Smaller percentages of children from homes with more risk factors, such as poverty and a primary home language other than English, mastered specific reading and mathematics skills by grade 3, compared with children with fewer or no risk factors.

Basic proficiency in reading and mathematics is a foundation for later success in schooling, but not all children master the fundamental skills needed for proficiency at the same rate in their early years. This indicator looks at the different rates at which children who started kindergarten in fall 1998 mastered fundamental reading and mathematics skills.

By spring of grade 3, almost all of these children (95 percent or more) could identify ending sounds, common sight words, and words in context in reading, and recognize ordinality and sequence and add and subtract in mathematics (see tables 8-1 and 8-2). By 3rd grade, many of these students has also acquired more complex skills, such as making literal inferences based upon cues stated in text, identifying clues to derive meaning in text, and making interpretations beyond text in reading, and multiplying and dividing, understanding place value in integers to the hundreds place, and using rate and measurement to solve word problems in mathematics. For example, overall, 4 percent of these children were proficient at deriving meaning from text in spring of 1st grade compared with 46 percent by spring of 3rd grade.

The percentage of these children who had mastered these more complex skills by spring of grade 3, however, tended to vary according to the number of family risk factors in kindergarten, defined as living in poverty, non-English primary home language, mother’s education less than a high school diploma/GED, and single-parent household. In general, children whose families had more risk factors were less likely to have mastered more complex reading and mathematics skills by spring of 3rd grade than children from families with fewer risk factors. For example, in reading, the percentage of children with no family risk factors who were proficient at deriving meaning from text increased from zero to 54 percent from spring kindergarten to grade 3, compared with an increase from zero to 24 percent for children with two or more risk factors. In mathematics, the percentage of children with no family risk factors who were proficient at understanding place value increased from zero to 50 percent from spring kindergarten to grade 3, compared with an increase from zero to 21 percent for children with two or more risk factors.