"Forty percent of third-graders cannot read. What a terrible indictment of our public-education system!"
Robert Sweet of the National Right to Read Foundation charges that President Clinton's proposal to solve the illiteracy problem in America by sending volunteer reading instructors into the government schools "diverts accountability from the colossal failure of the public-education system to achieve perhaps its single most important mission." And it is a colossal failure, particularly when you consider how easy it is to succeed in teaching reading. "Almost every child can learn to read by the end of the first grade, if properly taught," observes Sweet. "But schools aren't achieving this by the third grade. For this failure," he says, "heads should roll."
Inadequate funding is not the problem; more money is not the solution. "The federal government spends $8.3 billion on 14 programs that concentrate on promoting literacy," Sweet reports. "Federal, state, and local governments spend another $40 billion a year on special education," nearly half of which goes to children with reading problems.
Sweet concludes that "teachers and principals obviously aren't being held to the right standards of performance." He also argues that "current methods for teaching reading must be completely overhauled. There are now 825,000 teachers from kindergarten to third grade whose principal job is to teach the three Rs," he observes. "A high percentage of these teachers have master's degrees; almost all have been specially trained to teach reading. Obviously their training isn't working."
The irony, of course, is that the job they're failing at is not that hard. "There's no great mystery to teaching reading," Sweet insists. "The best approach for the overwhelming majority of children is systematic phonics, the simple concept of teaching the 26 letters of the alphabet, the 44 sounds they make, and the 70 most common ways to spell those sounds. For most children, learning this basic code unlocks 85 percent of the words in the English language by the end of the first grade."
Sweet recalls that "an emphasis on phonics once made America the most literate nation on earth. From colonial times until the latter part of the 19th century," he notes, "reading instruction was simple and straight-forward: Teach the code, then have children read. It worked then; it will work now. Immigrants from every nation on earth had come to America. They all wanted to learn English, and most of them did," says Sweet. "With phonics the predominant instructional practice, illiteracy was almost unknown at the turn of the century among those who attended school."
With systematic phonics instruction, we could conquer illiteracy again. "During the past decade, more and more parents have been teaching their children to read before they enter school or after schooling begins," Robert Sweet reports. Several states have passed legislation requiring the teaching of phonics in their public schools, and several more have legislation pending. The solution to the illiteracy problem in America is simple: "Teach the letters and sounds directly and systematically," says Sweet, "and you will have lifelong readers who love books."
