The following letter was published in the November 21-22, 2007 issue of the Roane County News (in Tennessee). The author is James M. Leitnaker, Ph.D

Reading via Chuck Johnson

“If you can't read you can't do much in this technical world,” my neighbor Chuck Johnson told me the other day.  We were having a conversation about current needs in education.

I agreed strongly with his comment, but then asked him about his reasoning along this line.    Johnson used to teach about air conditioning technology in both the Anderson County Vocational School and adult education courses in Anderson County, and the lack of reading ability in his students made an impression on him.

 “How could you tell they couldn't read?” I asked him. 

 “I couldn't depend on them to read the material at home, I found, so sometimes I'd have students read the material from the text we were using.  It was obvious (that reading was quite difficult for them,)” Johnson told me.

 I suggested that one could be a welder and not be able to read.  Johnson didn't think so.  To be a competent welder, he told me, one has to be able to understand specifications about what is wanted.   Unless someone will hold the welder's hand, he/she needs to be able to read.

 Several years ago Jim Lett, then the Elementary School Supervisor, gave a book, The 90% Reading Goal by Lynn Fielding, Nancy Kerr, and Paul Rosier, to each school board member.  That book and subsequent books by the same authors changed my thinking.  Rather than believing that growth of students is the only goal we should pursue, I came to believe that it is a serious mistake to throw away the talents of a large fraction of our population by not teaching them to read.  For that is what is happening.  Being unable to read severely hampers or kills the ability to do school work past the third grade.  The higher the grade in school the more difficulties the non-reading student will have.

 A later book by these authors, Delivering on the Promise, showed that 90% of the children could learn to read.  And note that a stringent standard was used to measure success, not the watered down version currently used by the State of Tennessee.  It took the folks, in the school district described, ten years to reach the goal.  The path to the goal had not been obvious.

 I'm impressed with what works.

James M. Leitnaker, Ph.D