Students who do not read well by the end of third grade will continue to struggle and will be among those most likely to drop out of high school, said governors and chief state school officers at a Washington Post Live panel discussion on Tuesday.

The state leaders, a bipartisan group drawn from  across the country, agreed that reading proficiently by the end of third grade is a national priority but proposed different approaches to ensuring more students reach that critical reading milestone.

Currently, two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders, and four-fifths of those from low-income families, are not reading proficiently. To combat the problem, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) urged an approach that emphasizes early education and healthy development.“You cannot fix third-grade reading by focusing only on third grade,” Markell said at the Reading Milestones: States Target Third-Grade Reading event in Washington D.C. He said Delaware’s early education efforts begin at age six weeks and include support for parents, as well as expanded access to better quality preschool programs. A new initiative launched in April also emphasizes healthy development.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) agreed on the importance of early learning as she described her Reads to Lead initiative, which provides reading coaches to help teachers identify struggling readers early and intervene with them. It also provide parents support to nurture their child’s development and early learning.

But if students still have not mastered reading by the end of third grade, Martinez argued, they should be held back. “It’s not compassionate to just move children from grade to grade without preparing them to read,” she told the audience of about 200 policymakers, advocates and educators.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R), who proposed a third grade retention policy through the legislature and signed it into law this spring, said any students held back should receive intensive literacy instruction. He described how, as a child with undiagnosed dyslexia, he repeated third grade. He also stressed the important role of the state’s business community in creating a strong early education program in Mississippi.

The panel of governors was followed by a roundtable discussion among six chief state school officers: John Barge of Georgia, Randy Dorn of Washington State, Lillian Lowery of Maryland, Richard Ross of Ohio, Patricia Wright of Virginia and Mick Zais of South Carolina. As they elaborated on their approaches to improving third grade literacy, several themes emerged: early education, high expectations and strong school leadership to help teachers and students meet those expectations, engaging parents and building a level of trust with them, and support for low-income children beyond the schoolyard.

In particular, they emphasized the need to support learning in the critical very early years, so that children are ready for what schools have to offer when they reach kindergarten, the need to ensure children attend school regularly and the need to keep students learning through the summer. The issues form the core of the work that the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading is undertaking with 134 communities across the country. The GLR Campaign was a co-sponsor of Tuesday’s event, along with the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation.

“Governors, chief state school officers and legislative leaders in more than 30 states have chosen to put a stake in the ground around third-grade reading,” said Ralph Smith, the GLR Campaign’s managing director and senior vice president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “The leaders of these ‘stake in the ground’ states will admit that, at this point, the work is imperfect, incomplete, often contentious and ever-evolving. They have found no single approach fit for all, no silver bullet, no yellow brick road, no magic potion. The magic, if any, is in the mix.”

On Sunday, June 9, the Washington Post ran a full-page ad about the Campaign.