A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

This is a Working Document
The Seven Priorities of the U.S. Department of Education (July 1997)

Priority One:
Reading Independently and Well by the End of Third Grade

Importance of Priority One

 Reading is the foundation for all other learning. Even though as a nation we are above the international average in reading, unfortunately, too many of our children still struggle when it comes to reading. Forty percent of America's fourth graders cannot read at what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) considers to be the basic level. Seventy percent fall below the proficient level.(6)

Our schools emphasize reading during the first three grades. By the fourth grade, we expect children to be good readers so they can then learn the rest of the core curriculum. Too often, the children who struggle with reading early on fall further behind in school, are placed in special education classes, or lose interest, give up, and drop out. For several years already, Secretary Riley and the Department of Education have tried to help combat this problem by stressing the importance of reading and improved literacy, launching both the Partnership for Family Involvement in Education and the Read*Write*Now! initiative which connects children with reading partners during the summer. The President and Secretary believe a strong and early focus on reading, coupled with greater parental involvement, can reduce special education and remedial education costs, decrease truancy rates, and reduce the number of young people dropping out of school. It can also help bilingual students achieve the high standards established for all students.

As a nation, we now have the opportunity to make greater progress in this area. New scientific research shows that experiences before and after birth, particularly in the first three years of life, dramatically influence brain development.(7) Nurturing, talking to, singing to and reading to our youngest children can improve their ability to learn and develop throughout their lives. Although this information presents daunting challenges, it also expands our understanding of how to help every child get off to a strong and healthy start and begin to become a lifelong learner. Moreover, we now know a lot about how to teach reading.

Already, states and communities nationwide, such as Texas, California, Boston and New York City, have launched far-reaching efforts to improve the reading success of their students. The Department of Education's activities are designed to build on and support those efforts in order to help America's children read independently and well by the end of third grade.

Strategy for Supporting Priority One

The strategy for supporting priority one involves three critical steps. (The steps mentioned throughout this section are not meant to be rank ordered. In fact, to be most effective, whenever possible, they should be taken simultaneously.) The first step is the America Reads Challenge. It has four major components. The second step involves research, development and dissemination of information. The third step is the new voluntary national test of fourth grade reading in English.

Step 1: The America Reads Challenge

In August 1996, President Clinton responded to our national literacy problem by announcing the America Reads Challenge. The America Reads Challenge calls on all Americans --parents, community groups, religious organizations, teachers, principals, and private sector leadership --to pitch-in and help ensure that all children are reading independently by the end of third grade. To achieve this, the initiative strives to provide all children with the reading supports that only some children currently have. These include: (1) actively involved parents who read with their children from infancy onward; (2) quality preschool opportunities; (3) extra individualized attention, where needed, from pre-school through 3rd grade; and (4) high quality in-school instruction. To support each of these four areas, the Department of Education is engaging in a number of different strategies.

  1. Actively involved parents. The America Reads Challenge Act, which the Administration proposed to Congress in April 1997, requests $300 million for Parents as First Teacher Grants for local programs. The grants would assist parents, such as those who may be hard to reach or whose first language may not be English, in helping their young children learn better reading skills. Additionally, the Department's Partnership for Family Involvement in Education, which now includes over 2,000 family, school, community, employer and religious groups, continues to sign up partners to help with reading, promote family-friendly business, and support community-based organizations and schools as they create neighborhood learning communities outside of school hours.

  2. Quality pre-school opportunities. A number of U.S. Department of Education programs currently support preschool opportunities. For example, Even Start supports over 500 local family literacy programs which combine early childhood education, adult education, and parenting instruction; Part A of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act funds preschool programs for 140,000 children; and the Preschool Grants program under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) helps provide special education services for preschool children. President Clinton and the bipartisan leadership of Congress also have secured significant increases in the Head Start budget to enable 1 million 3-and 4-year olds to be served by 2002.

  3. Extra individualized attention from Pre-K through grade 3, where needed. A major emphasis of the President's American Reads Challenge is expanding tutoring opportunities after school, during the summer or on weekends for young children who need additional help. The Department's efforts to increase dramatically the number of tutors available to provide this assistance include:

    1. The President's proposed America Reads Challenge Act requests $2.75 billion over five years to support one million reading tutors. The bulk of these funds would help local reading partnerships hire reading specialists and tutor coordinators, including 14,000 AmeriCorps members, to mobilize and train tutors. The tutors would provide individualized assistance, both after school and during the summer months, to children who need extra help to read well and independently. Significantly, the recent balanced budget agreement between the President and Congress includes a child literacy initiative consistent with the President's America Reads Challenge to help children learn to read independently by the end of third grade.

    2. Through its college work-study effort, the Administration is working with college presidents to give 100,000 college work-study students the opportunity to serve as reading tutors. As of July 15, 1997, over 500 colleges had committed thousands of work-study students to this effort and to other student and family volunteer initiatives.

    3. Fighting the summer drop-off in reading. The Department of Education is continuing to work with over 40 partners -- including Pizza Hut, the Urban League, the National PTA and Hadassah -- on its Read*Write*Now! Initiative. Read*Write*Now!, an intensive summer component to the America Reads Challenge, encourages children to read and write 30 minutes daily, including with a reading tutor at least once or twice a week, to prevent a decline in literacy skills over the summer. First started in the summer of 1995, the initiative reached nearly one million children last year.

  4. High quality in-school instruction (K-3). The Department's current programs are important levers to help strengthen students' literacy skills. Programs funded by Title I of the ESEA, Even Start, Bilingual Education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act spend substantial dollars in reading services for children, primarily during the regular school day. For example, over 70 percent of the six million children served by Title I receive reading assistance. Even Start and Adult Education programs make reading assistance available to adults. The Department of Education intends to harness these and other programs to support high-quality reading instruction more effectively.

Step 2: Research, Development and Dissemination of Information

The success of the America Reads Challenge will depend on raising expectations nationwide, giving better information to educators about effective practices, and mobilizing people to help children become successful readers. The Department hopes to take advantage of its national voice and position to help parents and the public understand the need for every child to read independently by the end of third grade and ways to be involved to support this goal. Moreover, by disseminating to the public examples of student work that meet challenging standards, both the Department and other organizations can advance the public's understanding of the level of performance each child must attain. Through research and development, they also can promote the use of best practices in all programs supported by its funds. Educators and the public will need more high-quality information on such issues as effective tutoring programs and professional development strategies for teaching early reading, exemplary practices for Title I and early childhood education, ways to use programs like Success for All or Reading Recovery if students experience trouble in reading early in their schooling, and strategies to work with institutions of higher education to improve the training of future teachers.

Step 3: New Voluntary National Test of Fourth Grade Reading in English

To stimulate further a movement to help students read independently by the end of third grade, President Clinton has also proposed a new, challenging and voluntary national test in fourth grade reading (his proposal for a similar test of eighth grade math is described in the next section). The test will not just be another test. It is intended to capture the public's attention and stimulate change. By showing parents and teachers where individual students stand in relation to rigorous national standards and by demonstrating the kind of work that will be essential for success in the next century, students, teachers, parents, and their communities can work together to improve their schools. The test will have the following characteristics:

  1. It will be administered first in the Spring of 2000.

  2. The test will be voluntary: the decision to use it will be made by state and local authorities. President Clinton is urging every state and district to participate in the effort.

  3. The test will be based on the frameworks used to develop the widely-accepted National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) fourth grade reading test, which is now used in over forty States on a sample basis. The test will be equated to the NAEP and, like the NAEP, be criterion-referenced rather than norm-referenced.

  4. The test will provide individual student scores and will be available to all students in all fourth grade classes of participating states or districts. This contrasts with the NAEP, which does not produce individual scores and is given to only a sample of students in most states. While NAEP works well for providing a state or national average, it does not tell a parent, teacher or principal how an individual student is doing.

  5. No individual student data will be received by the U.S. Department of Education. Under legislation (P.L. 105-78), the bipartisan National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) is responsible for formulating policy for the voluntary national tests, just as it does for NAEP. NAGB will also control the voluntary national test development with advice from the most successful math and reading teachers across the country, parents, governors, and education, civic and business leaders. Once the test is developed, printing, scoring and reporting will be licensed to test publishers who, along with NAGB, will ensure proper administration for states, and school districts.

  6. While the voluntary national tests are being developed, the National Academy of Sciences will conduct studies on testing issues and the feasibility of linking states' testing programs to NAEP. This will provide NAGB, the Department and Congress with the most complete testing research available.

  7. The Department and NAGB will make information available to help teachers, parents and students prepare for the test. Each year, after the test has been given, the test instruments and scoring guides will be made available on the World Wide Web. Every effort will be made to report data clearly and informatively.

The Department believes that a challenging reading test based on high standards that produces individual scores will raise expectations systemwide and promote greater equity. For it is in higher poverty areas, where expectations often are lowest, where "C" level work often receives an "A."(8) Educators will have clear benchmarks towards which they can work. Parents in poor-achieving schools, whose children bring home strong report cards but have low scores on these tests, will have additional information to examine their child's progress and hold their children's schools more accountable. And the public will be better able to make sure all young people are mastering the basics because they will have a clear standard against which to judge success.

End Notes:

  1. NAEP 1994 Reading Report Card for the Nation and the States. The basic level provides a measure of the capacity to read independently and understand the overall meaning of what is read. The proficient level measures the capacity to make valid inferences from text. (p. 42). [ Return to text ]

  2. White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, April 1996.[ Return to text ]

  3. The National Assessment of Chapter 1, Reinventing Chapter 1, Final Report, February 1993.[ Return to text ]

Your comments on this document are invited, please send them to 7priorities@ed.gov.


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Last Updated -- November 25, 1997, (pjk)