Teaching Children the Joy of Books

A grandfather seven times over--and thus a well-seasoned reader of children’s stories--U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley on Friday helped kick off a five-year countywide initiative aimed at helping schools teach children the joy of books.

Sitting in an easy chair on the stage of the Mark Taper Auditorium at the Los Angeles Central Library before a dozen rapt second-graders, Riley read from “The Wednesday Surprise” by Pasadena children’s author Eve Bunting, in which a 7-year-old teaches her grandmother to read.

“It’s much smarter if you learn to read when you’re young,” the grandmother says in Bunting’s book. “The chance may pass with the years.”

Hoping to give as many students as possible that chance before it is too late, the Los Angeles County Office of Education is designed to provide training for as many as 20,000 primary grade teachers.

With roughly 40% of American fourth-graders struggling to read, Riley said, “improving reading is the most urgent task facing American education today. . . . Illiteracy is the ball and chain that ties children and their families to poverty.”

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The county’s initiative comes as the state is just getting going on its own much larger effort to train teachers, and finance the purchase of reading books, to make sure that all students get a good grounding in phonics while enjoying compelling stories.

The state assault on poor reading skills was spurred by test scores in 1994 that showed California’s students were 40th out of 41 states and by extensive research indicating the importance of letters and their sounds--a concept that had been de-emphasized in the state beginning in 1989.

The state also is spending nearly $1 billion to help school districts reduce class sizes in the primary grades. To staff the additional classrooms that the program created, districts this year will hire an estimated 7,700 teachers, many of whom have had no training on how to teach reading.

To help them, the county will hire eight reading specialists who will each be assigned to an area. The county also will put on workshops for school board members, administrators and parents to understand how children learn to read.

The county’s reading initiative comes amid a nationwide debate over how best to teach children to read.

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Next month, the California Board of Education will approve a list of new reading textbooks and observers expect that the list will not include at least one--and possibly two--reading programs now used in many schools. The books that are expected to be eliminated concentrate on teaching children the sounds of letters in the course of reading stories, an approach some experts believe is often ineffective because it does not give children a chance to practice the sounds they are learning.

Patti Stewart, a reading specialist who will be among those creating the county’s seminars, said they will help teachers learn to teach phonics in ways that avoid the repetition that often characterized such instruction in the past.

“Our job is to take the research [on how children learn to read] and make it teacher-friendly,” she said. “Let’s do phonics and spelling . . . but not by giving them work sheet pages.”

Jerry Treadway, a San Diego State professor who is the co-director of the statewide teacher training program known as the California Reading and Literature Project, said the county’s program must strike a balance embracing the different approaches.

“We need not let extremists on either side of the debate keep us from developing a balanced reading program,” he said. “Because a few teachers will abuse phonics is no reason to exclude it from the program. Because a few people will refuse to teach phonics at all is not sufficient reason to undo many of the beautiful things that people are doing in whole language and writing.”