Education Bill Getting Closer to Completion

When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, President Bush was in Florida, reading to schoolchildren.

The tragedy yanked Bush away from his top domestic priority: passing education reform legislation.

But he and congressional leaders said they won’t let the tragedy deter them from resuming work on an education reform bill as early as this week.

“Our children are our future, even when our nation is at war,” said Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), co-chair of the congressional committee working on the bill.

Congressional leaders working on the Bush-backed bill say the effort to improve reading instruction is the most specific and ambitious federal effort ever in that regard.

Although the federal government has had a significant presence in the nation’s schools since the Johnson administration, its main role has been to provide money. The new bill--with its well-publicized menu of tests and lesser-known blueprint for reading instruction--would deepen that relationship.

“We’ve spent $147 billion on federal government programs” since the Johnson administration to help disadvantaged children catch up, said Secretary of Education Rod Paige in September. “Why is it . . . that 70% of inner-city and rural fourth graders cannot read?”

The president and his advisors say that recent research about language and how children learn should end the long-running disagreements over reading that have split educators for nearly a century. They want to see that new consensus reflected in classrooms.

Skeptics abound, however, in many universities, state education departments and some schools.

“Some of the dust raised by the ‘reading wars’ has been settled,” said Donald N. Langenberg, a physicist and chancellor of the University of Maryland, who also chaired the congressional national reading panel. But, he said, “the real solution really lies in winning the hearts and minds” of teachers.

One powerful tool of persuasion will be money, assuming it isn’t wiped out by spending to recover from the Sept. 11 attacks. The legislation was supposed to contain $5 billion to be spent over the next five years. To get their share, states will have to commit to training teachers according to the administration’s agenda.

“The methods we use to teach reading are critically important,” Bush said before the terrorist attacks.

“And we’ll make sure that every teacher is well-trained in these proven methods.”

Bush said good teaching must include “a central role for phonics,” which is breaking words down into sounds. Administration officials, and a growing number of reading experts, favor teaching those skills explicitly rather than counting on children to pick them up.

But Susan B. Neuman, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, also said that phonics is only a start. Those skills must be combined with an emphasis on writing, vocabulary and helping children understand what they read, advisors said. Schools also should diagnose reading problems earlier, she said.

The International Reading Assn., the largest group of reading teachers, is supporting the administration’s reading bill.

But the main journal of the 22,000-member American Educational Research Assn. in July published an article dismissing the scientific basis for explicitly teaching phonics or other aspects of reading. The article argues that children learn to read “naturally, without instruction” as long as they are surrounded by books.

The administration’s plan “is a scientific approach, but the question is, is it the right science?” said Richard W. Allington, a researcher and author of “No Quick Fix: Rethinking Literacy Programs in America’s Elementary Schools.” Moreover, he said, providing weak readers with the intensive, high-quality instruction they need will cost far more than $1 billion a year. A better bet, he said, would be to make sure every child has books to read during the summer.

“That would have a larger impact in most high poverty communities,” he said.

Other researchers support the administration’s approach.

Because the scientific basis for the approach is solid, said Claude Goldenberg, associate dean of the College of Education at Cal State Long Beach, there should not be lingering controversy over using it in classrooms.

A growing number of states and school districts already are headed in that direction. California has tapped many of the same experts as the Bush team.

Most elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, have embraced a program called “Open Court,” which teaches letters and sounds as an entree to reading.

The federal education bill “absolutely supports what we’re doing,” said Ronni Ephraim, who oversees reading programs in the elementary grades.

In some cases, the district is already seeing gains. At Martin Luther King Elementary School south of USC, where half of the children are still learning English and 97% live below the poverty line, test scores have soared.

Students write and read daily and within months of starting school, children are able to independently read books with plots and characters.

“I think it’s important the school district and state is finally looking at what research says,” said Victoria Seabold, the school’s literacy coach.

But other teachers say they are worried about politicians telling them how to teach.

“They want to end the debate, they don’t even think the debate ought to take place, and that’s what I object to,” said Miles Gullingsrud, a sixth-grade language arts teacher at Westside School in Thermal, Calif. “I’m afraid of the day the literacy cops walk in the door and say, ‘What are you doing here?’ That’s scary.”