Gary Pearce posted on March 29, 2012 09:34
Pat McCrory’s much-ballyhooed education platform reads like a compilation of every cliché and buzzword of the last three decades.
This tweet from the McCrory campaign especially struck me: “3rd grade is a critical year for reading. We are not doing our children favors by socially promoting them to 4th grade.”
Right you are, Pat. Which is exactly why in 1977 Governor Hunt pushed through a Primary Reading Program. It put teacher aides – Hunt then called them “reading aides” – into every first-, second- and third-grade classroom in every school in the state. The goal: make sure every child could read before they left the third grade.
Guess what? It worked. And guess what else? The last legislature – led by McCrory’s Republican friends – cut many of the aides.