A Home-Grown Skill

Schools nationwide are taking a beating over the finding that fewer than a third of America’s fourth-grade students read at grade level and the gap between the best and worst readers is growing, despite huge investments in education. These results, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test, indicate how much harder and smarter parents, teachers and government must work to boost reading achievement across the board.

NAEP is known as the national report card, and it is the nation’s only federal survey of student achievement. State participation is voluntary, and a sample of students is tested. But even though more of the fourth-grade students who took the test are getting high marks in reading, they are offset by students who are falling closer to the bottom, toward illiteracy.

U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige blames the number of poor readers on the failures of Title I, Washington’s huge education program for poor children. Low-income children unsurprisingly tend to score lower than more affluent children on tests like NAEP, just as white and Asian students typically outdo black and Latino children. Students who live in the Northeast routinely perform better than children in other regions. And girls tend to do better than boys. Of course, neither success nor failure is firmly bound to race, ethnicity, gender, poverty or geography. Paige proved that by achieving across-the-board reading improvements while he was superintendent of Houston schools.

However, placing blame for the dismal results is at this point mostly speculative. NAEP scores this year were not broken out by state, so it is difficult to separate the successes from the failures and identify strategies that are working on a wide scale. The 2002 test will give separate state results, allowing better conclusions.

Other assessments, such as the Stanford 9 standardized test, have shown that reading test scores are improving in many urban school districts, including Los Angeles Unified. The change was greatest last year among second-grade students, the children who will be fourth-graders taking the 2002 NAEP test.

In 1994 California tied with Louisiana for last place on the NAEP reading test. The state woke up and made some changes. It now requires children to read for a longer time each day and write more often; most reading teachers have been retrained. Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature are building incentives to attract better teachers to the lowest-performing schools, a key to sustained improvement.

Connecticut, which has emphasized high standards, early reading competency, regular testing, intervention and targeted aid to failing students for nearly two decades, made the largest gain between 1992 and 1998 in the percentage of fourth-grade students who could read at grade level. Texas also improved in 1998, crediting intense emphasis on instruction and regular diagnostic testing in the early grades.

President Bush has proposed a national reading initiative with annual testing, including state-level sampling yearly in reading and math. Such tests should be mandatory.

However, no matter what a school does or what government requires, nothing takes the place of parents who read aloud every day to their children. Better teaching is needed, but reading competency starts best at home.