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APRIL 2004

Too Little? Too Late?
by Al Sikes

At a recent business forum, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein reiterated a widely held belief that public education is broken. He talked about the system's failure to educate kids in poverty and that six out of ten minority students never make it all the way through the K-12 system. He underscored the danger of social promotion and talked about the merits of a new summer school program as part of a plan to impose strict promotion standards for third graders. And he emphasized that the type of systemic change he and Mayor Bloomberg are seeking in New York City's public schools, while gaining momentum, will require consistent effort and commitment over time.

What he didn't address is that third grade intervention is too little, too late. Nor did he acknowledge existing programs that currently are working to ensure that children will be successful readers by third grade. Many of these programs either go unnoticed or are ignored. One of these, like the Reading Excellence and Discovery (READ) program, founded in 1999, though privately supported, are addressing one of the core problems K-3 students face in our inner city schools—inability to read.

READ is a proactive and preventative early school readiness program that employs research-based instructional strategies to help at-risk children reach grade-level reading proficiency. It has been proven countless times that the most important mental and learning patterns children build start well before they begin school and significantly evolve during the kindergarten through third grade years.

Research has also shown that learning to read before third grade is essential to reading to learn after grade three. Reading must be the first skill and must be learned. If a child leaves kindergarten unable to decode the English language, a potential problem has just been promoted.

Over 60% of the children in most inner city school districts cannot read at grade level and are falling further behind each year. READ's simple premise: pairing teen role models with the struggling young children in a scripted and supervised one-to-one tutorial relationship would both elevate the children's reading skills and give them a neighborhood hero. Studies show that male children in particular begin to choose role models quite early and in homes where the father is often missing, that choice is crucial.

Early intervention is optimal. Without it in place, America's under-educated will continue to be in dead end jobs, on unemployment roles and in the nation's prisons. A single loss of life in Iraq is a front-page story while at home, on a personal level; those we leave behind only make news if they commit a crime.

READ has worked. Not only are the lagging readers catching up, but the social transformation of many of the children is remarkable.

Class-based programs are not adequate for many children. I was fortunate, my mother was an English teacher who gave up teaching to raise and teach me. When I arrived in first grade I was ready, my mother made sure of that.

Individualized education for early learners who are definitively lagging must be expanded and successful older students, if properly trained, can be a force multiplier. Perhaps most importantly, they will help multiply the confidence level of their young students, while being introduced to a life-changing profession.#

Al Sikes is the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He is currently Chairman, The READ Foundation.

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