One editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times recently celebrated the reality of rising reading scores in large urban school districts such as Houston or Sacramento. There is much more complexity that should be explained in any comparison. Keep in mind that the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 1994 revealed that in California, evidence of serious reading failure cut across all ethnic and socioeconomic variables. Nearly half of California's fourth-grade children reading below the basic levels were from homes where the parents had graduated from college. It's an exciting time to be working in reading and literacy research and practice.
New studies arrive regularly.
The challenges are constant. If the practices seen in the classrooms of the best teachers in the best schools could be introduced everywhere, improvements in reading would be dramatic. The same contact numbers apply to the Texas Family Literacy Center. The new Texas Family Literacy Center opened in late April 1999, with Texas First Lady Laura Bush giving the keynote address and the Tapestry Foundation of Austin providing startup funding. Eight months later in December, the Family Literacy Center hosted its first-ever conference offering connections between Texas family literacy providers and nationally recognized guests, including former First Lady Barbara Bush's family literacy foundation created more than a decade ago.