The following paragraph is from the article of the Wall Street Journal.
Statewide, in 2019, 36% of all third grade students could read at grade level. That’s an F, and that’s the good news.
I am not sure the meaning of at grade level but I guess the level is what the educational authority thinks as proper. If so F which means fail seems to be acceptable. But why is it the good news? Is it because it dropped more later and just a sarcastic metaphor?
When you consider that "grade level" means the reading level the student should be at for the grade that they are in (in this case, third grade), then 36% is very poor.
This isn't a case of a figure rising and improving from a low point; the benchmark is clearly set. The reading standard for a 3rd-grader should be achievable by all 3rd-graders, just as the standard for a 2nd-grader should be achievable all 2nd-graders, and so on. Of course there will be some outliers and I'm not qualified to say what a satisfactory percentage ought to be, but 36% is so low it is clearly a problem by any reckoning. Even 50% of something that should be 100% would seem problematic. If only 50% of brand new electrical appliances were in working order you'd think that was bad, right? They all should work and you'd expect a small percentage of slippage.
Regarding the use of "that's an 'F'" - I would describe that as a flippant, or irreverent remark. It isn't suggesting that this percentage of 36% actually equates to an 'F' grade on any scale; it is just using education terminology known to denote failure on a student level to humorously point out a failure in the entire education system. I wouldn't call this 'sarcastic' as such - sarcasm usually involves saying the opposite of what you believe, for example, saying "that's just great" about something that is clearly bad.
And 'that's the good news' isn't strictly sarcasm either, for the same reason - it may be said flippantly, but it isn't an example of saying something is good when it's bad - it is only comparatively good. I would guess that, in the wider context, the writer goes on to deliver worse news than this. It is playing on the common trope of 'I have some good news and some bad news', only there's bad news and worse news.
As Astralbee said, "at grade level" here means "the reading level the student should be at for the grade that they are in". And, yes, 36% is very poor.
I'm going to focus more on the "that's the good news" part. The phrase "(and) that's the good news" is probably a fixed phrase at this point. It means something like "as bad as that last bit is, it gets worse"; I don't think it's a sarcastic metaphor so much as gallows humor. The article demonstrates this with the next sentences:
That number drops to 27% for Hispanic students and 22% for black students statewide. In certain public school systems, the numbers plummet to single digits. In Decatur, 2% of black third-graders are reading at grade level and only 1% are doing math at grade level.
NB. Gallows Humor from Mirriam-Webster:
humor that makes fun of a life-threatening, disastrous, or terrifying situation
or, from Google/Oxford Languages:
grim and ironic humor in a desperate or hopeless situation
So, the sentence is saying that only about 1 in 3 third graders have the reading - and reading comprehension - skills we as a society expect of 3rd graders and that, as bad as that number is, there's worse information to come.
In the US, an “nth grade” student is a member of a “class” of students that is n years into their required formal education. The student's “grade level” increments at the start of a new academic year (which typically starts in August or early September, and ends in late May), unless they are made to repeat a grade due to low academic performance, or promoted multiple grades due to high academic performance.
Typically, there are 13 grades, with kindergarten (begun at age 5) effectively serving as a “0th grade”, then “1st grade” thru “12th grade”. These are usually grouped into three stages, held at different school campuses:
However, since the US doesn't have one unified education system, but a patchwork of states, counties, and school district, different places may have slightly different classifications.
Point is, “third grade students” are usually 8-9 years old.
Various state education agencies have specific standards for what knowledge a student should have at each grade level. For example, the math standards may say that second-graders should be able to evaluate multi-digit sums like 867 + 309, and that fifth-graders should know how to do long division. English literacy standards will expect students to know the meaning and spelling of particular vocabulary words, and be able to handle a certain amount of grammatical complexity.
Standardized tests are often employed to evaluate whether students have, in fact, met their expected skill academic skill requirements. This became especially more common after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001.
If a student can “read at grade level”, it means that they're capable of reading material that the relevant educational standards organization expects them to be able to read.
It's part of the traditional grading system where a student is assigned a letter grade of A (the best), B, C, D, or F (failing), either on a particular assignment or exam, or for a course as a whole for an academic term. Sometimes, these grades have + or - modifiers, such that A+ > A > A- > B+ > B > B-, etc.
“That's an F” is just using this educational terminology to say “That's unacceptable.”
It's a common idiom to say “I have good news and bad news” when delivering two related pieces of information. A straight example is “The bad news is that our team lost our big rivalry game. The good news is that we're still eligible for the playoffs.”
In the context of the article:
There's probably some sarcasm in the author's use of “and that's the good news”, because nobody would consider this poor outcome “good news” at all; it's only “good” by comparison to the worse news immediately after it.
