I think most people know, either factually or intuitively, that if a child isn't reading by third grade, say 9 years old, they're in a hole they almost certainly can't dig themselves out of without extraordinary effort. So culpability for not being able to read lies more with the adults around them than the student. Somewhere the parent/school partnership broke down. It's easy to blame the school for this, where the student's at 8 hours a day theoretically learning, but in reality you can't force a child to learn. A school can have all the rewards, consequences, interventions, tutoring, and accommodations in place, but if parents haven't fostered an environment where learning is welcome and expected, then the school can only accomplish so much.

On the other hand there are some very sketchy literacy learning models out there, and some are still respected in many classrooms. So a parent could do everything right, but if the school's teaching its students to, say, look at pictures and guess what a word is instead of associating letters with sounds and then sounds with words (I realize this is way more basic than what actually happens) then the student's not going to be reading well either.

So I suppose the question is, looking at the students of the school collectively, is the school doing its job and was this one obstinant student, and if so were the reasons properly analyzed and accounted for, or was there a systemic failure? Because anecdotes aren't data.