Reading skills prove pivotal in quest for good education

By Chet G. Diestel
News-Sentinel city editor

“Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.”
— Charles Scribner Jr., American writer and publisher

Reading is the keystone upon which the foundation of a good education is based, but for millions of American children the ability to read well is virtually a non-existent factor in their lives.

	Jerry R. Tyson/News-Sentinel
	Mendes “Duke” Nepote, 85, of Lodi reads a book about Italian ceramics. Nepote is a retired teacher who taught for 38 years in the Lodi Unified School District.

Indeed, results of the latest National Assessment of Education Progress test — known as the nation’s report card — showed that more than a third of fourth-graders can barely read. Two-thirds of all students tested scored at, or below, minimum proficiency. In California, 59 percent of students read below the minimum established proficiency level.

While the Lodi Unified School District was not included in the NAEP results, scores from California’s Standardized Testing and Reporting program released last summer showed no growth by local fourth grade students, who remained at the 36 percentile.

The results, based on the “Stanford 9” test, are reported in percentile comparison to a “norm group” of test-takers. Thus, the 36 percentile ranking by LUSD fourth graders mean 64 percent of like students in the “norm group” performed at a higher level. In short, that means if the 100 percentile was an A, then even by the most generous curve imaginable, LUSD’s 36 percentile was a failing grade.

But Lodi is hardly unique in California when it comes to low reading scores. While the 2000 NAEP results have not yet been broken down by state, the consensus is that California schools will again rank near the bottom line in reading.

And to educators that bottom line is: Too many American students are simply failing to master the ability to read with any significant degree of comprehension during their early years in school. This failure not only limits their success in school, but their career options as adults.

In short, if you can’t read, you can’t succeed in this modern high-tech world.

“To send children out into the world unable to read,” said Mendes “Duke” Nepote, a retired teacher who spent 38 years in the LUSD, “is to rob them of their futures.”

Therefore, if the cycle of kids who can’t read is ever going to broken some basic educational reforms are needed, say educators. These include expanding the length of the school calendar, training teachers in how to teach reading, better retention of skilled teachers and the establishing of innovative programs to help motivate children to read. It should be noted a good many of these steps have been adopted to some degree by LUSD in the last couple of years.

A good example of the type of innovation needed can be found at Lawrence Elementary School where Principal Cheryl Nilmeyer has set up a series of after-school and weekend programs in a school that is heavily minority and where English is truly the second language of most students.

“Teaching reading to students where English is not their first language presents its own set of problems,” said Nilmeyer, “but they are not insurmountable ones.”

The NAEP scores, which were released April 6, also found that while the average scores for fourth-graders have remained static since 1992, the gap between the best and worst readers is widening, not narrowing, despite the injection of $125 billion in federal Title I education funds over the past 25 years.

Additionally, the NAEP’s national sampling of 8,000 fourth-graders revealed average scores of 217 on a 500-point test, which were identical to those in 1992 and 1998. The results are divided into four groups: Below basic, basic, proficient and advanced. A student reading at the basic level is able to understand the overall meaning of what they read.

The NAEP report showed:

• 37 percent of fourth-graders perform below the basic level.

• 31 percent read at the basic level.

• 24 percent were proficient.

• 8 percent were rated as advanced.

Students ranked as proficient not only understood what they read but could draw inferences from the written material, while those at the advance level could generalize about topics as well as recognizing literary devices used by authors.

In 1994, California public school fourth graders tied with Louisiana for last place in the reading portion of the NAEP test. By 1998, California had barely crawled out of the basement with fourth graders placing ahead only of Hawaii, Guam and the Virgin Islands.

At that time, less than one in five California fourth graders were rated a “proficient” reader capable of demonstrating a written understanding of their grade-level reading assignment.

Moreover, the NAEP results, which U.S. Department of Education officials have termed as “mediocre” and “downright dismal,” indicate that fourth-graders ranked among the top 10 percent of readers nationwide scored slightly higher than they did in 1992, but those in the bottom 10 percent scored significantly lower.

Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige, former superintendent of the Houston school district, who has called reading a “civil right,” said the data are clear evidence that federal education policy has failed in addressing the needs of low-achieving students.

But why?

Why is it that millions of students continuously fall below average reading skills despite so much money having been spent to raise the reading levels in America’s schools?

That feeling of frustration runs deep among the educators interviewed for this story. What needs to be done all too often is not being adopted at the classroom level, they said.

That is the contention of veteran educator Thomas Flick, a school administrator in Fairfax County, Va. Flick, a longtime advocate of educational reform whose career spans three decades, believes either we reform America’s education system or it will continue to fall far short of what is needed to prepare students for life in the modern world.

This is particularly true when it comes to the area of innovation, said Flick, a learning disabled specialist who has written extensively on the need for educational reform.

Flick said that one of the major hurdles for adopting needed reforms is that very few administrators want to rock the educational rowboat. Instead, they prefer even what is not working to trying something new and, perhaps, a bit politically risky.

He cites the need for increasing the length of the school year. It is ridiculous, said Flick, to try and educate children to survive in a high-tech society while following a school calendar created for the still largely agrarian society of early 20th century.

According to Flick, a longer school year is absolutely vital in order for teachers to have the time necessary to give concentrate at length on those areas where students have fallen behind, particularly reading.

Flick finds a ready ally in veteran Los Angeles Unified School District teacher Selwyn Eiber, who teaches fourth grade in an inner-city school. The public keeps repeating the mantra of “improved schools” — well, part of that price is a longer school year, said Eiber.

Both LUSD and LAUSD operate on year-round calendar called Concept 6. Under that plan, there are only 163 days, 17 days less than a typical school calendar. While many teachers may love the additional days off, said Eiber, Concept 6 is an academic bandit which yearly robs every child of valuable classroom time.

Shifting away from the Concept 6 format and lengthening the school calendar are among the series of academic reforms being studied by LUSD Superintendent Bill Huyett along with a task force of parents, staff and district officials.

In the area of reading, Flick points out that much time and energy is wasted engaging in an often bitter debate between phonics and the whole language advocates. Taking a middle ground, Flick finds some merit in the whole language approach when taught properly — which, he admits, is seldom. Additionally, while strongly supporting the use of phonics, he cautions that advocates are wrong in proclaiming it as an academic cure-all. Phonics, said Flick, has its limitations, especially when it involves children whose first language is not English.

In this, Flick is supported by Nepote, 85, who entered school speaking hardly a word of English, said phonics is not always the brightest beacon for teaching reading. During his nearly four decades in local classrooms, Nepote found it was often extremely difficult for a student brought up reading and speaking a “truly phonetic language” to grasp the complexity of English quickly and thoroughly.

The failure to understand the language, Nepote said, leads to embarrassing mistakes which, in turn, causes many students to back away from learning the language out of fear of being ridiculed by their peers.

Nepote, who has a master’s degree in languages from Stanford University and is the author of “An Introduction to Language Learning,” said the key to teaching reading is to remember that it is only partially an intellectual exercise. It is mostly a mechanical one where “repetition for retention” is vitally important.

Nepote’s conclusions are supported up to a point by Lawrence’s Nilmeyer, who has spent 28 years in the LUSD system as a teacher and administrator. According to Nilmeyer, a student whose primary language is not English — and that is two-thirds of the Lawrence student body — can be taught to read with full comprehension. Nilmeyer admitted that there was no set time in bringing a student up to reading at their grade level, because there are so many variables.

One of those variables, said Nilmeyer is that Lawrence faces the problem of a large transient student population whose parents are migrant farmworkers. In any given school year, these students may end up traveling from Mexico to Washington state as their families follow the harvests. This plays havoc, said Nilmeyer, with trying to establish some form of educational consistency, especially when it comes to getting those children to read at the state required level.

However, merely teaching a child to read is not enough — there is the whole matter of comprehension, said Sandy Flick, Tom Flick’s wife and a veteran of 22 years teaching learning disabled children in the Prince William County, Va., school system. She too has been a longtime activist in the classroom reform movement.

It is not that “Johnny can’t read,” said Sandy Flick. Most students can read just fine if that means only reading the words. However, all too many students have little or no comprehension of what the words mean.

This is especially true in California where nearly 25 percent of the state’s 5.7 million public school students are non-English speakers. Learning the language, said Nepote, and learning what the language means are two very different things.

Eiber, whose downtown Los Angeles school contains students from a half a dozen different immigrant groups, added that his students can read the words, but have no idea what they mean. As an example, a story he had the students read contained the phrase “at a peaceful lake.” He asked them what “peaceful” meant and no one knew its meaning. He then asked what “lake” meant and got the same lack of response. “Reading without comprehension,” said Eiber, “is worse than not being able to read at all.”

Nilmeyer agrees that the tension between fluency and comprehension exists, but maintains it’s more important to teach fluency first and then comprehension will follow. It is often a struggle to get the two reading lines to meet, she acknowledged, and that’s why every report card tells parents how their child is performing at both levels.

But the basic first step, all agree, is to get a child to read and read well.

A child who can not read, said Tom Flick, is truly learning disabled. That claim is underscored in California where tens of thousands of students in the state’s special education system have been labeled as “learning disabled” not because of any serious mental or emotional handicap, but because they can’t read.

A kind of educational smorgasbord needs to be created, said Tom Flick, where the best of existing programs are integrated with new, innovative ones in order to allow kids not only to read, but to do so with full comprehension.

Such reform programs as hiring reading coaches, devoting extended periods of time for in-classroom reading, purchasing supplemental textbooks and conducting training classes on how parents can best help their children to learn to read, are being moved forward by LUSD officials as a means of bolstering the academic levels of their underperforming schools: Bear Creek High School; Delta Sierra, Morada, and Woodbridge middle schools; along with Creekside, Heritage, Lawrence, Nichols, Oakwood and Sutherland elementary schools.

Other reforms aimed at raising the standard of course work to match state levels include giving training and planning time for teachers along with sitting up after-school and off-track programs to help struggling students. Lawrence, for example, has set up a Saturday school, after-school reading lab as well as a home work club.

But getting those programs to work takes veteran teachers, said Nilmeyer, and the constant turnover of teachers presents a chronic problem

It takes a good five years for a teacher to develop the skills to properly teach younger children to read, said Eiber, and every time there is a turnover that knowledge disappears from the classroom for the replacement is liable to be a brand new teacher fresh out of college, an emergency credentialed teacher or a long-term substitute.

“When a teacher leaves a school either out of frustration or for greener pastures,” said Eiber, “it is the students who end up suffering the most.”

Nilmeyer said the turnover of teachers at Lawrence, nearly a third last year, has been a difficult matter, but she has been fortunate in being strongly supported by the district in her efforts to keep her teaching staff intact.

LUSD, in an effort to better its test results, is increasingly making use of a variety of government-funded programs — including Reading Recovery, the Arkansas Reading Model, Reading is Fundamental, SCORE the Governor’s Reading Incentive Program and Bonus Instruction — to help youngsters learn to read.

And these steps are working to a degree: Most LUSD schools showed schoolwide progress in the Academic Performance Index released by the state Department of Education in October. The state has set a goal requiring every school to achieve an API score of 800 on the index which ranges from 200 to 1,000. Individually, schools were required to improve their previous rankings by 5 percent schoolwide and by 4 percent for specific ethnic or racial groups and poor students.

In Lodi, 22 out of 29 schools met or exceeded their schoolwide goals. District wide, the API scores ranged from a high of 961 at Elkhorn, the school for gifted students, to a low of 438 for Heritage Elementary school.

And there is the great educational conundrum, said Nepote. “How do we close the gap between the highest and lowest scoring schools?”

That, not Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be,” is the great question, said Eiber. “And if we don’t find the right answer, then too many children won’t have the skills to even read ‘Hamlet’ let alone comprehend what it means.”