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, nearly half a century 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. The typical American corporation today routinely pushes 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 who they know are borderline functionally illiterate.

The state's new reading research center will be anchored by (clockwise from top right) FSU psychologists Joe Torgesen, Christopher Lonigan, Carol Rashotte and Richard Wagner.

Since 1969, the best measure of the nation's troubled learning curve has been the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the so-called “Nation's Report Card,” run by the U.S. Department of Education. In 2000, the NAEP reported that more than a third (37 percent) of America's fourth grade children (roughly 10 million kids) could not read at even a basic level.

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.

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. Reading scores have improved hardly any since 1971 when the NAEP gave a collective “D-minus” in reading to kids aged 9, 13 and 17.

A National Wake-up Call

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 largely failed to register much of a blip on the national consciousness, despite periodic, fevered political ballyhoo from Washington.

Until recently.

In the wake of the Clinton administration's “America Reads Challenge,” a one-lunged, $2.75 billion program trotted out in 1998, last year the George Bush administration announced its plans to finally put a fire under America's sleepy public school system. Amid unsurpassed bipartisan fanfare, Bush's $26.5 billion, “Reading First” program, in the form of the No Child Left Behind Act, was signed into law January 8.

Easily the most ambitious federal attempt to overhaul America's entrenched educational establishment in 35 years, the act creates a host of precedent-setting measures ostensibly aimed at dramatically improving the nation's pitiful report card during the next decade.

Tucked into the thicket of the law's 1,200 pages are calls for setting higher standards in classroom achievement-including mandatory testing in reading and math in grades three through eight, plus annual assessments in science-stiffer accountability and teacher-quality monitoring practices for school districts; and more aggressive rescue efforts for low-achieving students.

Also-to the great relief of a special corps of university researchers-the act puts pressure on school districts in every state to teach kids how to read using “scientifically based reading research.” In classic carrot-and-stick style, if districts fail to adopt this new edict they will forfeit their share of the nearly $1 billion per year the act sets aside for state-by-state reading improvement grants.

For Florida, the new law may be the tonic that finally saves the patient. With an embarrassing K-12 track record accurately reflecting the national educational malaise (see box), the Sunshine State is in high gear to get aboard the new federal imperative. Taking a cue from his brother, last September Gov. Jeb Bush, through executive order, created “Just Read, Florida!,” essentially his own version of Washington's plan.

Based largely on the premise that a child's scholastic success in any subject hinges entirely on his or her ability to read (once upon a time a common-sense cornerstone of the country's educational system), Bush's “Just Read” effort is being hailed on both sides of the aisle in Tallahassee. The law aims to have all Florida students reading at grade level by 2012. Less than half of the state's K-12 students now do.

To bring Florida classroom reading instruction in line as quickly as possible with the “No Child” act's specific emphasis on “scientifically based reading research,” in February Gov. Bush announced creation of a $2.5 million reading research center to be headquartered at Florida State University.

Tapped to head up the center is Joseph Torgesen (Ph.D. Michigan), a developmental psychologist who specializes in the scientific study of how children learn to read.

Lisa Jones, FSU reading research teacher with Torgesen's group, leads an intensive review of sounds in an elementary school in North Florida.

It was chiefly Torgesen's work with students at Tallahassee's Hartsfield Elementary school that brought his findings to the attention of officials within the Jeb Bush administration. In 1994, 32 percent of Hartsfield's first graders finished the year reading below the 25th percentile. Five years later, after the school made changes based on Torgesen's research, less than five percent did.

In another study that took place in six other elementary schools in Tallahassee, the FSU research group worked with a target group of 180 kids who were identified in kindergarten as those most 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.

At the end of the two-year study, about 26 percent of the children had been held back either in kindergarten or first grade. Children who receive the most explicit and systematic instruction had the lowest retention rate-nine percent-compared to 41 percent for the group that got less direct instruction.

In another study with older, severely dyslexic kids in Gainesville, Torgesen's group applied the same techniques he'd used in Tallahassee and got results that amazed veteran educators. The results defied what most had said was impossible-turning older, dyslexic children into proficient readers.

“We were 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 said.

The secret of his success?

A teaching method steeped in the venerable principles of phonics.

Among many rank-and-file elementary educators, not long ago “phonics” was essentially a dirty word. To many, it still is.

Message from Washington to the latter: Get over it. Phonics-based reading instruction is how America is going to save itself from a steady descent into dumbing-down hell, say backers of the George Bush plan.

In his “No Child” act, the “scientifically based” language addressing how students should be taught to read is code for phonics-intensive training methods developed and tested mainly by university researchers-mostly psychologists such as FSU's Torgesen-over the past three decades.

In a sense, the measure lances a national boil that has festered for years over the best way to teach kids to read. Characterized as “the reading wars,” the debate has assumed the posture of 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” (critics are fond of calling it “look-and-guess”) and “sight reading”-traces its roots to the teachings of 19th century educational reformer Horace Mann. By most accounts, “whole language” has been the predominant reading instruction method in America for the last two decades.

The phonics-based 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 (“p” as in “pot,” “m” as in “man”) that make up speech. The whole-language method de-emphasizes 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 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 Bush initiative tosses that notion out the window.

“This is not the bad old phonics of yesteryear, as some think, where teachers turned kids loose with some workbooks,” Torgesen explained. “This involves intensive, explicit instruction designed to do whatever is necessary to give children all the information and skills they need to learn to read.”

Torgesen's team uses the words “intense” and “explicit” as technical terms, encompassing an often labor-intensive prescription for taking immediate action as soon as reading problems are discovered in an individual child. The method, which he says is easily tailored to fit most classroom dynamics, can mean teaching harder (more explicitly) for longer periods or in smaller classrooms as necessary.

The method even incorporates some techniques found in whole-language teaching. Torgesen calls phonics “hardly a panacea.” He says that 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, saying that “reading is far too complex an activity for that.”

But the beauty of letting phonics be the first taste a child gets in reading instruction, he says, is that it gives that child the essential keys for unlocking literature, for grasping the meaning, derivation and kinship of words, and picking up on the subtle complexities of other languages. Once children master phonics, they feel more confident in diving head-first into literature, which is basically what the whole-language movement advocates-immersing children as early as possible in the rich world of words.

“Explicit, phonics-based teaching is the best method available to get kids ready to read, period. But proficiency requires practice, practice and more practice.”

READ: RESEARCH

To be sure, regardless of the bipartisan banner under which it sailed through Congress, Pres. Bush's bold, high-dollar incursion into American classrooms doesn't sit well with everybody.

Critics assail it as just another costly boondoggle, a naked power-grab by the federal government out to meddle in an area where it has no business. Some key educators have decried the move as fundamentally wrong-headed, a cynical denial by conservatives in power to acknowledge frightful societal ills that U.S. schools are obliged to battle daily with too few weapons.

Backers of the new measures argue vehemently that they're long past due, and point to the government's own studies as ample evidence. One of the earliest warning sirens came in 1983, when the U.S. Department of Education released A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, an independent study that heaped unprecedented scorn on the American educational system. The report called the nation's allegiance to mediocrity an “act of unilateral educational disarmament.”

Despite its provocative conclusions, the report failed to shake the country's educational system out of its paralysis. Meanwhile, however, yet another, little-known 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.

One of the most profound revelations in recent years is what neurologists (scientists who study brain function) have learned about how the brain analyzes phonemes, the individual sounds in spoken words. They found 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.

Phonics Fad? Each year, worried parents spend millions of dollars on highly marketed programs advertising reading benefits for children. FSU's Torgesen says that while some off-the-shelf programs may have merits, parents of LD children shouldn't expect miracles, especially if children are left to work through the programs on thier own.

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.

Early on, NICHD researchers began 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.

G. Reid Lyon, head of the NICHD branch that directs reading research, says that collectively, 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. Such is the brick-and-mortar of phonics-based teaching.

“There is no way to read if you are not very facile in the use of phonics,” Reid said. 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. Lyon now finds himself and his agency at Ground Zero in a national campaign to rebuild U.S. education in the very image of research he's supported and advocated all his life.

Lyon, a lifelong Democrat, has become the Bush Administration's chief advisor on matters of reading instruction. He worked closely with teaching specialists in Texas during George Bush's gubernatorial years, and approved funding for much of the research that Bush used to revamp reading instruction and testing standards throughout the Lonestar State. Lyon is credited with writing most of the reading portions of the No Child Left Behind Act, much of which mirrors what has been state law in Texas for four years.

Some of Lyon's best evidence supporting his convictions has been coming from Torgesen and his FSU colleagues Richard Wagner (Ph.D. Yale), Christopher Lonigan (Ph.D. Stony Brook) and Carol Rashotte (Ph.D. Florida State). Since 1990, these scientists have been awarded more than $16 million from Lyon's agency to study both the way children learn to read and methods to prevent reading failure in children with learning disabilities.

“We're trying to change the culture through this (No Child) legislation,” Lyon told a reporter in January. “Unfortunately, the culture to this point has been that anything and everything goes in reading instruction.”

Fighting the LD Epidemic

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.

Typically, by the time these children reach the second grade, they're wearing a familiar label-LD, for “learning disabled.” Since the mid-70s, the incidence of LD among school-age kids in the U.S. has shot up dramatically-just in the past decade, among students aged six to 21 the numbers have increased 38 percent, according to federal statistics.

The rise in LD among school kids-and especially among students in special ed classes, which in 1998 was pegged at 52 percent-has touched off a national furor over what's causing this epidemic and what's the best way to deal with it.

Of late, the debate has taken on a particularly nasty tone. A recent flurry of books has fanned parents' suspicions about LD. Some writers and TV pundits allege that LD is a myth, and worse, that children diagnosed with the disorder are being drugged unnecessarily, the “victims” of an insidious pact between the nation's educational bureaucracy and the pharmaceutical industry.

Heated rhetoric aside, the fact remains that LD is an extremely bothersome issue that observers say is undermining the very best efforts of educators to turn their schools around.

Torgesen is a co-author of a chapter entitled “Rethinking Learning Disabilities,” along with Lyon and others, recently published by the Progressive Policy Institute. He concludes that as a psychological phenomenon, LD is very real, yet often is misdiagnosed and therefore treated the wrong way.

“There's a broad category of LDs that describes children who have such severe difficulties learning in school that they 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.

But despite figures that label 15 to 20 percent of the American public reading disabled-upwards of 40 million people-Torgesen believes that as little as two percent of Americans are mentally or emotionally incapable of learning to read.

And of all the clinically identified LDs among schoolchildren, he said that the granddaddy of them all is dyslexia-a word not heard today as often as it once was. Up to 80 percent of all kids who wind up being labeled “LD” are in fact dyslexic, with the chief symptom being an inability to read, Torgesen maintains.

“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.”

Not all kids who have trouble reading are dyslexic, studies have found, but many are, says Torgesen. In fact, Torgesen actually prefers “dyslexia” as a synonym for “reading disabilities.” The latter has become a catch-all phrase that includes behavioral problems belonging to the family of acronyms so familiar to parents of school-age children-e.g. ADD, ADHD, ODD.

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 visual patterns.

The causes are complicated, but most researchers believe that both environmental and genetic factors are at work. For example, 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 problems.

“LD” kids for whom English is a second language face a double whammy, says Torgesen, because they aren't familiar with the building block phonemes that create the written word. They typically cannot fathom the sounds of English and usually fail to read and write successfully in both their native language and in English, 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 poor socio-economic strata who need early instruction and practice in “phonological awareness” the most and who are getting it the least.

But American kids hardly need to be poor or live in isolated communities to become casualties of the culture. 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 responsible for the rise in LD.

Today's almost 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 its root causes, America's LD plague is vulnerable to attack from what science has shown to be an effective antidote, Torgesen and his NICHD colleagues argue. Regardless of what caused a child's LD, the problem can be either solved outright or substantially alleviated through conscientiously applied phonics-based teaching.

“Only in the last 15 to 20 years have researchers come to understand that a lack of phonemic awareness is the underlying problem in (dealing with) dyslexia,” Torgesen said.

“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.”

Early Intervention the Key

Over the years, Torgesen's studies of very young students have revealed a common malady. By the end of kindergarten, students who still struggle to identify the basic sounds (phonemes) in words, are at a very high risk of facing a life-time struggle to decode the written word.

The corollary to this finding, though, is that if these same students get exposed to the right kind of phonics-based instruction at the earliest indications of their disability, most of them would be reading at grade level by third grade.

“Educators who now will begin adapting phonics-based teaching in reading classrooms need to grasp this,” says Torgesen. “We know how to do this, how to turn this thing around. The key is getting to those kids with learning disabilities as early as possible.”

A common stumbling block to early intervention efforts in Florida and elsewhere has been schools' reliance upon I.Q. tests to help diagnose learning disabilities. Such tests are used by school psychologists to identify children with large discrepancies between their general intelligence and their reading levels. It is this discrepancy which has been considered an essential part of the diagnosis of learning disabilities.

This method is fundamentally flawed, says Torgesen.

“For most children with reading disabilities, it takes several years for the discrepancy between intelligence and reading to become large enough for an accurate LD diagnosis to be made,” he said. This means time needlessly wasted in reaching children most critically in need of help to catch up. For many kids, by the time help arrives it's too late.

“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.

“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.”

POLITICAL TIDE CHANGE

In talking to Torgesen these days, one quickly picks up on a sense of immediacy that envelops the man in his cluttered campus office. Meeting time is hard to come by; ringing phones and e-mail alerts punctuate every hurried visit.

But through it all, he's smiling.

Torgesen and his FSU colleagues are witnessing something that befalls the rare academician-the application of research, work that has consumed their careers, at the highest level possible in a high-stakes fight to solve a national crisis.

Torgesen talks excitedly about the new reading center, how the mechanics will make it work for Florida. By April, there was still much to be resolved, loose ends likely to hang for awhile as the state gets ramped up for the governor's new resolve in reading.

Nationally, the picture is likely to take longer to come into focus, he knows. There's more than 30 years of bad habits to break in school systems from Maine to California. That's likely to take some doing, he said. There's a widely diverse audience out there, and it will be interesting to watch how the government's carrot-and-stick educational reform act plays to it.

But Torgesen is optimistic.

“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.”

From county school board offices to state legislatures, politics will surely color the outcome of the ambitious “No Child” act, whose fine print few have read. For example, while stopping short at sanctioning school vouchers-a popular conservative agenda item for years-the act opens a door for parents of students attending low-performing schools to apply for money to pay for private tutoring or transportation to another public school.

The law also cuts way back on federal subsidies for special education programs. Such provisos are sure to provide ample fodder for civil rights attorneys and lawmakers for months, if not years, to come.

Obviously, though, politics is hardly the obstacle it once was. Passage of the “No Child” act-made possible only through surprisingly solid support from both major political parties-now essentially codifies the kind of research Torgesen and others do for a living-officially sanctioning a “right way” to teach reading, in other words.

In his view, the nation finally has found the money to deal effectively 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 happy 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.

“I really believe we've finally turned a corner now in our approach to this national crisis,” he said. “There's just too much momentum behind this kind of research not to change the way we're teaching America's children to read.”

This article is adapted from an article of the same name that appeared in the fall/winter 1999 issue of this magazine-Ed.