A promising road map for better reading

Are we there yet? How much longer? These questions by impatient children on a trip are also asked by concerned parents regarding their children's reading proficiency skills.

In the recently passed education bill, President Bush heard those questions and offered some answers. But improving our children's reading skills will be a long, hard road.

Our multicultural society is saturated with educational ignorance of how and what children need to learn. Educational relativism thrives, denying that some teaching methods, such as explicit systematic phonics, are more effective or superior to others. Scientific reading research validates that the majority of students need these skills, which teach the relationship of sounds to letters of the English alphabet, to bring the words off the page so children can then apply them to skills of comprehension and writing.

A smorgasbord of reading methodologies dominates many classrooms of teachers indoctrinated with educational relativistic ideology by college professors. Elementary basal readers are filled with politically correct, dumbed-down literature, according to Harvard researcher Sandra Stotsky's Losing Our Language.

For a disastrous period of American history, our teachers and their students have been victimized by the non-validated ideology that learning to read is as natural process as speaking. They've been taught whole-language reading methods that promote guessing at whole words, memorizing and using picture clues and sentence context.

That old song, Doing What Comes Naturally, is a big lie when it comes to reading. Now the science of reading has exposed it. Still, powerful people in education circles arrogantly challenge this research from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Reading Panel. Like an outgoing beauty queen, it's tough to hand over the crown to the new winner.

National data show that at least 20 million of our nation's 53 million school-age children are poor readers. Raising reading proficiency skills of our children depends upon an informed watchdog society demanding accountability.

Public-education costs have risen 50 percent the last 10 years to $650 billion a year, accompanied by stagnant test scores especially in inner-city schools; results have been disastrous.

In the last three years of the Clinton administration, the Inspector General's office reported $450 million of the U.S. Department of Education's budget was lost "through fraud, waste and mismanagement." Secretary of Education Rod Paige said, "After spending $125 billion of Title 1 money (for the poor in our schools) over 25 years, we have virtually nothing to show for it."

President Bush's reading-education road map proposes to help needy schools, train teachers and demand more phonics and accountability from those who teach our children. It's a long, tough ride. Let's hope and pray we'll get there avoiding the detours and bureaucratic federal minefields of the educational establishment.

If you want to know more about the science of reading, call 1-800-228-8813 to order Put Reading First, The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read. To download the document, go to www.nifl.gov.

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Holten is director of the Indiana Division of the National Right to Read Foundation (www.nrrf.org). She lives in South Bend.

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