It's a mighty tall order.

Some might say too tall. This summer, an academic center is cranking up in Florida with the express purpose of blowing life back into a public school system that has posted failing marks in reading for nearly 30 years.

It's hardly a new idea, but this time-thanks to unprecedented political backing-it just may work.

In February, Gov. Jeb Bush announced a plan to re-train roughly 56,000 elementary school teachers to teach reading within the next three years. As a partner in this mammoth enterprise, he created the Florida Center for Reading Research, and put the headquarters at Florida State.

A cornerstone of his “Just Read, Florida!” initiative begun last year, the brand new center started off staring at a mountain of homework. Its job is nothing less than developing the right weapons that teachers across the state can use to fight reading problems that are crippling so many of Florida's youngest school children for life.

The governor's idea-spun off from his brother George W. Bush's “Reading First” effort embodied in the $26.5 billion No Child Left Behind Act which Congress passed in January-is to have all of Florida school children reading at their grade level by 2012.

Did we say “tall order?” Consider:

• Today, nearly half (47 percent) of Florida's fourth grade students cannot read at their grade level, according to statistics gathered from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test;
• 57 percent of eighth graders are in the same boat, as are 62 percent of 10th graders. Joe Torgesen says he's up for the challenge.

The FSU psychology professor has spent 20 years studying why some children fail to acquire solid reading skills, and he's developed highly successful teaching programs tailored specifically for those who lag behind. He's found that Florida's standard reading instruction methods simply aren't geared to help struggling readers much beyond first grade. As a consequence, each year a large corps of essentially non-readers gets yanked, pulled, and pushed through an educational system in which they have very little hope of gaining ground.

To help such kids--typically those from low-income households and minorities--Torgesen and other FSU researchers developed an intensive phonics-based reading program that is showing promising results in some of Leon County's most challenging first- and second-grade classrooms.

By 1999, Torgesen's success at one Tallahassee elementary school (Hartsfield) had caught the attention of staffers within the Jeb Bush administration. Once in a solidly middle-class district, Hartsfield began to see an influx of low-income students in the early 1990s thanks to expanding housing projects nearby. Along with the school's middle-class image, students' test scores in reading and other subjects began to plummet. Looking for a rope to climb out of this spiral, Hartsfield turned to FSU and Torgesen. In 1995 teachers began training to use Torgesen's research-based programs.

Within five years the percentage of first graders with severe reading difficulties at Hartsfield dropped from 31.8 percent to just 3.7 percent.

By 2000 Torgesen's programs expanded into five other Leon County elementary schools, and preliminary results from these classrooms also look promising.

Now, Bush has tapped Torgesen to take his research statewide by naming him director of the new center. In April, the center received $2.5 million for its first year to rent office space, hire two more nationally acclaimed researchers (who will become permanent faculty members at FSU) and pay the salaries of the six or eight additional staff the center needs.

“I want this to become the preeminent center in the country for developing research-based reading initiatives,” Torgesen said.

Mary Laura Openshaw, head of Jeb Bush's “Just Read, Florida!,” has high expectations for the center, too.

“When I first talked to Joe about a reading research center, he said, 'Do you mean along the lines of the ones in Texas and California?' I said, 'No, I want something better.'”

Torgesen and the three FSU psychology professors who are his chief associates at the center-Christopher Lonigan, Richard Wagner and Carol Rashotte-are nationally recognized for developing the research and teaching programs that are helping some of Tallahassee's poorest young readers make dramatic improvements.

Besides phonics, the programs stress building children's reading comprehension, vocabulary and language fluency. Top to bottom, the programs are built on “scientifically based reading research,” a catch-phrase describing what the “No Child” act now mandates as the only federally approved approach to reading instruction. The center's first several years will be devoted primarily to developing research-based curricula and reading assessment procedures ordered by the new law.

Florida is eligible for $45 million a year for six years under the program. Of that, $9 million each year can be used for the research and teacher training needed for implementation. The catch is, to qualify for a dime of the federal money, Florida's Department of Education must now require that schools adopt “scientifically based reading instruction” (read: lessons that include a heavy emphasis on phonics-based instruction) as the preferred method for teaching young Floridians to read. The move marks the first time the state has dictated to Florida public schools how reading is to be taught.

If all stays on track, by the summer of 2003, K-3 teachers from across the state will start learning how to use the new instructional programs that are based on scientific research. While Florida State will be the lead horse in developing the programs, the actual teacher-training process will fall to its partner in the governor's plan, the University of Central Florida's Family Literacy and Reading Excellence (FlaRE) Center. UCF established the center-the largest of its kind in Florida-about four years ago as part of its efforts to become a nationally recognized teacher training university.

Torgesen predicted that the training process will be easier for some teachers than others.

“These new curricula are complex and if teachers aren't already somewhat versed in teaching this way, they're not going to master it in just one year.”

Despite Torgesen's success, his programs and those endorsed by both the George and Jeb Bush administrations have been criticized by some reading researchers as being too focused on phonics. They say that children learn better if they are immersed in good literature, and given interesting and meaningful writing assignments from the beginning of first grade. Phonics, they say, should be taught only incidentally, as a small part of the overall reading program (the whole-language method). Additionally, they argue that Florida is ignoring scientific research that suggests that teachers will never be able to make every child a proficient reader as long as their classrooms are crammed with 25 or more students.

While acknowledging the critics, Torgesen said that research has proven that the whole language approach isn't as effective as phonics in helping those children struggling the most with reading. And he believes that reducing class size, while laudable, is beyond many states' cash-strapped budgets because it requires hiring extra teachers and building more classrooms. He holds that the state needs to help teachers learn how to use existing resources more effectively to support small group instruction for struggling readers.

Republican leaders in Florida's legislature this year shot down numerous attempts by Democrats to earmark extra money for reducing class size in K-3 and other grades. In the meantime, Sen. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami, is pushing a constitutional amendment for the November ballot that would require classrooms in pre-kindergarten through third grade to have no more than 18 students. The amendment would allow 22 students-per-classroom in grades four through eight and 25 students in high school.

“In the absence of lots of extra money, it's probably most efficient to do what we are doing,” Torgesen said.

Meanwhile, Florida's plan for improving the youngest students reading skills is supported by a three-legged stool. The partnership between FSU's reading research center, UCF's FLaRE Center, and Openshaw's office is one in which each entity must succeed in its mission or the entire program could fail.

With FSU's expertise as a research university and UCF's focus on becoming a top teacher education institution, Openshaw said no one is worried about the stool's stability.

“I'm not saying that just because we've got two centers that are very professional in what they do that it's going to be easy,” Openshaw said, “but it never dawned on me that (failure) would even be an issue.”