A National Right to Read

All students can become effective and enthusiastic readers. Yet, for at least five decades, each successive administration in Washington has bemoaned the legendary fact that "Johnny can’t read."

Since the advent of U.S. Department of Education in 1977, each new administration has targeted the national reading disgrace, with new promises to remedy the problem. The national results are as appalling as the national disgrace. The percentage of students failing the national fourth grade test remains unchanged.

The evidence of failure is overwhelming and easy to find! The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) reports: "The average score of fourth-graders in 2003 was not found to differ significantly from that in either 1992 or 2002. In plain English, reading performance in American schools is not improving. It is at a dead stand still.

If this 12-year flat line of performance were showing high performance, why sweat it? Once again, NCES reports the sad truth: "The percentage of fourth-graders at or above Basic Level was not found to differ significantly from that of 1992." That is a diplomatic way of saying that in 2003, 37 percent of the fourth graders cannot read at a Basic Level. In addition, this percentage of students below Basic Level is unchanged since 1992.

So the national system of teaching reading and writing is enjoying general systemic breakdown with over 37 percent of our students. What can we do to insure that this large group of students can gain the skills so necessary in our modern society? We should take immediate steps to change the system of teaching and learning reading and writing. The new system should follow five rules which will extend the National right to read to every student..

Be ready teach when the student is ready to read. What is the hurry? The Gezell Institute established long ago that on average only 50 percent of students are ready to read at age 6 and 50 percent of those are girls. The present system requires the child be ready to read when the school is ready to teach. The new system will require that when the student is ready to read, the school must be ready to teach, whether that is at age 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8.

Give students credit for what they already know. Wallace W. Douglas, the great Wordsworthian and English Education scholar once said that if children had to learn to talk the way schools expect them to learn to read, they would never learn to talk. Each child comes into the world as a language specific being. They are capable of making all the sounds of their mother tongue. Just as quickly, they begin using these sounds to form the words and attach meaning to the words. They use syntax and construct thoughts.

Teach students that written letters represent the sounds that they already know. Since students come to school managing the complexity of the language, reading is simply a matter of learning that the 51 general American sounds that they already know have 51 written symbols of one to three letters. At the exact point of readiness, reading instruction should focus on seeing the correspondence between these sounds and letters. Do it quickly and efficiently.

Give ready students a personal coach. Reading takes someone to show a student this relationship between the letters and sounds. This is a labor intensive but short-lived effort. Teachers need moms, dads, teaching assistants, or even peers, who are already reading, to help. The method is easy and time-honored. The coach points and reads; the coach reads, and the student points; the student points and reads; and the coach helps sound out new or difficult words.

Include the student’s personal and expressive writing in every instructional episode. Writing is making language and herein lies the key to literacy power. Just as students who speak language can always understand language, so a student who writes language can always read language.

There it is. After three decades of failure, forget national testing. We already know that status qou is a huge flop. Extend the National right to read to every student, and each student will become an effective and enthusiastic reader and writer.