CHICAGO -- Carson Elementary School principal Kathleen Mayer is amused when she sees a mother struggling to get her preschooler to class before the morning bell. The youngster pretends to read as her mom pulls her along: "And then the mouse ran," she says, fingering the thick book in her hands.

"That's it," says Mayer of the Norman Rockwell-type scene, "Kids want to read. We must be doing our job here."

Mayer's optimism isn't universal. With overall reading performance levels relatively flat among grade-schoolers over the past decade and the gap between the worst and best readers widening, the job of teaching children to read seems more daunting than ever. Only 32% of the nation's fourth-graders read at grade level. And, researchers warn, the consequence of reading failure in a technology-dependent world is a host of social and economic ills.

What's ironic is that experts know more about how children learn to read than ever before.

The National Institutes of Health, Harvard's School of Education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and other distinguished institutions agree: There is a definite process for teaching students to read, but those procedures are not reaching all classroom teachers.

Educators and government leaders now are pushing to change that. President Bush is insisting that the nation's school districts ensure that all students can read by third grade and that schools use teaching methods steeped in scientific research. Bush entered the White House promising to transform the federal role in education and to make schools more accountable. Because teaching reading is an important step in fixing schools, administration officials want federal aid tied to meeting the requirements. If not, school districts will face a reduction or withdrawal of funds.

Legislation that the House passed on May 24 to overhaul federal elementary and secondary education programs included the proposed reading requirements. The Senate is expected to complete action on a similar bill this month.

"President Bush believes that reading is the key to all learning. In fact, he says, 'literacy is the new civil right,' " Education Secretary Rod Paige says.

If that is so, it's a right many children are being deprived of. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) estimates that at least 20 million of the nation's 53 million school-age children are poor readers.

But getting all schoolchildren to read takes more than the federal government, says Richard Long of the International Reading Association (IRA). Involvement must come from many levels:

• School districts must offer a wide range of materials, develop outreach for parents and give teachers time to teach reading.
• Teachers must have extensive knowledge of which programs work best for individual students.
• Parents must show their children that literacy is important and spend time reading with them.

Reading achievement is inconsistent across the USA because, experts say, many teachers lack basic understanding of literacy development and reading difficulties, and the volumes of research on reading offer little practical help. Many kids aren't being exposed to reading at home, and the challenges of teaching reading rise as more English-as-a-second-language students crowd into schools.

Few options for non-readers

The problem is not unique to the new millennium, NIH researcher G. Reid Lyon says. "There were probably as many children 40 years ago who did not learn to read," he says. "The big difference has been that the options for non-readers 40 years ago were much greater. There were just more occupations that didn't require literacy."

A student's skill at reading in the early grades is a good predictor of how likely he is to graduate from high school, studies have shown. The long-term implications of reading failure amount to "a national public health problem," Lyon says.

"School dropouts, teenage pregnancy, poor academic achievement, crime -- all of these are downstream consequences of not learning to read," says Lyon, chief of the child development and behavior branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a Bush adviser.

Thirty-three years of study by the NIH found that of the 10% to 15% of children who will eventually drop out of school, more than 75% will report reading difficulties. Only 2% of students getting special education for reading problems will complete a four-year college program.

Further research shows that half of the adolescents and young adults with criminal records have difficulty reading. In some states, the size of prisons a decade in the future is predicted by fourth-grade reading failure rates.

Experts say about 5% of the nation's children learn to read and write with ease. Almost intuitively, they develop an understanding that letters can be sounded out to make words. The beginning reader must learn the connections between the 42 sounds of spoken English -- called phonemes -- and the 26 letters of the alphabet.

An additional 20% to 30% learn to read relatively easily once they enter school and begin formal instruction. But the bulk of the students, about 60%, have difficulty. About 20% to 30% of these mainly low-income and minority children struggle with reading throughout high school.

Bush's plan requires that all students be exposed to programs that teach them to break apart and manipulate sounds in words and read aloud with guidance and feedback from teachers. His ideas come from the congressionally created National Reading Panel, which released a report in April 2000 that experts say ended decades of reading wars between advocates of phonics and whole language teaching methods. Its recommendation: a blend of the two approaches.

A key challenge is to prepare teachers for the task. Mind-sets and attitudes must be changed first, experts say. Reading was once thought to develop naturally, and educators tended to attribute problems in young children to maturational factors that would disappear over time. But Lyon says children do not outgrow reading problems.

The old attitudes are hard to shake, says Marilyn Whirry, a high school English teacher in Manhattan Beach, Calif., who has visited many classrooms across the USA. In some places, teaching seems unaffected by innovations in technology or research, says Whirry, who was named 2000 national teacher of the year by the Council of Chief State School Officers.

'Still using ditto sheets'

"There are still students using ditto sheets," Whirry says. "This might have been what we did as children. This is not what we know about the teaching of reading today. We must retrain and re-educate all teachers, because we all should be teachers of reading."

That's one reason the Bush administration says it is stressing reading programs that are science-based -- proven with measurable results -- as opposed to experiments, or those that "seem good."

The National Reading Panel evaluated 100,000 research studies conducted since 1966 and found that much information was limited in scope, was too specialized or didn't have wide applications in schools. Teachers have been left short on research that actually produces reading success.

"Those that stay in the profession learn to simply wait out the next 'research-based' instructional magic bullet," Lyon says.

Bush's plan would give money to local school districts and states to train teachers in effective methods of teaching reading. The administration wants $75 million for preschoolers and $900 million for K-3, it and outlines the procedures that must be followed to prove results. There are few critics of the funding or the approach, since both represent a "fundamental shift" in the White House's role in education, says Long, IRA's director of governmental relations.

"It's not in and of itself going to solve all the problems we have to work with, but it's a good start, a beginning," he says.

Others, however, are unhappy about losing funds for their own reading programs. One popular program scheduled to be cut is Reading Is Fundamental (RIF). RIF president and CEO William Trueheart says the program has 310,000 community volunteers who will have served about 5 million children by the end of 2001. The volunteers hand out nearly 15 million new books a year; 200 million have been distributed since the program began in 1966.

RIF supporters have been fighting to keep alive the program, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Education. But officials there argue that the nation's focus should be on reading instruction instead of mere exposure to books.

Even so, exposure to books has a correlation with reading skill, studies show. Brigid Hubberman created a Family Reading Partnership program in Ithaca, N.Y., to distribute books to parents of newborns at local hospitals and to kindergartners. The 3-year-old program inspired others in Avery County, N.C., and Los Angeles, Hubberman says. She estimates that 20% to 25% of children in her community enter school having had little or no experience with books at home because television is a more favored pastime and parents don't understand the importance of just having books around.

"We need to reach out to families long before they enter our schools," Hubberman says. "That's where literacy development begins. Sometimes we get caught up in the 'how-to,' and we need to think about the 'want to' as well. The desire. Desire is so important in learning anything new."

Chicago's experience

Desire is what principal Mayer and the teachers at Carson Elementary work on. Children are exposed to books from the moment they enter the classroom. Picture books jam colorful plastic crates that line the walls.

Students also attend computer labs that have piloted such early reading software programs as Earobics by Cognitive Concepts Inc. and Fast Forward by Scientific Learning Corp. (Earobics is considered an effective reading program by the NIH; Fast Forward is under evaluation, Lyon says.)

Chicago studies show nearly two-thirds of students there are not reading at grade level -- roughly 287,832 students.

Hearing subtle differences

Teachers report success with the Earobics program, which helps children hear the subtle differences between sounds as the difficulty of the work increases. With different exercises, students learn how to blend words into compound words, to blend syllables into words and to blend phonemes into words. They also are taught to distinguish between vowel and consonant sounds.

The program focuses on phonics awareness, which is especially helpful to Latino students, says Susanna Aguilar, who teaches in the Carson computer lab.

"A lot of people take these sounds for granted. They listen to the TV. They listen to the radio, she s"ays of U.S.-born children. "These kids don't. Their parents speak Spanish and watch and listen to TV and radio programs in Spanish."

Mayer says her school has a comprehensive "literacy focus" that offers special training for teachers, works with parents through computer classes and seminars, sends out newsletters to homes and takes youngsters on trips to community bookstores and libraries. "Reading should be an exciting activity," Mayer says. "But you can kill it if you go about teaching in the wrong way."

Lyon agrees, adding that federal legislation is just a starting point and improvements won't come overnight.

"I don't expect that all children will be reading at the third-grade level in the next two years or three years or four years, because what goes into law is not only providing the resources. We (also) must make sure that state and local districts have the capacity to do it correctly and to do it well," Lyon says.

© Copyright 2001 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Home | About Us | About Phonics | Resources
Research | Topics | Reading Reform | Links | Search

Unless otherwise noted, you may copy and distribute any information on this site as long as The National Right to Read Foundation at www.nrrf.org is given credit. The National Right to Read Foundation is a 501(c)(3) publicly supported organization.