It's the supreme irony of the Information Age: Never in history has society been so awash in words--nor as dependent on them for economic survival--and Johnny still can't read any better than he could a quarter of a century ago.

    In fact, more than four decades after Rudolf Flesch warned us in Why Johnny Can't Read (Harper Collins, 1955, 1986), American school kids are struggling to make passing reading marks even in a day when an "A" on a report card increasingly stands for "average."

    The sad evidence is anywhere one cares to look. Hundreds of companies today routinely push new hires through intensive, remedial reading and writing programs. Not infrequently, Fortune 500 corporations run huge display ads in such publications as The New York Times with embarrassing grammatical blunders embedded in the wording.

    It's the rare university in the country--public or private--that doesn't offer a spate of remedial offerings in reading, writing and math. Teachers and administrators on campuses ranging from high schools to the nation's toniest four-year colleges increasingly find themselves obliged to turn blind eyes to graduating students whom they know are borderline functionally illiterate.

    Since 1969, the best measure of the nation's troubled learning curve has been the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In 1996, the NAEP reported that fully 40 percent of America's fourth grade children (roughly 10 million kids) could not read at even a basic level, which is to say they didn't possess skills necessary to decipher a simple sentence without difficulty.

    Researchers predict that of those 10 million reading-challenged youngsters, up to 40 percent will eventually drop out of high school. A stack of studies forecast bleak futures for these drop-outs, beginning with their prospects for earning a living. The highest average earnings for a high school drop-out are below the lowest average earnings of a college graduate, studies show. If other stats can be trusted, a high percentage of this class of underachievers will eventually graduate to crime--where society finally gets served the real bill for an educational system that dozens of critics since Flesch have argued is fatally, irreparably flawed.

    What is stunning about the NAEP findings and the social mayhem they pose is that they are not the result of some recent shift in the way kids are being taught to read. The 1996 study, if anything, documents that this scenario is nothing new--average reading scores nationally haven't changed hardly any since 1971 when the NAEP gave a collective "D-minus" in reading to kids aged 9, 13 and 17.

    When skyrocketing sales of Japanese cars finally shocked American automakers out of their complacency about lousy workmanship and service in the 1980s, Detroit got the message. Today, the quality of many American-made cars can stand toe-to-toe with the world's best, consumer-priced vehicles.

    Compared to good cars, the value of a fully literate American has yet to register a blip in the national consciousness, notwithstanding the Clinton Administration's much-ballyhooed (and much-criticized) launch of the $2.75 billion "America Reads Challenge" campaign last year. What else can explain why--after decades of trying to teach children to read and failing so miserably at it--hasn't somebody done something about the problem?

Reading: The Research

    The fact is, somebody has. Perhaps the problem is that until recently, few have been listening.

    Even well before the 1983 release of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, a U.S. Department of Education study that heaped unprecedented scorn on the American educational system--calling its allegiance to mediocrity an "act of unilateral educational disarmament"--another federal agency was quietly building a case for a return to Flesch-like basics in the teaching of reading.

    In 1965, an arm of the National Institutes of Health called The National Institute of Childhood Health and Human Development (NICHD), began funding scientific research focused on a wide range of problems tied to reading and learning disabilities in children. Today, this $200 million research project continues, with key components based at 18 universities that include Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the University of Houston and Florida State.

    What set out to be purely a scientific exploration into the mysteries of why some children have so much trouble grasping simple aural and visual clues associated with learning to read and do math--while others obviously don't--has produced the most robust body of verifiable data ever gathered about how the mind absorbs, processes and uses information, say NICHD officials.

    Researchers associated with the project were quick to realize that their findings had direct implications not only for addressing clinically proven reading disabilities such as dyslexia, but for mainstream school-day instruction in the 3-Rs as well.

    Dr. Reid Lyon, head of the NICHD branch that directs reading research, says the findings present "overwhelming evidence" that the key to overcoming most reading (and thus learning) obstacles in all children is an early exposure to teaching methods that stress the relationships between the sounds of letters, letter combinations and words. If the term "phonics" springs to mind, bingo.

    "There is no way to read if you are not very facile in the use of phonics," Reid is quoted as saying. Especially for increasing numbers of kids falling into the direst of reading straits, Lyon says "phonics is non-negotiable."

    This from a neuropsychologist-turned-federal administrator whose career has spanned an era of nationwide angst over schoolchildrens' dismal reading performance. This malaise has coincided, not by accident, with a blistering, coast-to-coast debate over the best way to teach children to read. The furor has coalesced into a highly politically charged stand-off between the disciples of phonics-based instruction and embattled defenders of a method best known as "whole language." The latter--with such incarnations as "look-and-say" and "sight reading"--traces its roots to the teachings of 19th Century educational reformer Horace Mann. "Whole language" has been the predominant reading instruction method in America for nearly seven decades.

    Phonics-based and whole-language instruction stand poles apart for their obvious differences. The former method relies at least in part on teacher-led drills that in America date to colonial times--the rote memorization of the many letter-sounds ("pr = pray; princess; pretty") that make up speech. The whole-language method deemphasizes direct instruction in phonics, and contends that children will discover the phonics clues they need on their own as they plunge head-on into reading and writing.

    Traditionally, observers of the so-called "reading wars" have written the debate off largely as a philosophical conflict, hopelessly lying beyond any light that rigorous scientific analysis might shed on the subject. The network of NICHD research has changed all that, says Lyon.

    What the findings represent is a tapestry of insight into how the brain works, knowledge gleaned from repeated (and repeatable) experiments conducted by psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, linguists and biomedical researchers. This refined knowledge of how the brain processes language, Lyon believes, proves beyond any reasonable doubt that phonics-based instruction is the most rational way to start young children on the path to literacy, no matter what their I.Q.s, backgrounds or learning problems may be.

    Some of Lyon's best evidence supporting his conviction is coming from Florida State University, through the work of long-time NICHD-funded developmental psychologists Dr. Joseph Torgesen (Ph.D. Michigan) and Dr. Richard Wagner (Ph.D. Yale). This fall, the scientists' research group was tapped for a $3.5 million, NICHD grant--one of the largest awards made to a specific research team in the agency's history.

    The award is based on a successful line of inquiry into learning disabilities that date to Torgesen's grad-student days at the University of Michigan. For most of the '90s, his work at FSU has focused on solving what may be the most daunting challenge teachers ever face--reaching kids with severe reading impediments. The FSU research group is thought to be alone in its ability to predict reading problems in young children and moreover, to show that whatever the difficulties, there are effective ways to overcome most of them.

Dyslexia is Number-One

    In 1821, the great Cherokee chief and scholar Sequoyah created an alphabet, paving the way for development of a written language for his people. Like the Egyptians, Greeks and Etruscans before him, Sequoyah understood the relationship between spoken sounds and written letters.

    So does every child who learns to read and write well.

    But in a typical American kindergarten class today, up to 30 percent of the kids stare at their teachers, blackboards and workbooks and just don't get it. This is the national target group of school kids that gives educators nightmares--an estimated 10 to 20 million children each year who start their formal years of instruction with moderate to high odds against ever grasping the same reading clues that most kids snap up easily.

    "There's a broad category of learning disabilities that describes a set of children who are entitled to extra services in our public schools," says Torgesen. "This group encompasses everything from severe mental retardation to mathematical learning difficulties to reading disabilities," Torgesen said.

    Of all the clinically identified learning disabilities, dyslexia is the granddaddy of them all. Torgesen says that about 80 percent of all kids who wind up being labeled "LD"--for learning disabled--are in fact dyslexic, with the chief symptom being an inability to read. Not all kids who have trouble reading are dyslexic, studies have found, but most are, says Torgesen. In fact, he often uses the term "dyslexia" as a synonym for reading disabilities, a label he actually prefers.

    When the term "dyslexia" sprang into public consciousness in the 1960s, researchers said it described a visual impairment which prevents a victim from recognizing patterns in word/letter associations. But scientists now know that the condition's manifestations--misspellings, reversing letters and words, even writing backwards--spring from an inability to recognize sounds, not patterns.

    "Only in the last 15 to 20 years have researchers come to understand that a lack of phonemic awareness is the underlying problem in dyslexia," Torgesen said.

    "Phonemic awareness" is simply a child's ability to identify the individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. Children in the beginning stages of phonemic awareness can recognize when two words rhyme, for example. A solid grasp of phonemic awareness is thus the essential precursor to phonics-based reading instruction, says Torgesen.

    "I like to refer to dyslexia as a lack of talent in reading, just as someone might have a lack of musical talent or athletic ability," he says. "People who have dyslexia will always have it. It's a disability in that regard, but in our research we have learned two significant things--how to predict which child will grow up to be dyslexic, and how to help that child become a better reader."

    Over the past three decades, the causes of dyslexia and other reading disabilities have been the subject of often heated controversy that invoked the venerable nature-versus-nurture debate. Until recently, researchers thought that heredity (genetics) accounted for roughly 50 percent of all reading disabilities, says Dr. Anne Alexander, director of the Morris Center for Child Development at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Alexander, an M.D., has been a prominent collaborator with Torgesen in recent years.

    "Current thinking is that there probably is a genetic, chromosomal cause for the neural pattern disruption that characterizes dyslexia (more than) previously believed," she said.

    Researchers are exploring the theory that something happens in utero--either genetically or via an insult--in the first or second trimesters of pregnancy that causes neurons responsible for phonological processing to migrate where they don't belong or to fail to link up as they should, said Alexander.

    Most researchers believe that even though genetics plays the primary role in reading disabilities, environment and culture still counts for a huge part of the problem. Recent research at the University of Colorado, for example, showed that such factors as poverty, whether or not a child was read to by his or her parents, and the presence of an oral tradition accounted for up to a third of the reading disabilities in one study group.

    Such findings dovetail into others which show that kids coming from impoverished backgrounds, from homes where English is a second language and where English dialects are spoken comprise the nation's number-one, at-risk group for reading disabilities.

    "Kids who grow up speaking English dialects, for example, are at a disadvantage when faced with decoding the linguistic sounds of written English because they are not familiar with the building block phonemes that create the written word," says Torgesen.

    "When you say 't-a-r' in some parts of the South, are you referring to a black, sticky substance or the item that covers the wheel of your car?"

    Dyslexic kids for whom English is a second language face a double whammy. They have problems in their native language, cannot fathom the sounds of English and usually fail to read and write successfully in both languages, studies show. The states with the highest percentages of poor readers are states with the highest numbers of immigrant children in their schools--California, Texas, New York and Florida.

    Ironically, says Torgesen, too often it's the children from such socio-economic strata who need early instruction and practice in "phonological awareness" the most and who are getting it the least.

    "I'd guess that about five to 10 percent of suburban and 30 to 50 percent of inner city kids need intensive instruction," he said. "There's very good evidence that a substantial proportion of kids (from the inner city) don't have the talent or skill in this phonological area and therefore need more and better reading instruction than we're typically giving them now."

Phonemes First

    Ruth, R.N.: "Twenty years ago I used to type at home to make ends meet. I had a regular customer, a grad student at Cornell-- absolutely brilliant. She would write these very long, complicated, intelligent and insightful technical papers, but couldn't spell 'cat' or 'is.' I had to have her speak her papers into a tape recorder."

    This true example shows the insidious nature of dyslexia. The otherwise bright Cornell student couldn't understand that the words "is" and "cat" are, like all words, collections of phonemes--sounds with letters attached to them. "Cat," for example, has three phonemes: 'k;' a short 'a' sound (as opposed to long, as in "Kate"); and 't."

    The ability to distinguish phonemes constitutes phonemic awareness, says Torgesen. Neurologists (scientists who study brain function) are now convinced that the typical, healthy human brain is actually predisposed to processing phonemes, and is "hard-wired" to bundle, store and dissect phonemes as the first step in synthesizing speech. The process, which scientists speculate may have evolved as a survival instinct, breaks down parts of speech into separate, distinct sounds. This mental parsing is the first critical step the brain takes in assembling a "vocabulary" that the memory can eventually use to form speech and subsequently, to decode printed words.

    Sound-processing instincts aside, the actual act of reading is anything but a natural phenomenon, say a host of researchers, who refute one of the basic tenets of whole-language instruction that learning to read comes as naturally as learning to talk. Dr. Barbara Foorman, an educational psychologist and NICHD researcher at the University of Houston, counters that "if reading were as natural as speaking, there would be no illiteracy in literate societies," according to a 1997 essay published in The Journal of American Citizenship Policy Review.

    Torgesen's findings strongly support this view. He, Wagner and their other FSU colleagues--cognitive psychologist Dr. Carol Rashotte; clinical psychologist Dr. Chris Lonigan and special education researcher Dr. Patricia Mathes--believe that students who cannot distinguish between the 44 phonemic sounds in English are almost certainly dyslexic and face a life-time struggle to decode the written word. What's key to their findings, though, is that if these same students had received both intensive and explicit phonics-based instruction at the earliest indications of their disability, most of them would be able to read at or near their grade levels.

    But proponents of whole-language argue that merely teaching kids to decode words without regard to context--how words are used in sentences or whole paragraphs--undermines a natural approach to understanding language and makes reading more difficult. Torgesen says that without breaking past the neurological and environmental barriers that prevent a child from using phonological cues to help decipher words, context won't matter a whit because the child won't be able to figure out enough words to glean any meaning from text.

    "Give a child basic strategies to decode words, and when they encounter strange words, they have an effective way of attacking them," says Torgesen. "Then watch what they can do."

    Lyon, of the NICHD, says Torgesen's research group heavily reinforces a growing body of scientific data that holds the promise for a new day in American reading instruction. Work at Florida State, he says, has been instrumental in nailing down the answers to key questions the agency has long pursued:

        •How, from a neurological perspective, do children learn to read?

        •What are the critical skills involved, and what environmental factors--if any--impede them?

        •How--and how early--can you identify children who need help the most?

    "On what it takes to read, Torgesen and his colleagues have illuminated the issue of phonological processing," Lyon told Research in Review. "And FSU has been the best at figuring out when kids learn and where the variation is by watching kids over time."

Early Intervention the Key

    Torgesen's research group will use the new NICHD grant to expand and refine techniques they have found to be extremely effective in recent studies with reading-disabled children.

    The team's largest study, completed in 1996, involved 180 kindergarten children who were identified as being likely to be branded as "reading-disabled" by the time they reached the second grade. The children were randomly assigned to one of four teaching programs, ranging from regular classroom instruction to very intense, explicit reading instruction.

    Torgesen's team uses the words "intense" and "explicit" as technical terms, just as another scientist might use jargon to describe an experiment in quantum physics. The terms define a labor-intensive prescription for taking immediate action as soon as reading problems are discovered in an individual child.

    "Explicit phonics instruction literally means doing whatever is necessary to teach children all the information and skills they need to learn to read," Torgesen explained. "This is not the bad old phonics of yesteryear, as some think, where teachers turned kids loose with some workbooks. Teachers who teach explicitly make no assumptions that a child will figure things out on their own or that they will learn important reading skills just by being exposed to books and listening to others read."

    Intensive instruction simply means teaching explicitly for longer periods or in smaller classrooms as necessary, and is variable depending on the severity of the problem.

    At the end of the two-and-a-half-year-long study, about 26 percent of the children had been held back either in kindergarten or first grade. Children who received the most explicit instruction had the lowest retention rate--9 percent--compared to 41 percent for the group that didn't.

    Interestingly, the children who received the most explicit instruction fell very close to the class average in reading performance and speed. All of these children were stronger in phonological awareness and sight-word reading than children in the other experimental and control groups.

    The study confirmed that the strongest predictors of reading disability in kindergartners are their abilities to grasp the concept of phonemes; their degrees of attention/behavior deficit problems (as rated by teacher) and their home backgrounds (as determined by parents' education and occupation).

    But one of the most noteworthy results confirmed what Torgesen and researchers throughout the NICHD network have suspected for many years--a child's I.Q. is not a good predictor of a reading problem. Most schools routinely use I.Q. scores--taken in the third grade when kids supposedly are able to take written tests--as the prime indicator of a potential "LD" child. Teachers look at the difference between kids' I.Q.s and their reading scores to make the determination.

    This method is fundamentally flawed, says Torgesen. He said his research suggests that in identifying kids who need special help in reading, schools needlessly waste three years waiting for I.Q. results that don't mean much anyway in predicting most kids' reading abilities in later years.

    "Forget the I.Q. tests," he says. "Our research proves that if you know what to look for, you can spot kids who are going to need help by the beginning of kindergarten, and by the time they're in the middle of the first grade, we can tell--with a high degree of accuracy--which ones are headed for serious trouble.

    "By waiting around for an I.Q. test, we allow children to fail for too long in learning to read. This makes it doubly hard for most of them to get a handle on the phonetic skills they need to catch up, and in the meantime, they have lost large amounts of critical reading practice because they are essentially non-readers.

    "It is absolutely crucial that these kids get the kind of intense, explicit instruction they need as early as you can possibly provide it. The longer you wait, the poorer the odds are you can reach them."

    But in a follow-up study with Alexander at Gainesville's Morris Center, Torgesen's researchers showed what intensive, hands-on phonics instruction could do for older, at-risk kids--fourth- and fifth-graders--tagged as severely dyslexic by their teachers. The team poured a total of 67 hours of intense attention on each child--two 50-minute sessions a day, five days a week for two months.

    After another two months of regular, hour-a-day classroom instruction, the kids were tested. All of the children showed large gains in their reading skills (see graph), and in fact, the progress represented what the average child would have achieved in 1.5 years of standard classroom fare--and all in under 70 hours of instruction. A check with the same kids a year later showed steady progress in all areas of reading.

    Alexander calls the results a "breakthrough," defying what most educators had said was impossible--remediating older dyslexic children.

    "Contrary to what many think, we do know how to help older children learn phonetic decoding in such a way as to improve their beginning reading skills," she said.

Turning the Corner

    Jan, 52: "I think my husband is one of those people who was dyslexic but never got diagnosed. He's far from stupid, but if you saw his handwriting you'd think he never made it past elementary school."

    An estimated 39 million Americans of all ages are afflicted with learning disabilities, according to one study, and up to 80 percent of these are reading-disabled. The affliction cuts across all demographic and socio-economic lines, and is the source of unending pain and embarrassment to many in stations both high and low.

    Analysts may forever argue about the root causes of what amounts to a national literacy crisis. Obviously, part of the blame rests with genetically based impediments, but evidence from such recent studies as the one previously cited from the University of Colorado, strongly suggests that millions of poor readers are the victims of cultural and environmental influences that undermine reading education.

    Television, with its astounding capacity to drown out family conversation, pre-empt reading time, and promote a sound-bite, quick-cut mentality that critics charge saps the inherent strength and utility of language, is high on many lists of culprits. The rise of the virtually standard two-income family has fed colossal growth in day-care, an unregulated industry representing a wide spectrum of quality instruction for preschool kids. Overcrowded public schools, victims of ever-tighter budgets and, in too many cases, just plain bad management, produce less-than-optimal environments for any instruction, say countless studies on the subject.

    Whatever the causes, the central fact--according to Torgesen and his NICHD colleagues--is that most childhood reading problems can be either solved outright or substantially alleviated with what researchers now know about teaching kids to read. After repeated tests with first- and second-graders, for example, NICHD researchers conclude that direct, intense instruction in phonics that is imbedded within a sound overall reading curriculum is the only strategy known that can bring young children up to par in reading proficiency quickly enough to give them a toe-hold on their educational careers.

    As he discovered working with older, severely dyslexic kids in the UF study, explicit, intensive phonics techniques can even be used to rescue older kids from illiteracy, traditionally one of the most challenging feats in education.

    "We've been able to take fourth- and fifth-graders reading below the second percentile of their class, and bring them up above the 30th percentile--and in only eight weeks!" Torgesen exclaimed. "And we also have screening techniques to catch problems even before school starts."

    Despite figures that label 15 to 20 percent of the American public reading disabled, Torgesen believes that as little as two percent of Americans are mentally or emotionally incapable of learning to read.

    "We know how to do this, how to turn this thing around," says Torgesen. "We've clearly proven that we have the tools to solve some of these problems. Now, it's just an engineering problem to put these tools in the right place; and it's a political problem to find the resources to do it."

Changing Political Tide

    As it turns out, politics may not be as big of a problem as it once was. The findings of the NICHD research network have now filtered their way into federal, state and even local education policies, and in fact have contributed much of the energy behind what is now a nationally recognized trend to replace curricula based on whole-language theory with phonics-based instruction.

    The most dramatic and most highly publicized example occurred in California in 1997. California's board of education rewrote its entire curriculum to embrace explicit phonics instruction, ending a decade of official endorsement of the whole-language approach. The switch was the state's response to results of a 1994 NAEP survey that showed California tied dead last with Louisiana in reading scores.

    Seizing on what some critics deride as "phonics fever," politicians from governors to local school board commissioners in at least five states--California, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Georgia and Florida--have made phonics a key part of their platforms in 1998. Solons may have been taking a cue from Texas Gov. George Bush, a presidential hopeful, who in 1996 ordered his state's board of education to make research-based phonics instruction the pre-eminent teaching approach in the Lonestar State.

    The list of states who have passed laws recommending phonics-based education now includes Wisconsin, Ohio, Washington, Oregon, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia. At least five states--California, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia--now have officially endorsed explicit phonics instruction as the only state-sanctioned method of teaching. In Florida, annually saddled with some of the worst reading scores in the nation, the phonics vs. whole-language issue has yet to break into the political discussion (see box).

    Anger and dismay at overcrowded schools --another hot political button--has finally reached such proportions that the federal government is giving growth states such as Florida special appropriations to build more classrooms. At least a dozen states, including Florida, made classroom-size in public schools a major political issue in 1998.

    But smaller classes present another problem--finding qualified teachers to put in more classrooms. California's recent campaign to reduce class sizes, for example, resulted in a statewide scramble for teachers, reportedly with the upshot being that some of the least experienced teachers in the state became emergency hires.

    President Clinton's "America Reads" program, acknowledging that millions of kids start school each year with only feeble pre-reading skills, aims to build an army of volunteer tutors ostensibly trained by reading experts. Backers say the plan eventually will help alleviate some of the qualification gaps in reading education.

    Critics, though, say the plan is essentially wrong-headed and may even add fuel to the fire. Robert Slavin, developer of Success for All, a reading program for beginning school kids, has likened the "America Reads" program to President Kennedy's demand to put a man on the moon--but using only volunteer scientists and engineers to figure out how to do it. The only rational solution, says Slavin, is to completely overhaul the way teachers are trained to begin with.

    Writing in a recent issue of Phi Delta Kappan, national education policy writer Anne C. Lewis thinks "America Reads" funding might better be spent on re-training teachers or even "mobilizing" all Americans as "volunteers" for a war on illiteracy.

    "If the key to helping a child learn to read is a well-trained teacher with the time to diagnose and address each child's individual needs, perhaps the America Reads Challenge should adjust its priorities," she writes. Noting the NICHD's findings, she suggested that the Clinton plan fails to address the "deeper problem" of kids growing up in increasingly language-impoverished environments, where "they don't develop the association of sounds with letters, and, ultimately, with words."

Revelation Through Research

    Marianne, 32, second-grade teacher: "Last year, some of us got trained in teaching phonics at a special seminar. It's been an eye-opener for me to see how fast my students pick up the knack of sounding-out words."

    No informed reading specialist will ever say that one particular method of reading instruction is all a child will ever need to become a proficient reader. Phonics is hardly a panacea, says Torgesen.

    "Reading is far too complex an activity for that," says Torgesen. "Explicit, phonics-based teaching is the best method available to get kids ready to read, period. But proficiency requires practice, practice and more practice."

    Indeed, a U.S. Department of Education-sponsored study done by the National Research Council, released in March 1998, concluded that a balanced approach to teaching reading--combining phonics with whole-language techniques--is preferable over any single method. The report did, however, include an entire chapter that stressed the importance of using phonics-based teaching almost exclusively in kindergarten.

    The beauty of phonics, says Torgesen, is that it gives children the keys to unlock literature, the meaning, derivation and kinship of words, and the subtle complexities of other languages. Once children master phonics, they feel more confident in diving head-first into literature, which is essentially what the whole-language movement advocates--immersing children as early as possible in the rich world of words.

    But phonics instruction doesn't come easy for many teachers, who say they don't find the approach intuitive.

    Ray King, principal of Hartsfield Elementary in Tallahassee, one of Torgesen's research sites, believes this is a main reason the whole-language movement has become entrenched in American education and why thousands of teachers are resistant to leaving it.

    "If you haven't seen what it looks like (as a teacher), you wouldn't know what it's supposed to be," he told Research in Review. After coming to Hartsfield and being appalled by students' reading performance, King suspended instruction in everything but math and reading, installed phonics education and saw his students' reading scores jump dramatically over the next four years. In 1994, 32 percent of Hartsfield first-graders read at below the 25th percentile--the figure dropped to five percent last year.

    He says a generation of principals and teachers are wedded to whole language instruction because it's perceived as being more intuitive, easier and more fun to teach than phonics, which many teachers condemn as boring. But another reason, he says, is because teachers simply aren't savvy about research-based reading programs.

    Herein lies a key element driving the nation's "reading wars," Torgesen believes. A prime reason mainstream teacher-education has been so slow to adopt methodologies based on research, he says, is because most teachers aren't trained to think and act like scientists.

    "If you're a typical educator--even with lots of experience teaching kids--you probably haven't been well-trained in research, and you just don't feel comfortable with it," he said. "You may go off and do a wonderful study with kids, but you don't conduct it in a way that allows you to draw clear conclusions."

    On the other hand, psychologists may be great at designing experiments with kids and collecting data, but may have little or no experience in teaching, he said. In both cases, neither professional produces results that can be quantified and hammered into anything useful--and therefore directly translatable into better policy.

    Torgesen has made it a point to incorporate as much expertise from various related fields into his research as possible. He believes it's impossible to do a complete, balanced study of learning disabilities without engaging highly trained specialists in such disciplines as education, psychology, neurobiology and pediatrics.

    "Our people are highly skilled in many areas, from teaching children the basics of how to read to conducting statistically valid measurements of outcomes, and this is why our research is so strong."

    By and large, bona fide scientific research is missing in both the theory and practice of whole-language instruction because the concept relies primarily on qualitative research methods, as opposed to quantitative. Critics say the difference automatically makes it difficult if not impossible to reliably measure student performance in whole-language classrooms, where subjective testing--taking into account kids' cultures and environment--is usually more valued than objective testing. This framework has been challenged by NICHD researchers who hold that regardless of a child's background or inherent limitations, every child needs clear, standardized rules to follow in beginning a reading program.

    Only now, says Lyon of the NICHD, is the nation finally coming to grips with the consequences of ignoring what quantitative research in reading instruction has been offering policymakers for years. Teachers and administrators in all 50 states are getting the message, with testimonials to the power of phonics-based instruction now making regular headlines.

    After seeing dramatic increases in reading scores among some of their schools that switched to phonics education, last year education leaders in Houston, Texas ordered phonics-based retraining for 5,000 teachers and hundreds of school principals. Last August, officials in Baltimore County, Maryland credited a newly installed phonics program with bringing reading scores up 20 percentage points over the course of a single school year in 100 county elementary schools. This fall, kindergarten teachers in Ohio reported a five-fold increase in the number of proficient readers at the end of a year of phonics instruction.

What Price Literacy?

    Success stories aside, even the staunchest devotee of phonics realizes that school districts face a wide range of reading disabilities, thereby making a "one-size-fits-all" approach impractical. Many kids have only a very mild form of dyslexia, for example, whereas many others suffer severely.

    Torgesen's work shows how these worst-case kids can be turned into readers, and it also shows what it takes to do it. He realizes that the amount of time and resources needed to reach the core group of many reading disabled classes is well beyond the capability of the average public school system today.

    Although reliable, cost/benefit studies of explicit/intensive phonics education in public schools are hard to find, naysayers commonly discount such intensive, one-on-one programs as Torgesen advocates as being wholly impractical, no matter how wonderful they may be. But Torgesen sees the futility of continuing to spend what resources are available in demonstrably inefficient ways.

    "A typical learning disability teacher in the fourth or fifth grade has 15 kids in the classroom a time, all with different reading levels. It's ludicrous to think that teacher can bring the reading level of any one of those kids up to anywhere close to normal reading levels."

    Obviously, says Torgesen, the nation has somehow found the money to deal with the awful social mess that critics charge a dysfunctional reading-education system abets--specifically, a national epidemic among youth of joblessness, teenage pregnancies, drug abuse and crime. He's more than ready, he says, to see more of that money spent up front, in the nation's kindergartens and grade schools, than at the end of a long and senseless pipeline of hopelessness and despair.

    His research gives him hope that such a brighter day is at hand.