Greetings!

An education expert recently published something that's making a lot of parents nervous. Chad Aldeman looked at data from 250,000 kids across 1,400 schools and concluded: if your child isn't reading on track by kindergarten, don't wait. Act fast. Every week you delay, he says, makes it harder for them to recover later.

The data he ushers sounds brutal, but is he interpreting it correctly?

Let's dive in.

THOUGHT: Aldeman's Alarm
TREND: Finland FTW
TOOL: Read Not Guess

Aldeman's Alarm

Among kids who started kindergarten on track in reading, 87% stay on track through third grade. But among kids who started kindergarten off track, only 49% caught up by third grade. And of those who were still behind third grade, only 5% finished on grade level.

In a nutshell, the earlier a child falls behind, the steeper the hill to climb. That's why Chad Aldeman is ringing the alarm bell.

But should you panic if your first grader isn't reading "at their grade level?"

If your child is going to traditional school, maybe. Schools operate on a track system. First grade moves forward regardless of whether every kid has mastered kindergarten skills. If you haven't grasped phonics, you move to the next classroom anyway. Now you're in a room where all instruction assumes reading fluency you don't have. You fall further back. The gap compounds.

But if you have options? If you can use a self-paced program or homeschool—anything that isn't locked into the tract system—it's different. A kid with mastery-based instruction stays at the phonics lesson until it clicks. Sometimes they're seven or eight when they start reading fluently. But then—they accelerate. The foundation is solid. No gap to close.

Read Aldeman's full article

Finland FTW

The nail in the coffin for Aldeman's analysis comes from Finland—one of the world's highest-performing education systems. They don't even start formal schooling until kids reach the age of seven. 

Even more striking: Finnish schools achieve better results with shorter school days, less homework, and more play-based learning in early years than American schools. 

Waldorf schools report the same pattern: students read later, but once they start, they catch up by fourth grade and often become more engaged readers because they have the maturity to understand what they're reading.

There's no doubt that kids should be immersed in books, words, and reading from a young age. But let's not panic over arbitrary benchmarks.

Read Not Guess

While we're critiquing Aldeman's premise, his solution is solid. Read Not Guess, the free program he created, is exactly the kind of mastery-based, parent-friendly tool that works within a home-pacing model.

Alderman discovered that schools often teach kids to guess at words using pictures and context clues instead of teaching them to decode. Read Not Guess fixes that by going back to basics: letter sounds, blending, decoding.

Daily lessons take 5-10 minutes. Whether you're schooling from home or trying to help your kid catch up with their peers in the classroom, try a sample lesson at readnotguess.com—you'll immediately see if your child can identify letter sounds and blend them. That response to instruction is what matters.

WORD OF THE DAY: Leikki 

Leikki (LAY-kee) — In Finland, early childhood education prioritizes leikki—play-based learning—over formal instruction. Count on Finland to dedicate an entire museum to the concept!