“The ‘fourth-grade slump’ (Chall et al. 1990) is the phenomenon whe...

“The ‘fourth-grade slump’ (Chall et al. 1990) is the phenomenon where some children seem to acquire reading (i.e. pass reading tests) fine in the early grades, but fail to be able to use reading to learn school content in the later grades, when the language demands of that content (e.g. science) get more and more complex. The fourth-grade slump is made up of kids who can ‘read,’ in the sense of decode and assign superficial literal meanings to texts, but can’t ‘read’ in the sense of understanding, in any deep way, informational texts written in fairly complex language. From remarks like the one quoted above, it would certainly seem that the problems poor and minority children have with learning to read must lie, for the most part, some place else than a lack of early phonemic awareness training or other early ‘basic skills’ training. The fourth-grade slump tells us this much (because here we see kids who have mastered early reading skills of the sorts traditionalists stress, but still can’t read to learn in the later grades).”