Long-Overdue Reading Help

On the first day of school, many ninth-graders will open their books to this lesson: “A fat cat sat at a mat.” They will be learning how to read at a time when they should be introduced to Shakespeare.

The Los Angeles school system deserves credit for starting to re-teach thousands of middle and secondary students to read. But shame on the district for failing to teach so many children, then allowing them to keep passing to the next grade.

Some 35,000 of the district’s poorest readers in sixth through ninth grades are or soon will be taking intensive reading classes for two hours each school day.

This lifeline for poor readers, described in a recent story by Times staff writer Duke Helfand, will cost the district $16 million at a time of deep budget cuts. That money, cobbled together from state and federal funds that could have been spent on other programs, will pay for teacher training, smaller classes and a highly structured and systematic basic reading series, similar to one that works well in the primary grades.

The Language! program, the choice for most students, appears babyish but is designed to make sure no student misses a basic skill this time. Teachers will get some training, and district reading experts hope to augment that with continued coaching. It isn’t easy for teachers to switch from “Moby Dick” to Dick-and-Jane-level texts.

Language! is working successfully in Texas, a front-runner in getting most children, including poor and minority students and English-language learners, to grade level. The Sacramento school district has been using a remedial reading program for older students for five years and now sends fewer poor readers to high school.

The Los Angeles program will operate on a much larger scale. If it works, students can expect to read at or above the eighth-grade level after two to three years, which would allow many of them to pass California’s mandatory high school exit exam and get a decent job. They also would have the pleasure of reading a newspaper or a menu or a best-selling novel.

These are needed incentives for students who have to give up electives like music and art to slog through embarrassingly childish texts. Progress brings them more interesting reading pretty quickly. And best of all, they will know that in due time they will be able to help their own children become good readers long before high school.