Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, May 2, 1995                   TAG: 9505040021
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BETTER READ EARLY AND OFTEN

Reading comprehension among randomly selected fourth-graders dropped 5 percentage points from 1992 to 1994, with only 23 percent at or above proficiency. That's the bad news.

The worse news is that for the three grades tested - fourth, eighth and 12th - the combined proportion of Virginia students able to read at even a basic level fell in those two years by 10 percentage points, to 54 percent. And among black students, it dropped to 28 percent, from 40 percent in 1992.

Whether they prove statistically valid or not, such dismal results are bound to play a role in what has become a politicized effort to toughen Virginia's Standards of Learning. One can hardly argue with the proposition that they need to be tougher.

Among seniors nationwide, this test indicates, 70 percent had reached at least the basic level of reading ability. Whoopee ding. That means an estimated 30 percent lack even partial mastery of the skills needed to analyze and understand what they read, after 12 years of school!

To remedy such an appallingly low level of reading ability will take more than any elixir administered daily in schools. The simplistic answer of returning to the good ol' days of all-phonics reading instruction, for example, is no answer at all. Without question, more effective classroom teaching is essential. A whole lot of what's needed, though, is to be found outside that setting - at home.

A kid who sees reading as fun will not be stopped from learning how, no matter what method of teaching is in vogue when he happens to pass through elementary school. That kid will read because he gets pleasure from it, and the more he reads, the better he will be able to understand increasingly complicated material.

The seeds for this kind of appreciation for the written word are planted before kids get to kindergarten, when Mama or Daddy reveal the enchanting worlds of Dr. Seuss and Beatrix Potter and any number of fine children's writers, by opening the covers of their books and reading their stories aloud. Parents also nurture those seeds when they spend their own relaxation time with a book or newspaper or magazine.

This is when children learn that reading can be sheer fun, it can light up the imagination, it can intrigue and, despite all resistance, it can teach you something. Kids who learn early to appreciate its pleasures will learn to read, no matter how much life is sucked out of it by schools in the process of transmitting skills.

And kids can be encouraged to improve as they mature by being asked, at home and at school, to discuss things they have read. To turn off the television or the computer game and read for fun. To read homework assignments. That would be too hard? Too much work? For whom? The kids will find that the more they do it, the easier it gets.

Children these days are not dumber than their parents. They often are more math literate; they most assuredly are more computer literate. But many are not as literate in the sense that the word means "able to read and write." That is the primary meaning, and the most important - the key to understanding the thoughts of others, and articulating your own.