With good reason, cries of alarm and despair erupted when the dismal results of the latest national reading exam for fourth-graders were released earlier this month. By contrast, few noticed when the outgoing Clinton administration in January released a comparably bleak assessment of Title I, the federal government's principal program to help low-income children perform better in school.
Yet the two reports should be read in tandem. Together, they underscore the difficulty of improving student performance, even after two decades of concerted school reforms. But the reports also highlight some promising pathways out of this forest of failure. If Congress and the White House look hard enough, they can find insights to guide their rewrite of the major federal education programs, an effort due to reach the Senate floor next week.
No one had to look very hard to find the message from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress fourth-grade reading test: It landed like a meteor. Overall, reading scores for fourth-graders were no better in 2000 than in 1992. The gap between white and black students remained stubbornly wide (with almost two-thirds of black students, compared with about one-fourth of whites, reading below the "basic" level of minimum competence). Latino students lost some ground, with a slightly higher share (nearly three-fifths) reading below the basic level today than in 1992. And low-income students continued to perform far below those from better-off families.
Closing these chasms of race and class is the mission of Title I, which spends $8.6 billion annually on remedial services for low-income students. But the Clinton administration report showed entrenched problems in the ways that local districts are using that money.
If there's an overriding lesson from these twin portraits of futility, it's that President Bush and Congress have to think more boldly than they have so far--because the problem may be even more intractable than we've thought. But the studies also offer more specific lessons. Among them:
* Parents still matter most: Ever since sociologist James Coleman's famous study in 1966, it's been clear that students do best when their parents commit to their education. The new NAEP results reinforce that abiding truth. Students who read for fun every day, watch television less, discuss their studies with their families daily and live in a home where reading materials are widely available all read far more proficiently than their classmates at the opposite pole on each of those variables.
