The National Assessment report card issued today gives an unusual, focused look at how well our schools are doing on one of most important tasks they have—teaching young children to read. The results are mixed and, in many ways, discouraging.

Over the past decade, despite some blips and wobbles along the way, average performance in reading among fourth graders is unchanged. There have been some gains in the proportion of students reaching the proficient and advanced achievement levels, but the proportion below the basic level remains stubbornly stuck at 37 percent.

Although these children may be able to read simple words and sentences, they have serious problems understanding the overall meaning of a relatively simple text. They are likely to find it difficult to read independently and well, which all children must do in order handle the rest of the fourth grade curriculum—in history, science, and writing. By grade 4, students are expected to read in order to learn. Those below the basic level find that a struggle. It is a very serious problem for them, for their schools, and for this country.

As Commissioner Phillips explained, the flat performance overall since the new NAEP reading assessment was introduced in 1992 is the result of two contrary trends. The top groups of students are reading somewhat better than before, which is good news. Those at the bottom are doing somewhat worse, which is not good news. To put it another way, the good readers are getting better while the weak readers are falling even farther behind.

Why this should be so is perplexing and discouraging, particularly at a time when so many educators and politicians repeat the mantra of "high standards for all students."

As the National Teacher of the Year since last May, I have had the opportunity to visit many classrooms throughout the country. In many schools, wonderful things are happening. In some places, however, the reform movement has not yet become an integral part of the teaching of reading. There are still students using ditto sheets. This might have been what we did as children. This is not what we know about the teaching of reading today.

This situation reinforces an important point. We must retrain and re-educate all teachers because we all should be teachers of reading. We must especially give professional training to those who teach early reading. So I am not surprised at these results, because although we talk about reform, not all the classrooms of America are seeing this reform.

Yes, there have been some successes. The proportion of fourth graders reaching the proficient level in reading has gone up steadily from 29 percent in 1992 to 32 percent last year. The proportion at advanced has risen from 6 percent to 8 percent. But the proportion reaching basic has stayed just about the same at 63 percent. And below that—in the bottom 10 percent of students—there has been a decline.

Under the Governing Board's policy, NAEP has a set of three standards, called achievement levels, for reporting performance in each grade assessed. We believe these standards are reasonable ones arrived at in a reasonable way. They were first adopted by the Board eight years ago after an elaborate, broadly-representative standard-setting process that involved classroom teachers, reading specialists, administrators, and interested members of the public from across the nation.

The central achievement level for each grade, called proficient, is meant to represent solid academic performance, which shows "competency over challenging subject matter" for that grade. The language is taken verbatim from the set of National Education Goals, issued in 1990 after an Education Summit convened by our first President Bush and the nation's governors. Yes, proficient is a high standard. But it is one we believe all children should be able to reach. And I have seen this happen in some of the best elementary schools in America.

The basic achievement level is a way station; it signifies "partial mastery" of fundamental knowledge and skills. The advanced level shows superior performance.

In reading, these are standards of how well students understand what they read, of reading comprehension. They are not tied to any particular method of reading instruction—whether phonics or whole-language or a mix of the two. But when so many children are below basic—63 percent of black fourth graders, 60 percent of children in poverty, and 47 percent of children in central city schools—there clearly is a problem in the way reading is taught.

There is one important point to make about the gap that is getting wider. It is not the racial gap between whites and blacks and whites and Hispanics. These gaps are substantial and a cause for great concern, but there was no significant change in the average score for any of these groups between 1992 and 2000. Instead, it is the variation within each group that seems to be getting wider. For example, among black students, the score at the 90th percentile—the highest group—has increased 6 points since 1992, while the score at the 10th percentile is 7 points lower.

This pattern of widening gaps within each racial or ethnic group is repeated in all the subgroups that NAEP reports, though usually it does not meet the test for statistical significance in the NAEP representative-sample survey. Also, the gender gap of girls reading better than boys is about the same now as it was in 1992, although it did increase significantly over the past two years.

Because of immigration, there has been an increase in limited-English students. However, in the samples used for reporting official NAEP results the proportion in that category—limited-English proficient—is still small, rising from 1 percent to 3 percent of those tested between 1992 and 2000. On the other hand, the proportion of students excluded from NAEP, either because of disability or limited-English proficiency, was 7 percent last year, compared to 6 percent in 1992—just a very slight change.

So why is the top group of fourth graders reading better and the bottom of the distribution doing worse?

As you know, the National Assessment is a survey; it does not follow the same children from grade to grade. It does ask teachers and schools—and the children—quite a few background questions, and these can tell us what is happening at a particular time. But they cannot be used to prove any cause and effect relationships.

One important point, which previous NAEP assessments have also shown clearly, is the connection between reading more and reading better. The students who said they read more either in school and for homework or read more for fun have higher reading scores than students who read less.

Since 1992, the amount of reading for fun reported by most fourth graders has stayed about the same, but there has been a slight but significant increase since 1994 in the proportion who say they never or hardly ever do so. Meanwhile, the proportion reading at least 11 pages for school each day has increased since both 1992 and 1994, while the proportion reading five pages or less for school has dropped since 1994.

All this deals with how much reading is done, not with how well reading is taught or encouraged. To find out how that should best be done for different students requires the sort of controlled research that NAEP is not designed to provide.

However, the National Assessment of Educational Progress does provide an important status report, and the overall status of fourth grade reading was stagnant during the 1990s. But we must remember that there is a new revolution in the teaching of reading, and a revolution takes time. With the retraining of teachers to understand that revolution and a commitment from this nation and from all of us, we can look forward to the future with confidence.