By Bill Scanlon, News Staff Writer
Rocky Mountain News June 26, 2002

Colorado will receive $59 million from the Department of Education to help teach kids to read, with the caveat that the state use only scientifically proven approaches.

"President Bush believes that all children can learn and learn well when taught well," Education Secretary Rod Paige said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "They have not been taught well."

Colorado, Alabama and Florida are the first states to receive Reading First grants -- part of Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative -- because their applications were excellent and each passed a rigorous panel of review, Paige said.

It's the largest federal grant for reading instruction that Colorado has ever won, state Education Commissioner William Moloney said.

Twenty-seven other states may be awarded similar grants. Paige said the reading instruction should emphasize phonetic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

That's a good, broad list, said educators in Colorado, who had worried the six-year grant would tie teachers to a narrow approach.

"Being one of the first states to get this funding is wonderful," said Jeanne Beyer, spokeswoman for the Colorado Education Association, noting that state money for teacher development wasn't renewed this year.

Colorado classroom teachers would especially applaud the grant if a good chunk of the money helps not just primary teachers, but also teachers in the upper grades, many of whom were never taught how to teach reading, she said.

Nationwide, fewer than one third of fourth-graders are reading proficiently, and it doesn't get much better through 12th grade, Paige said.

Mandating that the money be used on tried-and-true approaches to reading won't be a problem, because most metro-Denver districts already do that, said Susan Dalton, past president of the Colorado Council of the International Reading Association.

Most educators today agree that a scattershot approach to reading -- the first-grade teacher uses one approach, the second-grade teacher another -- doesn't work well.

Dalton said the push is on to get colleges to train future teachers in what they actually need in the classroom. That means a lot of emphasis on teaching phonics, fluency and understanding.

While many children haven't been taught well, it usually isn't the teacher's fault, Paige said. "Teachers are America's heroes," he said. "I don't think lack of effort has anything to do with it. All teachers and all parents want children to learn."

Paige wants to see monitoring of a student's reading progress. Moloney, Colorado's education commissioner, said the $9 million this year -- $59 over six years -- "is a serious bit of money."

It will complement the monies being spent on the state's Read to Achieve program. "Compared to other industrial nations, we just have a scandalous level of youngsters who are not at grade level," Moloney said.

He puts some blame on the teaching colleges. "It's as if some of our medical schools taught to take the appendix out from the front, others from the back," he said. "Only about 10 percent of our teachers have had proper training

"It's not like we can say any old approach will do. Reading is exactly like math. It's a very precise sequential art. If you leave out Step 6, the whole house falls down."

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