Saturday, April 27, 1996

Officials offer tools, incentives to improve reading

By Associated Press

New tools to assess students' reading skills as early as kindergarten and new incentives for schools to develop successful reading programs were unveiled Friday.

The key is for teachers to catch potential reading problems early, even before students take their first Texas Assessment of Academic Skills in third grade, officials said at the Governor's Council Reading Summit for educators and education supporters.

"We believe that third grade is too late. It is too late using a TAAS test to find out whether or not our children can read. We need to know early. We already know that this is a game that's over early," Education Commissioner Mike Moses said.

Gov. George W. Bush, who says Texas' No. 1 priority is ensuring that youngsters can read, added, "We cannot solve the reading problem ... until and unless we figure out early who can't read."

New moves in the state's reading push include:

- The Texas Primary Reading Inventory, an informal and optional way for schools to determine students' reading level in kindergarten through second grade.
The assessment material - which for kindergarten starts with such simple observations as whether the student is holding the book right side up - will be available for school districts that don't have their own early assessment tools or that want additional help.

- In awarding state bonuses to principals for student performance, giving heavy weight to reading improvement as compared with performance by students in similar schools. The bonuses can be up to $5,000.

- Allowing schools that meet certain standards to obtain a higher state ranking if their students' reading performance improves more than other comparable schools.

Bush - who has called it a catastrophe that one in four of the school children who took the TAAS reading test last year failed - said he has received an "incredibly heartwarming" response from around the state since launching the reading initiative in February.

Among examples: the Abilene Reporter-News has published a chart for families to put on their refrigerators to track reading vs. television hours. The Boy Scouts have a goal of donating 1 million volunteer hours to help their peers learn to read. Bush also said the Dallas school district is "leading the way" with a successful early elementary reading assessment program.

Such involvement is what's necessary to meet the goal of having all children read on grade level by the time they leave third grade, he said.

"Inertia would be the biggest problem to change in the system, and the biggest problem to succeeding in the system will be indifference," Bush said.