Reading Wars

The reason 82% of Black fourth-graders cannot read proficiently is not a mystery. It is not a function of intelligence, parental indifference, or cultural pathology. It is the direct and predictable consequence of a pedagogical catastrophe that has been unfolding in American schools for forty years, and its burden has fallen most heavily on the children who could least afford it.

Emily Hanford, the journalist whose investigative reporting for APM Reports has done more to expose this catastrophe than any academic paper, documented what reading scientists have known for decades: the dominant method of reading instruction in American schools does not work. The approach known as “balanced literacy” or “whole language” — which teaches children to guess at words using pictures, context clues, and the first letter rather than systematically decoding them through phonics — is contradicted by virtually every major study of how the brain learns to read. The cognitive science is not ambiguous. Reading is not natural. The brain does not learn to read the way it learns to speak. It must be explicitly taught the relationship between letters and sounds — the alphabetic principle — and this teaching must be systematic, sequential, and cumulative.

Hollis Scarborough, a researcher at Haskins Laboratories, developed what is now called “Scarborough’s Reading Rope” — a visual model that illustrates how skilled reading requires the intertwining of two broad categories of skill: word recognition (phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition) and language comprehension (vocabulary, syntax, background knowledge). Both strands must be explicitly taught and practiced. Balanced literacy effectively abandoned the word recognition strand, telling children to use “strategies” like looking at pictures and guessing, and the result was millions of children who never learned to decode printed text reliably.

The children who suffered most from this pedagogical malpractice were the children who arrived at school with the fewest literacy resources at home — fewer books, less read-aloud time, more limited vocabulary exposure. Children from affluent homes, whose parents read to them nightly and whose homes contained hundreds of books, could compensate for poor reading instruction through sheer environmental exposure. Children from high-poverty homes, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, could not. The reading instruction method that dominated American schools for a generation was a machine for producing inequality, and it operated at peak efficiency in the communities that could least absorb the damage.

Mississippi’s Miracle: Proof That It Can Be Done

If there is a single piece of evidence that the Black literacy crisis is solvable — that it is a policy failure, not a destiny — it is the story of Mississippi. In 2013, Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation, the state with the highest percentage of Black students, the state that had ranked at or near the bottom of every educational metric for as long as such metrics had been collected, passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act. The law mandated that all reading instruction be grounded in the science of reading: systematic phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency practice, vocabulary development, and comprehension strategies. Teachers were retrained. Curricula were replaced. Third-graders who could not read at grade level were retained and given intensive intervention rather than being promoted to fail quietly in fourth grade.

The results have been extraordinary. On the 2019 NAEP, Mississippi was the only state in the nation to show significant gains in fourth-grade reading. By 2022, Mississippi’s fourth-graders were outperforming those in California, a state that spends nearly three times as much per pupil. Mississippi’s Black fourth-graders now outperform the national average for Black fourth-graders. The poorest, most underresourced state in America, simply by teaching reading correctly, achieved what decades of funding increases, diversity initiatives, and progressive pedagogy had failed to produce.

This is not a complicated story. Mississippi did not discover a secret. It did what the science said to do, consistently and at scale, and it worked. The implications are as obvious as they are damning: every state that has not adopted evidence-based reading instruction is choosing, through negligence or ideological commitment, to leave millions of children illiterate. And the children paying the highest price for that choice are Black.

“The most important thing we can do for children in poverty is teach them to read. Not inspire them. Not motivate them. Teach them. Explicitly, systematically, using what the science tells us works.”
— Natalie Wexler, author of The Knowledge Gap

The Billion-Dollar Alternative

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that mails one free book per month to registered children from birth to age five, has now distributed over 200 million books across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Independent evaluations have shown that children who participate in the program arrive at kindergarten with significantly stronger vocabulary, letter recognition, and print awareness than children who do not. The cost is approximately $25 per child per year. Twenty-five dollars to give a child sixty books before she enters kindergarten.

The 1000 Books Before Kindergarten initiative, now adopted by libraries across the country, encourages families to read to their children from infancy, tracking progress toward the goal of one thousand books read aloud before the child enters school. The research supporting this approach is overwhelming: children who are read to regularly from birth develop vocabulary that is 50% larger by age three than children who are not. That vocabulary advantage translates directly into reading advantage, which translates directly into academic advantage, which translates directly into life advantage.

These programs work. They are inexpensive. They are scalable. And they are wildly underutilized in precisely the communities where they are most needed. The National Literacy Trust estimates that the total cost of illiteracy to the American economy is approximately $230 billion annually in lost productivity, increased healthcare costs, and criminal justice expenditures. We are spending $230 billion a year on the consequences of a problem that could be substantially solved for a fraction of that amount, if we simply taught children to read using methods that work and ensured they had books in their homes from birth.

The Pipeline They Built

The school-to-prison pipeline is not a metaphor. It is an actuarial reality with a documented mechanism, and third-grade reading is where the mechanism engages. A child who cannot read by third grade is retained or socially promoted. If retained, she is now older than her classmates, a risk factor for dropout. If socially promoted, she arrives in fourth grade unable to access the curriculum, falls further behind each year, begins to act out from frustration and shame, is disproportionately disciplined (Black students are suspended at three times the rate of white students), and eventually drops out or is pushed out. A young person without a high school diploma faces an unemployment rate three times the national average and an incarceration probability that dwarfs that of her educated peers.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that approximately 75% of state prison inmates and 59% of federal inmates are functionally illiterate. This is not a coincidence. It is a pipeline — a series of connected institutional failures that begins with a five-year-old who was not taught the relationship between letters and sounds and ends with a twenty-five-year-old in a cell. And the pipeline runs fastest through Black communities, where the reading failure rate is highest, the discipline rate is harshest, and the safety net is thinnest.

What Must Be Done

The solution is not a mystery. It is a matter of will. Every state must mandate evidence-based reading instruction grounded in the science of reading. Every teacher preparation program must train teachers in systematic phonics, phonemic awareness, and the cognitive science of reading acquisition. Every school district must screen children for reading difficulties in kindergarten and provide intensive intervention before the third-grade cliff. Every community must invest in early literacy programs — book distribution, read-aloud initiatives, library access — that ensure children arrive at school ready to learn to read.

The Black community, specifically, must treat literacy as the emergency it is. Every Black church should have a reading program. Every fraternity and sorority chapter should sponsor tutors. Every Black professional organization should fund book distribution in high-poverty neighborhoods. The cost is minimal. The return is incalculable. A child who can read by third grade is four times more likely to graduate from high school, dramatically more likely to attend college, and exponentially less likely to enter the criminal justice system. There is no intervention — not policing reform, not sentencing reform, not reparations — that has a larger effect on the trajectory of Black America than teaching Black children to read.

The prison planners are counting. They are looking at the third-grade reading scores in Black neighborhoods and budgeting for beds. They are not doing this because they are evil. They are doing it because the data tells them, with dispiriting accuracy, how many of those children will end up in their facilities. The only way to make their projections wrong is to change the input variable. Teach the children to read. Teach them using the science, not the ideology. Give them books in their homes from birth. Screen them early and intervene immediately. Do what Mississippi did, because Mississippi proved it works.

Eighty-two percent of Black fourth-graders cannot read at grade level. That number is not a statistic. It is a sentence — passed on millions of children before they are old enough to understand what has been taken from them, by a system that knows exactly what it is doing and has decided that the cost of fixing it is higher than the cost of building more prisons. We can accept that calculation, or we can reject it. But we cannot pretend we did not know. The data is on the table. The solutions exist. The only missing variable is the decision to act, and every year we delay, another class of third-graders crosses the cliff, and the counters in the corrections departments add another row to the spreadsheet.