She's the nicest kid in 8th-grade, but she can't read

She's a polite girl, grateful for any kindness, the kind of student a teacher wants to succeed. But she is in eighth grade and she can't read. She isn't "struggling" to read, writes Jen, who teaches Spanish. "She does not know the sounds the letters make."

Jen tried to get the girl moved to a reading intervention class, where she could learn the phonics skills other students learned years ago. "The counselor said no. The reason given was that she likes me."

"I do teach a surprising amount of English grammar in my Spanish class," writes Jen. "And because Spanish phonics are actually simpler than English, one letter, one sound, consistent every time, she is getting some of that from me, too."

But not nearly enough.

Most of the non-readers who show up in Jen's eighth-grade Spanish class are nice kids. Nobody had the heart to tell them they needed to repeat a grade before they fell "so far behind that the gap felt impossible."

Jen gave her student an F in Spanish. Before calling to talk to her mother, she looked at the girl's other grades. She'd been given B's in history and science, D in math and a C in eighth-grade English, a class that requires daily writing. She cannot write.

I told her mother "where the gaps were and how deep they went," writes Jen. "I told her that her daughter had not been given accurate information about where she was, and that I was sorry it was coming from me, now, this late."

The mother said her daughter was a good student. "Nobody had ever told her otherwise. Not once. Not in eight years."

This girl and her mother deserved the truth, writes Jen. "She deserved it years ago. We called it kindness. It wasn’t."

The girl will not "walk" at eighth-grade graduation because of the F. But she'll start high school in the fall.