The Real Reading Challenge for America (1997)

The good that happens in America's classrooms this school year will depend on one factor more than any other. No, it's not money. And it's not how long the school day is or how many courses students take or who sits on the school board or in the principal's office. Above all else, what will be crucial this year at all grade levels and in all subjects - as has been every year - will be how well children read. Reading is such a universal skill that we rarely stop to think about what means to learn to read well. We just know that everyone needs to be able to read, and, unlike learning to talk, we know that reading is something that must be explicitly taught. Teaching a child to read is so important a responsibility that I have mixed feelings about finding fault with any attempt to elevate to a national cause. The America Reads Challenge of the Clinton Administration identifies the right problem: about 17% of school-age children are considered poor readers, and millions of children enter school each year without adequate prereading skills. The Challenge envisions an army of tutors recruited and coordinated by AmeriCorps volunteers and trained by reading experts. The Challenge includes many other elements, such as grants to encourage collaborations that will help parents help their children learn to read, the expansion of Head Start and of family literacy programs, a little bit of research, and a national reading test - all tied together by rhetoric that says, in effect, we have declared war on illiteracy among our nation's children. As Robert Slavin, head researcher and developer of Success for All, a primary grades reading program, told an Education Writers Association (EWA) seminar last spring, this proposed campaign should certainly make the volunteers feel good. And having adults read to children is always a good thing. But, Slavin suggested, the solution proposed by the America Reads Challenge is akin to President Kennedy's declaring that U.S. astronauts would go to the moon - and then asking for volunteer scientists and engineers to help figure out how. Learning to read is so complex, so important, and so much in need of expert help that the only adequate response to the problem is a total retraining of teachers, Slavin said. From a network of federally financed projects, new research designed to find out why some children are poor readers is now beginning to reach the public, and the findings confirm Slavin's views. The work of the researchers, who are drawn from education, psychology, linguistics, and medicine, is being conducted at 18 sites and is being coordinated by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Here are some of the findings. * The majority of children become proficient decoders regardless of how they are taught. However, about 30% have problems, and, according to Marilyn Adams, another panelist at the EWA seminar, those who don't get it easily often find instruction that is limited to phonics to be boring. However, among first- and second-graders in Title I schools at one research site, direct instruction in phonics was the only strategy that brought the children up to average levels of reading proficiency after one year. * Instructional strategies are even more critical for children from families with a history of poor reading, and appropriate reading interventions can compensate to a degree for the lack of exposure to print and for low levels of parental literacy and laptop reading. * Skills in decoding and phonological analysis are necessary but not sufficient to make children successful readers. Children must be able to learn to read words quickly and accurately as well. Moreover, comprehension must also be taught. * Reading problems occur just as frequently among girls as boys, but schools identify the problems of boys four times as often - primarily because boys act out their frustrations. * Contrary to the assumption that children will outgrow their reading problems, 74% of the children who are poor readers at the end of third grade will be poor readers in the ninth grade. …