Education is the great engine to personal development. The most important academic skill that a student can have is the ability to read effectively. Success in every other school subject is dependent upon reading. Reading success is the foundation for achievement throughout the school years. There is a critical window of opportunity from the ages of four to seven for learning to read. Children who successfully learn to read in the early primary years of school are well prepared to read for learning and for pleasure in the years to come. On the other hand, children who struggle with reading in Grades 1 to 3 are at a serious disadvantage. Educators and researchers have long recognized the importance of mastering reading by the end of third grade. Third grade is a fairly pivot point in a student’s academic life. A student who can't read on grade level by 3rd grade is four times less likely to graduate by age 19 than a child who does read proficiently by that time. Reading is taught for the first three grades and then after that children are not so much learning to read but using their reading skills to learn other topics. In that sense if a child hasn't succeeded by 3rd grade it's more difficult to [remediate] them than it would have been if it started before then.

Academically, struggling readers have a much harder time keeping up with their peers, and they increasingly fall behind in other subjects. For the worst readers, those couldn’t master even the basic skills by third grade; the rate is nearly six times greater. While these struggling readers account for about a third of the students, they represent more than three fifths of those who eventually drop out or fail to graduate on time. Add poverty to the mix, and a student is 13 times less likely to graduate on time than his or her proficient, wealthier peer. By contrast, more than one in four poor, struggling readers did not graduate, compared with only 2 percent of good readers from wealthier backgrounds. Study shows that poverty has a powerful influence on graduation rates. The combined effect of reading poorly and living in poverty puts these children in double jeopardy.

Schools must address this problem, as well as providing effective instruction whenever students are present in the classroom. Similarly, research spanning 100 years has shown that students lose ground during summer, particularly low-income students. They lose an average of more than two months in reading achievement over the summer, slowing their progress toward third-grade reading proficiency. It is also, therefore, important for schools and communities to develop