Reading Skills Lagging in State and Across U.S.

A new federal assessment of reading skills released Thursday contained a hefty dose of bad news for the state and the nation, showing that two-thirds of American high school seniors do not read well enough to handle challenging tasks and that California’s fourth-graders rank last--tied with Louisiana--compared to their peers in other states.

The so-called Nation’s Report Card tested students in three grades in 39 states and found that only a quarter of the fourth-graders, 28% of the eighth-graders and slightly more than a third of the seniors nationally were proficient in reading, meaning they are able to competently handle challenging texts.

Only a handful of students--between 2% and 5% depending on the grade--were reading at advanced levels, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tested 130,000 students across the nation last year to measure how well public and private schools are teaching a wide range of reading skills.

Nationwide, more than half the students at every grade level tested were reading at only a basic level or below.

In California, nearly 60% of the fourth-graders--the grade at which experts say students should have learned to read and must use reading to learn other subjects--were found to have less than even basic skills, preventing them from gaining even a superficial understanding of most texts.

U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley said he was “disappointed by the lack of improvement” in the national scores, which showed little change from 1992 among fourth- and eighth-graders and dropped several points among high school seniors.

“These . . . findings indicate we have a long way to go to equip our students with the tools they will need for success in the next century,” Riley said in a statement released in Washington.

California Gov. Pete Wilson was unequivocal in calling the scores “deplorable and inexcusable,” and he said the state’s “education Establishment has taken our children over the cliff.”

He called on the state Board of Education to “take a serious look” at new reading textbooks proposed for state approval to make sure that they “have a strong emphasis on basic reading skills.”

The results were particularly humbling for California, which educators nationwide have looked to for leadership in reading instruction since the late 1980s, when the state embraced progressive theories of how children learn to read.

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The approach endorsed by the state’s school board and Education Department stressed the importance of exposing children to engaging stories, but resulted in the de-emphasizing of basic skills such as phonics and spelling.

Now, California educators are understandably embarrassed and concerned that the state, one of the nation’s richest and most technologically advanced, remains tied with or behind such largely poor and rural states as Louisiana and Mississippi. Mississippi was one of only two states where scores increased significantly from 1992, and California was one of 10 states where the 1994 results were worse than two years earlier.

State schools Supt. Delaine Eastin said the results were “most depressing” and provided more confirmation of what the state’s own academic test showed earlier this month, “that our students are not learning to read well enough.”

In anticipation of the poor showing on the two tests, Eastin appointed a 24-member task force earlier this month to examine every element of reading instruction in the state. That panel is to conduct its first meeting next week and issue a set of recommendations by the end of summer.

“The real question for California and for America is, do we have the courage to face these results honestly and do something?” Eastin said.

Tommye Hutto, a spokeswoman for the California Teachers Assn., the state’s largest teachers union, said it was unfair of Wilson to blame the low scores solely on educators. “There are lot of things going on that teachers have no control over,” she said. “What’s happening in education in California is the result of the systematic lack of funding that we have had over the past several years. We are reaping the results of neglect.”

California ranks near the bottom among the 50 states in per-pupil spending on education, and its average class size is the largest in the nation.

But Maureen DiMarco, Wilson’s top education adviser, said the reading scores cannot be blamed on such outside factors. Instead, she said, the fault lies squarely with the state’s move away from teaching children using phonics and other basic skills at the lower grades.

“California made a horrendous mistake in taking out the phonics and the basic decoding skills from our reading programs, and when you do that kids aren’t going to learn to read anywhere well enough, if at all,” she said.

A survey that was part of the 1992 NAEP results--in which California fourth-graders also came in near the bottom--found that the state’s teachers were far more likely than their counterparts in any other state to believe in the so-called whole language approach to reading.

But California school districts and teachers in recent years have become increasingly concerned that the state may have gone overboard in pursuing that method, and have begun deliberately restoring phonics and other skills fundamental to reading fluency to the curriculum. For students who fall behind in their reading skills, districts are spending thousands of dollars on intensive remedial approaches.

“Teachers need to be allowed to use an eclectic approach that isn’t one extreme or the other,” said Patty Abarca, a third-grade bilingual teacher at Heliotrope Avenue School in Maywood who believes in teaching good stories as well as basic skills. Abarca said her school has no spelling or grammar books and she is pressured by administrators to downplay phonics instruction.

But Norma Ramirez, who trains reading teachers for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, said the whole language approach criticized by DiMarco “has not even been implemented” in the state and it would be a mistake to give up on it and go back to the phonics-based approach.

“They are trying to find someone to blame for these scores so they are resorting back to an old way of thinking . . . that is the hardest way for children to learn to read,” she said.

The NAEP test measures students’ ability to perform a variety of reading tasks, including understanding the plot of stories, gaining information from texts and using written material to learn how to do something. The test for 1994 increased the percentage of test questions that asked students to write a response, rather than simply choose from a list of possible answers.

Reading scores on the national exam have remained largely unchanged since the 1970s, while math scores have improved slightly. Mathematics was not part of the 1994 assessment. State-by-state comparisons did not begin until 1990.

In the past, scores were reported only as national averages, based on a 500-point scale. Beginning in 1992, NAEP also began to relate those scaled scores to objective performance standards, to determine what percentage of students are at each of four levels: advanced, proficient, basic or below.

In 14 states, including California, the average fourth-grader exhibited a less-than-basic level of understanding, meaning that they had missed out on fundamentals essential to learning.

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The states with the highest average fourth-grade scores among the 39 that participated in the voluntary assessment were Maine, North Dakota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Massachusetts; among the states near the bottom were South Carolina, Mississippi, Hawaii, Louisiana and, bringing up the rear, California. Only the island of Guam, where students also took the exam, came in lower.

NAEP officials urged caution in reaching sweeping conclusions based on the state-by-state comparisons, saying that the results do not take into account socioeconomic and demographic differences.

Yet even with those cautions, California’s performance seemed to fall clearly behind that of other states. For example, a higher percentage of the California students who took the test did not speak English fluently. Yet, even when the state’s showing is broken down by ethnic group, its performance was poor.

Nationwide, 40% of white high school seniors and 30% of Asian Americans were proficient readers while only 12% of African American and 18% of Latino students reached that level.

But the average score of California’s white fourth-graders, which fell by seven points between 1992 and 1994, ranked them last among the 39 states. Among black and Latino fourth-graders, the scores were also at or near the bottom compared to those groups of students in other states. Asian American scores could not be broken down by state.

“Whatever the problem is, it is not a problem of the racial composition in the state,” said Lawrence Feinberg, assistant director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which monitors the NAEP test. “It really is the deterioration of the performance of the white students that brought the state even lower.”

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How the States Compare

California readers ranked last among 39 states that participated in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Here are the average scores by state for fourth-grade students. The national average score was 213 out of a possible 500.

Maine: 229

North Dakota: 226

Wisconsin: 225

New Hampshire: 224

Massachusetts: 224

Iowa: 224

Connecticut: 223

Montana: 223

Wyoming: 222

Nebraska: 221

Rhode Island: 221

Indiana: 221

New Jersey: 220

Minnesota: 219

Utah: 218

Missouri: 218

Pennsylvania: 216

North Carolina: 215

Colorado: 214

Virginia: 214

West Virginia: 214

Washington: 214

Tennessee: 214

Texas: 213

New York: 213

Kentucky: 213

Maryland: 211

Arkansas: 210

Alabama: 209

Georgia: 208

Delaware: 207

Arizona: 207

Florida: 206

New Mexico: 206

South Carolina: 205

Mississippi: 203

Hawaii: 202

Louisiana: 198

California: 198

National Assessment of Educational Progess