What Can Be Done

No. 1: Require Kindergarten

Kindergarten sparks images of stacking blocks, singing songs around the piano and splashing paint. In other words, fun.

But extensive research on reading shows that, amid the fun, 5 year olds need to be learning the first lessons necesssary to become good readers. Indeed, too many youngsters now enter the first grade not even knowing the alphabet--their A,B,Cs.

* First step: Make sure kids are actually in kindergarten. California not only does not mandate kindergarten statewide, state law actually forbids individual districts from requiring it.

* Second step: Make teaching the building blocks of reading a priority in kindergarten. By mid-year, teachers should evaluate their students to find out which ones understand that spoken and written words are made up of simple sounds. Experts call this “phonemic awareness”--the basic concept that a whole word can be broken down into small bits of sound. All children benefit from being explicitly taught that a whole word like “cat” is actually three separate sounds. But nearly one in five are unlikely to break the alphabetic code on their own.

No. 2: More Counselors Needed

College counselor Lilia Garcia is meeting with a senior during the morning nutrition break in the bustling counseling office at Manual Arts High School. The student has good grades--mostly A’s in her math and science classes--and wants to go to a University of California campus. But, looking at her transcript, Garcia gives her disappointing news: she took the wrong courses. Instead of college prep classes, she’d been assigned to too many “service” periods in which she ran errands for teachers. And she was left too long in English as a Second Language classes that don’t qualify as college prep.

* Across the state, high school counselors are overwhelmed--and don’t have time to make sure each student takes the courses they need. At Manual Arts, there are 600 students for every counselor. Some schools’ ratio is far worse.

* Pending legislation calls for hiring enough counselors to equal one for every 300 students--the recommended ratio nationally--starting in elementary school. The price tag: $145 million a year.