Friday, June 25, 1999
Governor gives reading a boost
Taft promotes initiatives to raise proficiency levels
BY DANA DiFILIPPO
The Cincinnati Enquirer
In a stuffy classroom in the West End's Heberle Elementary School, Gov. Bob Taft spent Thursday morning reading about hungry soldiers who persuade grudging villagers to give them food.
The moral of the story, one third-grader enthusiastically volunteered, is that people should share.
The governor nodded and smiled and then offered the other lesson he came to deliver: “I learned to read and I became governor. So if you learn to read, maybe you can become governor someday, too.”
It's a message he's molded his leadership around: Early literacy is key to later achievement. Since he assumed office in January, the governor has pledged to make Ohio “the reading state,” boosting funding for reading initiatives and calling for 20,000 citizens to become volunteer literacy tutors.
But some wonder whether such efforts will work — especially in an urban district such as Cincinnati Public Schools, where proficiency scores have sagged for years.
CPS already has tutoring programs to raise reading achievement, but some complain that progress is too sluggish. Two-thirds of CPS fourth- and sixth-graders did not pass the reading portion of state proficiency tests given in March.
Ohio's new reading guarantee, which will start in the 2001-02 school year, requires districts to flunk fourth-grad ers who can't pass the reading test. Under that guarantee, two-thirds of CPS' fourth-graders would fail.
That means hundreds of students would then be overage for their grades. And overage students are more likely to drop out and have later learning and socialization problems, according to CPS data.
But Mr. Taft said Thursday he's confident a combination of incentives and penalties will lessen the likelihood that districts will see skyrocketing failure rates. Such efforts include:
• Ohio Reads. To be launched this fall, the program calls for 20,000 tutors to help kids learn to read. It also includes $25 million in grants to schools and community agencies for training, materials and background checks.
• Performance incentives. The state budget includes $10 million in cash incentives for districts that significantly improve proficiency test scores and other achievement indicators.
• Intervention. Districts with persistently poor performance face monitoring, intervention and possible takeover under new district report cards Ohio began issuing last year.
Critics say lawmakers should tie schools' performance to funding.
State support of CPS will climb 11.5 percent next year and 12 percent the year after under a budget legislators approved Thursday.
“Why should they get more money if they're not achieving?” said Stu Mahlin, a Hyde Park resident who plans to fight a tax increase CPS will seek from voters in November.
“My grandfather only had a sixth-grade education; he was a farmer. He was more literate than the fourth- and even 12th-graders are now. If a district doesn't perform, the state should take them over just like they did in Cleveland instead of giving them more money.”
Tom Brinkman of Mount Lookout, who heads the anti-tax group Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes, agreed: “They get more money, yet their performance is the pits. It's like giving more money to a drug addict.”
As competition from charter and private schools grows, CPS should follow the lead of other districts, critics say. One Milwaukee district, for example, promises to pay for after-school tutors if kids can't read on grade level by the end of second grade.
But CPS administrators say improvement is imminent, and they point to Heberle students as an example.
The school last year launched a program called Roots and Wings/Success for All, a reading-based curriculum in which students spend 90 minutes a day in uninterrupted reading.
Regular, midyear assessments show the program has boosted achievement, Principal Patricia Stewart-Adams said, adding that she hasn't tallied Heberle's average scores from March's proficiency tests.
“I have trouble reading, but then I sound out the word, stretch it out,” said Heberle fourth-grader Malcom Whitehead, 9, of Price Hill. “I'm getting better.”
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