Senator Huppenthal, members of the task force, thank you for inviting me to testify today.

President Clinton made reading instruction a national issue in his 1996 State of the Union address when he said: "more than 40% of fourth graders cannot read at their grade level." He submitted the "America Reads" proposal to the Congress, recommending that funds be appropriated to pay for 1,000,000 volunteers to help children learn to read. After more than a year of debate, hearings, research, and a national discussion, the federal "Reading Excellence Act" passed by unanimous consent. It was a bipartisan bill, supported by the U.S. Department of Education, the White House, and both houses of Congress.

This summer, the first awards will be made for competitive grants totaling $260 million to assist states and local communities in improving the professional skills of teachers. These funds will be used in some of the most needy school districts in America. Guidelines for receiving these funds are available from the U.S. Department of Education and can be accessed through their web site.

We all care very deeply about the education of our children. We want to do the best we can to help them learn to read. Too often though, what we believe to be true about reading instruction is based on false premises. As painful as it is, we often have to abandon our prejudices and our fears and learn from one another. Education in America is at a crossroads. We have some hard choices to make. We can isolate ourselves and our methods from mainstream scientific research based thought and progress, or we can choose to be part of the modern scientific community. We can adjust our strongly held beliefs, and for the sake of our children, do the right thing, but it will take unusual courage.

For the last half of the 20th century, many universities have conducted research on how children and adults learn to read. Often this research has been supported by federal funds. Research findings in several areas of reading instruction have now converged, and if applied in the classroom, can launch us into the 21st century with confidence that all children can be taught to read before the end of third grade, as the president suggested.

The U.S. Department of Education's First Grade Studies completed in 1967, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, by Harvard Researcher Jeanne Chall, and the one billion dollar federal Follow Through study, all made it clear that scientific research findings support sequential, systematic instruction in the alphabetic principle, or in laymen's terms, phonics. These studies found that sequential phonics instruction should be an essential component of any high quality reading program. However, despite this research, textbook companies and schools of education refused to apply these new findings either in college classrooms or in elementary school reading instruction.

Another major resource of valid reading research has been underway for more than 35 years. At a cost of more than $200 million, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has methodically and carefully conducted longitudinal research in reading instruction. What began as a small research study at the Yale University Haskins Laboratories expanded into a reading research program at more than 41 sites in North America, Europe and Asia.

During the past 34 years, NICHD-supported scientists have studied the reading development of 34,501 children and adults, some over a period of 16 years. Over the past 12 years, 7,669 children (including 1,423 unimpaired readers) have participated in these instructional studies. 1,012 classroom teachers participated, instructing in 266 schools and 985 classrooms. More than 2,500 publications have been produced through this NICHD supported research. These studies include a major emphasis on reading and writing in environments that include good literature, reading for enjoyment, and other practices to facilitate the development of reading skills and literacy.

Once again, the findings of this extensive research are consistent with the findings of Harvard researcher Jeanne Chall, Marilyn Adams, author of Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print, Follow Through which lasted for more than a quarter of a century ending in 1995, the First Grade Studies of the 1960's, and myriads of other smaller studies as well. All of these scientifically valid studies resulted in similar findings on how children learn to read. Since the NICHD research is the most recent and comprehensive, it served as the basis for development of the federal Reading Excellence Act.

The NICHD findings converge on the following: good readers understand the relationship between letters and the speech sounds they represent and, how letter/speech sounds blend to make words; can apply these skills to reading and spelling words; and can read fluently and accurately. Once they can rapidly and automatically decode, good readers also bring strong vocabularies and good syntactic and grammatical skills to the reading comprehension process. They can understand what they read based on their own background knowledge. That is why it is important to read to children when they are little, creating a love of books and a desire to learn to read. Once they reach school age, their spoken vocabulary is already well over 15,000 words, and if properly taught, all children can learn to read what they can talk about and understand.

Let me discuss two false assumptions that are widely held by teachers nationally. These false assumptions are not supported by valid scientific data, and are the basis of most whole language instruction.

The first assumption is that children learn to read naturally without specific instruction in phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency, and comprehension. If this were true, there would be no non-readers. Yet this assumption is readily accepted, and fiercely defended by many educators today.

Second, the assumption that children should be taught to read using context clues, rather than by applying decoding and word recognition strategies in order to read unfamiliar words, also remains unsubstantiated. Children, who are taught to read using context clues and guessing strategies to read unfamiliar words, often have the most trouble mastering the skill of reading. These approaches appear to impede the process of learning to read even more. Neither of these assumptions are supported by the scientific evidence.

The bottom line is this. The most vulnerable children in our schools, those, who have a limited vocabulary or have little or no story time at home, are the most limited by the instructional practices presented in the very textbooks that many state boards of education mandate that schools use.

If illiteracy continues at its current level, or even close to it, Special Education costs will continue to increase. Nationally, over half of the students placed in Special Education are normal, healthy children who are there simply because they haven't been taught to read. Not only is the cost of educating these children almost triple the cost of educating a child in a regular classroom, but the implications for the children are frightening.

In a longitudinal study of students from first through fourth grades it was found that the probability was nearly certain that a poor reader at the end of first grade would remain a poor reader in the fourth grade. It further found that students who fail to learn to read early in their school careers risk falling further and further behind in their school work, and subsequently become more at risk for school failure. The implication for a dramatic increase in school dropouts, delinquency, disruption, and damaged children is obvious.

There are school districts where valid, research based reading instruction is being used and where the cost per pupil is a fraction of what large publishers charge for their reading programs.

Jeanne Chall, Harvard professor emeritus and author of the 1967 study Learning to Read, The Great Debate, asks poignant and wistful questions in a March 1999 Reading Research Quarterly article: "How much research evidence is needed to turn our research findings into recommendations for practice? How many confirmations of the 1967 First Grade Studies do we need before we put its findings to use?"

James Collins, in an October 1997 Time magazine article, "How Johnny Should Read," puts it another way: "After reviewing the arguments mustered by the phonics and whole-language proponents, can we make a judgment as to who is right? Yes. The value of explicit, systematic phonics instruction has been well established. Hundreds of studies from a variety of fields support this conclusion. Indeed, the evidence is so strong that if the subject under discussion were, say, the treatment of the mumps, there would be no discussion."

What I am presenting today is not a partisan position. The Learning First Alliance, in a March 1, 1999 publication, makes the following statement: "While reading performance may not be declining, it is certainly not improving." In what other area of American life would we be satisfied if things had gotten NO WORSE in 25 years? We know more than ever before about how to help virtually every child becomes a successful reader.

One of the most important foundations of reading success is phonemic awareness. Phonemes are the basic speech sounds that are represented by the letters of the alphabet, and phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are sequences of phonemes. The Learning First Alliance, in their early 1998 publication "Every Child Reading: An Action Plan," cites the National Academy of Sciences study, "Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children" released just a year ago, which recommends that to be good readers, "All children have to learn to sound out words rather than relying on context and pictures as their primary strategies to determine meaning." And finally, "Well sequenced phonics instruction early in first grade has been shown to reduce the incidence of reading difficulty. Given this fact, it is probably best to start all children, especially those in high poverty areas, with explicit phonics instruction."

The Learning First Alliance includes the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education; The American Association of School Administrators; the American Federation of Teachers; the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development; the Council of Chief State School Officers; the Education Commission of the States; the National Association of Elementary School Principals; the National Association of Secondary School Principals; the National Association of State Boards of Education; the National PTA, and the National Education Association.

Dr. Marcy Stein, University of Washington, and Barbara Johnson, Monterey County, California Special Education Director and California Curriculum Specialist, conducted a study and found that Harcourt Brace, Macmillan, Scott Foresman and Silver Burdett/Ginn reading programs DO NOT follow the principles of scientific evidence, and do not include explicit, systematic phonics instruction. Another study recently released in New Zealand, home of Reading Recovery, found similar results with that program as well.

The study concludes with this warning: "Currently, many publishers claim to offer both explicit phonics instruction and literature-based instruction in a balanced reading program. Educators must look beyond publishers' claims and marketing strategies and examine the instruction for themselves. While the programs are beautifully packaged and include an array of supplemental components, the instruction provided by the programs should be the primary concern of those teaching beginning reading. The impact of poorly conceived and ill-designed instruction not supported by the research literature on the academic success of children cannot be underestimated. The long-term effects of poor decoding instruction and lack of applied practice are potentially devastating to students and difficult for the best of teachers to reverse."

I know this is a tough message. I wish it was not necessary, but in today's society, the child who doesn't learn to read, often is handicapped for life. If children don't learn to read early enough, if they don't learn to read with comprehension, if they don't read fluently enough to read broadly and reflectively across all content areas, if they don't learn to read effortlessly enough to render reading pleasurable, their chances for a fulfilling life - by whatever measure - academic success, financial stability, the ability to find satisfying work, personal autonomy or self-esteem - are unnecessarily limited.

Applying the findings of research in reading instruction could make the difference between success and failure for the children in today's schools. The benefits are many: Teachers will be satisfied that their hard work is resulting in children who can read. Parents will be pleased that the schools are doing a good job. Taxpayers will be happy that the cost of education is not increasing as rapidly. Most important of all, the right thing will be being done for the children.

Thank you for your attention. I am prepared to answer any questions you may have.

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