Reading Instruction

Maryland Schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick intends to push for stiffer requirements at the state's education colleges to ensure that teachers are better prepared to teach reading, especially in elementary schools.In response to a series in The Sun this week detailing widespread failure to learn how to read properly among the state's and nation's schoolchildren, Grasmick said she plans to ask the state school board early next year to require more college reading-instruction courses for teachers to become state-certified.

So many classes ... ALL IN FAVOR of a longer school day, raise your hands. Ah, we see a few arms in the air, and we understand why. There's never enough time. The constraints are getting tighter in Anne Arundel County, where the school board recently voted to double the time sixth-graders spend on reading instruction - a necessary move in light of slacking reading performance on standardized tests. Now, Superintendent Carol S. Parham and her middle school principals must face a new challenge: how to carve out time for extra reading instruction without debilitating arts education.

At a time when Maryland is seeking to boost stagnant eighth-grade reading test scores, teachers and principals from middle schools across the state will gather tomorrow for four days of brainstorming and planning on how to improve instruction. The fourth meeting of the Maryland Reading Network - to be held at Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg - will focus for the second consecutive year on middle school reading programs. "It is such a change in the culture for middle schools to think about reading instruction," said Michele Goady, chief of the Maryland State Department of Education's language development section and specialist in reading and communication skills.

Baltimore County schools are adopting a new screening system to determine which of its seventh- and eighth-grade pupils need additional reading instruction. Under the new system, outlined at a school board meeting last night, all 26 middle schools in the county will use the same standards to assess pupils' reading levels. School officials are evaluating the reading skills of the current sixth-graders, who will be the first class affected. All Baltimore County pupils receive reading instruction through sixth grade.

Maryteresa Bressler went to college to become a teacher. She now realizes she never got some critical information: how language develops, how to teach the sounds that make up words, how the brain responds to reading.Those important tools came only "by trial and error during my first four years of teaching first grade," the Baltimore County teacher told the State Board of Education yesterday.The Middlesex Elementary teacher was testifying at a hearing on proposed reading courses for Maryland teachers.

IF there is compelling logic to the Baltimore City school board's decision to set up a reading curriculum that switches gears abruptly between the second and third grades, we fail to grasp it.Acting CEO Robert E. Schiller and other school officials contend that such a program would not adequately prepare third-graders for the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program tests, which measure a student's ability to use basic skills in problem solving and...

YOU CAN'T teach what you don't know. And if you've ever sat through a class with a teacher who doesn't know anything about reading instruction, you know how painful it can be for both instructor and student. Ill-equipped reading teachers will talk about "immersing the kids in language" and grasp at the wispy, illogical tenets of whole language. But they don't know the fundamentals. They can't give kids the rock-solid reading foundation that's only constructed through a methodical, phonics-based approach to instruction.

With Anne Arundel County's middle school pupils lagging behind in reading, school district officials hope to put a new focus on the mechanics of reading in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades. On Wednesday, they will ask the county's school board to consider a restructuring of the middle school day to provide a long block of time devoted to reading, more reading teachers, more group planning time for faculty and the option of keeping those pupils who haven't mastered English from moving on to study Spanish or French.

Critics of Maryland's public school systems urged legislators yesterday to "get back to basics" and pass a bill making phonics the state's primary method of reading instruction.In sometimes emotional testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, phonics advocates argued that public schools have done irreparable harm to children by clinging to failed methods of reading instruction."When you can't read, you feel ashamed. You think you're stupid," said Conrae Fortlage, who said she has been afflicted by spelling and reading problems as a result of a nonphonics "whole language" curriculum.

LEARNING TO read is one of life's defining experiences. For many children, the skill comes as naturally as learning to ride a bicycle. For others, the process is fraught with frustration and failure. No responsible adult can turn a deaf ear to con- cerns about how reading is taught, especiallyconcerns that some teaching methods increase the chances that children will fail to become competent readers in the early elementary years.But the proper place for these discussions is at meetings of boards of education, in school administrative offices, in classrooms with principals or teachers, and especially in the colleges and universities where future teachers are being trained.