IN 1961, President John F. Kennedy made an audacious promise. Within a decade, he said, Americans would walk on the moon.
To accomplish this goal, he brought together thousands of the country's top scientists, engineers and designers to carry out a broad-based program of research, development and experimentation. Eight years later, Neil Armstrong made President Kennedy's promise a reality.
In 1996, President Clinton made an equally audacious promise. Every 9-year-old, he pledged, will be a reader.
This is no small challenge. Currently, the president notes, 40 percent of fourth- graders are not reading at the "basic" level on the respected National Assessment of Educational Progress. To enable every one of these children to succeed would be an enormous contribution to the well-being of our entire nation, perhaps a more important accomplishment than the moon landing.
Yet in contrast to President Kennedy's proposal, President Clinton has primarily proposed to accomplish his goal by recruiting up to a million volunteers to tutor at-risk children. He established America Reads to coordinate a massive process of recruiting and training an army of volunteers.
Volunteerism, of course, is a good thing. Simply to create mentoring relationships between caring adults and children is a real contribution. Volunteer tutors, just by reading with children, can reinforce the importance of reading, give children additional practice and perhaps increase children's motivation to read.
The tutors themselves may experience real pleasure and a sense of accomplishment from working with a child, and political support for education may be increased by having a broad range of non-educators spend time in schools.
But will volunteer tutors solve America's reading problems? Not a chance.
It is simply unrealistic to imagine that children who are failing in reading six hours each day in school will magically catch up because a volunteer works with them a few hours a week.
Volunteer tutoring programs that have selected well-qualified tutors, given them extensive training and follow-up, and often paid them a stipend for their efforts have sometimes had a significant impact on student achievement.
However, even if a million such volunteers could be recruited, trained and supervised, it wouldn't be enough. At any given time, there are about 11 million children in grades one to three. If 40 percent of them are not reading adequately, there are 4.4 million children who need tutors.
Further, there is a question of equity. Studies show that volunteers won't travel far from home. Which will recruit more volunteers, Baltimore City or Howard County? Which will recruit more college-educated volunteers?
If we are serious about ending reading failure, we need to work on many fronts at once.
We need to provide teachers with proven materials, methods and professional development to put into practice what we already know how to do.
We need to carry out research and development, just as the space program did, to identify new approaches classroom teachers can use to help all children learn to read.
Most reading problems can be solved by improving the quality of classroom instruction, but there are individual children who need additional assistance. Many low-achieving first-graders can become good readers if they have one-to-one tutoring from well-trained, certified teachers.
Others, with less serious problems, can benefit from tutoring by paraprofessionals or, yes, volunteers. A few children need more sophisticated strategies. Some need assistance that has little to do with instruction. They may simply need eyeglasses, hearing aids or even just breakfast.
There is much that we know about solutions for serious reading problems and need to apply more broadly, but there is also much we need to develop and to investigate.
Just thinking about volunteer tutoring raises several questions:
How often should tutors work with children? What minimum qualifications should they have? What instructional materials should they use? How should training be carried out?
Volunteers are not inexpensive. The Clinton administration proposes to spend $2.75 billion to recruit, supervise and provide stipends to tutors. If we're going to spend this much money, we should have a much better plan.
Most of the costs of a volunteer tutoring program would go to provide training and supervision to the tutors. Yet school districts today, especially inner-city districts, are chronically short on resources for professional development for their teachers.
Wouldn't it make more sense to invest in teachers, give them top-quality in-service training and follow-up, help new teachers, train principals and so on?
Teachers are with our children all day, every day, and will be in the profession for many years. Volunteer tutors come and go. Let's invest in the core of instructional practice before we start thinking about spending serious money on out-of-school assistance.
It's hard to imagine President Kennedy promising to put a man on the moon, and then proposing to recruit a million volunteer engineers to do it. No one would strap himself into a rocket built by volunteer engineers. Let's have the same consideration for our children.
Robert E. Slavin is co-director of the Johns Hopkins University's Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk (CRESPAR).
Pub Date: 5/11/97
