These Steps Can Help Us Teach Johnny to Read

This is a critical time in our country's efforts to extend the educational franchise. The initiatives announced by President Bush this week signal his administration's interest in putting matters educational, especially as they pertain to reading, at the top of the national agenda. It is no accident that on his first workday as president, Bush and his wife, a former teacher and librarian, convened a meeting of literacy researchers and educators at the White House. It's too bad that this meeting was overshadowed by more volatile issues such as vouchers and abortion.

Whatever your political leanings and whatever you think of how the last election was won, you can be sure of one thing: the president and first lady are committed to the cause of helping all children acquire and productively use literacy. "No child left behind" will be the administration's mantra.

Skeptics will counter that this campaign is a diversionary tactic that absolves us (and the administration) of responsibility to address more fundamental issues of equity and the distribution of opportunity. But helping all children learn to read and write well is an equity and opportunity issue. Economic and social disparities will not disappear once everyone learns to read. But true universal literacy is likely to help narrow economic and social gaps. One of the meeting's participants said, "Learning to read is now a civil right." In this information age, the person who cannot read and write is deeply disadvantaged--intellectually, economically, socially, politically.

As the Bush administration launches its initiatives, it would be good to remember some of the things we are pretty sure of about helping children learn to read and write. We have often expended far too much energy on what we don't know or have conflicting evidence or opinions about. Certainly we must vigorously pursue additional knowledge. But just as certainly, we cannot let disagreement obscure what we have reasonable confidence about.

One thing we know is that reading is a complex act. It seems easy once you know how to do it, but reading requires the coordination of a number of processes: knowing letters and sounds, spelling patterns, the meaning of the words being read, how collections of words combine to form phrases and longer pieces of text and how to apply what you know in order to understand what you read. A reading program that ignores any of these is unlikely to be successful. "Back to basics" fans like to trumpet the line that "phonics works." But they're only partly right. Phonics in a vacuum--in the absence of purpose and meaning, in other words, interesting things to read and hear and talk about--won't help children learn to read well.