U.S. Students Ranked No. 2 in Literacy

American students are reading more proficiently than their counterparts in other countries but reports of this success might draw attention away from problems that continue to pervade the nation’s classrooms, according to a report released Monday by the Department of Education.

“The United States is second in the world behind Finland . . . when it comes to literacy,” said Education Secretary Richard W. Riley. For years, U.S. students have not fared favorably in similar, international comparisons of math and science scores.

The study was intended to measure literacy levels based on reading comprehension questions on tests in 32 countries that compose what the Education Department considers a “world average.” They include industrial nations, such as France, Germany and Switzerland, and nonindustrial ones, such as Botswana, Slovenia and Zimbabwe.

But despite the upbeat findings overall, many U.S. students are not doing as well as they should, said Jeanne E. Griffith, acting commissioner at the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics, which wrote the report.

For instance, children who are white, affluent or reared in two-parent homes continue to score better than those who are black, Latino, poor or raised by a single parent, the report said.

“This report tells us that there is a substantial gap in the reading scores between schools that involve parents and school’s that don’t . . . “ Riley said. “Parental involvement is the No. 1 factor.”

The report was based on data compiled in 1991 and originally released in 1992. It was reissued Monday, with new analysis, largely in response to a 1995 report that found reading scores were too low nationwide.

The 1995 report, “A First Look--Findings From the National Assessment of Educational Progress,” concentrated exclusively on U.S. students.

Some experts questioned the new report, arguing that flaws exist in comparing U.S. reading scores to those in other nations.

“Quite a few students don’t do well here but, when you compare them to the rest of the world, they’re going to look a lot better,” said Reid Lyon, who directs clinical trials in reading research at 12 sites around the country for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

“I’m always worried about who participates in all the different countries in these studies,” said Barbara Foorman, a reading researcher at the University of Houston. “It’s always enormously difficult to compare tests in different languages.”

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Griffith acknowledged that difficulty. The new report, she said, is based on questions that were rigorously evaluated: Each test question was translated into 32 foreign languages, which were then translated back into English by independent groups.

“That way we can compare it to the original and see what’s been lost or muddled by the conversion,” Griffith said.

And while high literacy scores in the United States is a laudable achievement, some academic experts said that the Department of Education should not gloss over the disparities that exist among different groups within the population.

But Ruth Graves, president of Reading Is Fundamental, a national organization that has 3.8 million children in its literary programs, cautioned that while many experts are encouraged by the report, “we still have a lot more to do.”