Now, the Pressure Begins for Bush's Reading Expert

January 19, 2002

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 - Combat photos from Vietnam cover the

corner walls, alongside framed certificates in lethal

skills like jungle warfare. Strewn across the nearby table

are journal articles and the cauliflowerlike images of

children's brains, with islands of light illustrating brain

activity in children who can read.

Standing in the midst, half warrior and half scientist, is

G. Reid Lyon, who is exercising an enormous, if largely

camouflaged, influence on how America's children will learn

to read in the coming years.

Dr. Lyon, chief of child development and behavior at the

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development,

has been dubbed by many as President Bush's reading czar,

and he substantially wrote the Early Reading Initiative

that was part of the groundbreaking education bill the

president recently signed into law. The initiative pledges

at least $900 million a year to improve reading scores in

high poverty schools and another $75 million a year for

preschool reading.

But what has landed Dr. Lyon in the maelstrom of an

enduring battle over that most fundamental role of

education - teaching children to read - is the way the bill

singles out the money toward programs that embrace explicit

training in phonics.

The dispute pits supporters of drilling children in

phonics, which involves understanding the sounds that build

words and matching them with letters, against those who

favor "whole language" teaching, which uses good stories to

capture children's interest in reading and utilizes phonics

secondarily.

The debate over how children learn to read has long divided

the educational world. Despite serious criticism bubbling

in the education world lately, Dr. Lyon contends he is

within striking distance of what seems like a quixotic

goal: virtually eradicating reading difficulties in young

children. At present, 38 percent of American fourth graders

lack basic reading skills, while among poor and minority

children in cities, the figure is closer to 70 percent. Dr.

Lyon promises to bring the share of nonreaders down to 5

percent, which represents a core of children with genuine

developmental problems.

"In poverty districts, in classrooms where kids are coming

from disadvantage, we are going to - if we do this

correctly - have every one of those kids up and running,"

he said.

The promise represents the kind of salesmanship that has

dazzled politicians and policy makers, and won Dr. Lyon an

army of critics who point out that even in school districts

that have adopted scripted, systematic phonics, reading

problems have not vanished. Last fall, Laura Bush, the

first lady, introduced a program to encourage early reading

called Between the Lions, which the reading maven may have

taken as a private joke. But English teachers attending a

convention in Baltimore about the same time nicknamed him

Dr. Lyin'.

Dr. Lyon's rise to prominence within the Bush

administration began in 1995, when then-Governor Bush

called on him to improve reading scores in Texas, which

went on to mandate systematic phonics instruction. While

reading scores soared on state exams, a nationwide test,

the National Assessment of Education Progress, showed only

slight reading gains, and said the gap between black and

white achievement in Texas had continued to grow.

Hanging on the wall alongside Dr. Lyon's combat snapshots

are framed letters from the White House and photos of him

with Mrs. Bush. A 53-year-old pilot and former parachutist

who sometimes flies to his 42 research sites in his private

plane, Dr. Lyon says that much of the antagonism toward the

new call for evidence-based instruction - often taken as

code words for phonics - springs from inertia, laziness and

occasional corruption on the part of education bureaucrats.

He said: "A lot of this is about people investing in

careers, in products, in ways of making a living that have

frankly been found to be wanting. And it's hard."

Upon testing, he added, much of what people thought worked

in education "turned out to be false."

Dr. Lyon says he is not specifically supporting phonics or

any single method of teaching reading, but a scientific

approach that grounds instruction in evidence it works.

Nevertheless, Dr. Lyon's agency is distributing guides to

hundreds of thousands of educators across the country that

offer sweeping endorsements of systematic phonics as "a

valuable and essential part of a successful classroom

reading program." Education journals, however, have noted

discrepancies between the guides and the report on which

they were based, which acknowledged serious limitations in

the research supporting phonics.

Dr. Lyon said he became interested in how children learn to

read after returning from Vietnam. He began teaching third

grade in the mid- 1970's in Albuquerque but realized that

the job was not for him. "I was horrible at it," he said.

But he was jolted by the number of children who could not

read by the time they reached him.

"That led me to basic questions like, how do kids learn to

read?" he said. "And why do some of these kids have these

difficulties, and what do you do about it?" He went on to

earn a doctorate in psychology and special education.

Recruited by Duane Alexander, the head of the National

Institute of Child Health and Human Development, to oversee

reading research, Dr. Lyon boasts that in his 11 years

there, "we've built the largest longitudinal reading

research program in the world," following children as they

progress through school.

Dr. Lyon realizes that his pledge to wipe out early reading

difficulties has, in fact, no proven track record. It is a

pledge he will undoubtedly be held to in the years to come.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/19/education/19READ.html?ex=1012890985&ei=1&en=5e3e9c4f70576351