No one hates a bad teacher more than a good teacher,” Arne Duncan remarked in 2009.

No one talks as bluntly about K-12 education as President Barack Obama’s Education Secretary once did. The next President should make a clear, unambiguous statement about all students receiving public funding: No student will go to fourth grade until they can read.

Duncan’s rhetoric was part of a larger, urgent dialogue that marked national policy ambitions from when President George W. Bush warned against the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” For nearly 20 years, there was a shared national understanding that a failing school system was a threat to both national security and economic mobility.

There was also a shared frustration, and a backlash that sparked a new trend. Since Obama, presidents of both parties stopped talking about K-12 education much at all. The subject has drifted from the center of the American agenda to the periphery, replaced by higher-profile cultural and economic battles.

At its height, that consensus championed an interlocking engine of change where high standards, rigorous assessments, and accountability would drive systemic excellence. But in practice, the system was like a Frankenstein’s monster created to seed opposition throughout America’s fractured education ecosystem. Standards became bogged down in political theater. Accountability was fought at every stage and often decoupled from support. Regulated public school choice faced obstacles on the extent of the regulations, the definition of the “public,” and the nature of the choice. Since the Bush and Obama Administrations, presidents have largely pivoted away from these foundational measures, leaving a void where a national strategy once stood.

Instead of learning from what worked and changing what did not, a new bipartisan consensus was forged: silence.

The next President will take office in 2029, two decades after Duncan’s contentious address to the National Education Association. That administration would do well to reduce the scope but not the ambition or clarity of Duncan’s vision. His barb to teachers was often followed with an evocative example focused on third graders: “The fourth-grade teacher who gets children who are two years behind because they had an ineffective teacher in the third grade knows exactly what I’m talking about. That fourth-grade teacher has to do two years of work in one year just to get those kids back to grade level.”

The next President will likely not attempt to fix every variable simultaneously, but he or she can focus on the one metric that meaningfully impacts a child’s entire trajectory. The transition from third to fourth grade is a biological and pedagogical hinge. Before fourth grade, children are learning to read. After fourth grade, they are reading to learn.

If a student cannot successfully navigate this jump, the rest of the curriculum becomes a foreign language. By focusing on third-grade literacy, we create a targeted promise that every stakeholder can share: from parents and teachers to taxpayers and administrators. And that can also be shared across public and publicly funded private schools.

While the national consensus stalled over the last decade or so, several states continued to act as laboratories of innovation. Most notable is the “Mississippi Miracle.” In 2013, Mississippi was ranked near the bottom of the nation in literacy. By 2019, it was the only state to post significant gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, even as scores elsewhere plateaued or declined.

The Mississippi model was built on three uncompromising pillars:

• The Science of Reading: Shifting away from “balanced literacy” toward evidence-based phonics and phonemic awareness.
• Teacher Coaching: Providing teachers with specific training and on-site support to implement these new methods.
• The Retention Requirement: Implementing the “Literacy-Based Promotion Act,” which mandated that third graders meet a specific reading threshold before moving to fourth grade.

Mississippi proved that even in the most socioeconomically challenged environments, a clear policy floor can produce extraordinary results.

The next President should promise that every child in America can read by the time they start fourth grade. This is not merely a federal mandate; it is a call for a new compact across our entire educational landscape and should be built around three key commitments.

Ending Social Promotion. We must end social promotion after third grade in any school receiving public funding—including the growing number of private schools entering the public sphere. Social promotion is a lie told to children to avoid the logistical friction of retention. As Kevin’s life proves (I discuss his story in detail below), the friction of being an illiterate adult is infinitely more painful.

A Call for National Service. We should massively expand programs like AmeriCorps to create a “National Literacy Corps.” Thousands of young people should be deployed to support teachers and provide high-dosage tutoring.

Civic and Business Engagement. This cannot be a task for schools alone. Local businesses and civic groups must step up, recognizing that a literate workforce is the bedrock of a thriving local economy.

Critics often cite the “anxiety” of high-stakes testing for eight-year-olds. We must have the intellectual honesty to counter: What is higher stakes than a lifetime of illiteracy? The true “high-stakes” event is the moment a young man walks out of a high school with a diploma he cannot read, realizing his only currency is physical labor in an increasingly automated world.

Like most Americans, I have direct experience in public school as a student and parent. That direct experience with K-12 education is typically the most intense relationship with the government that an American citizen will have in their life.

But it is apparently not enough to keep education policy on the national agenda, and a truly ambitious goal would activate more identities in the civic spirit: volunteerism, the American Dream, immigrant assimilation, business leader workforce needs, local civic engagement.

In 2006, I was 22, idealistic, and spending my days in the back of a public library in El Cajon, California. As an AmeriCorps member, my mission was adult literacy. I expected to be helping immigrants navigate English as a second language. Instead, I met Kevin.

Kevin was 40. He was a high school dropout and a veteran of the California public school system. He had attended school for 13 years and emerged from the other end functionally illiterate. Because he was in Alcoholics Anonymous and trying to stay sober, Kevin wanted to read the “Big Book.”

Coming from Massachusetts, I was a product of a system defined by the 1993 Education Reform Act—a framework of high standards and clear accountability that propelled the state to the top of national rankings. Finding Kevin in a California library was a profound culture shock. It revealed what happens in the absence of a hard floor. “Low expectations” is a trap door to a difficult life.

There are hundreds of educational goals worth promoting, and the list is not getting any shorter in the age of AI and loneliness and civic educational deficits and male struggles and Covid recovery. But in America’s fractured K-12 education system, there may be too many pain points and too many stakeholders for the federal government to again lead on every front. We should not retreat from any current accountability systems or lower any current standards. But setting a specific, ambitious goal that both rallies the country and is followed through on will require a clear target.

Third grade reading is the clearest path to override opposition and the proposal of alternative measures. Kevin didn’t need a “multi-dimensional assessment of holistic learning.” He needed a system that refused to move him to the fourth grade until he could sound out a sentence. He needed the promise that his time in a public classroom actually meant something.

It is time to make the promise of basic literacy to all Americans. It is time to set the floor.