President's Viewpoint
Seuss and Substance

Beyond 'Read Across America'

For Gloria Siciliano, the new millennium will start with a blizzard of red-and-white striped top hats because, once again, Dr. Seuss is on the loose. Siciliano is now preparing 1,000 students in her Phoenix, Arizona, high school to read to 20,000 elementary school children during NEA's Read Across America on March 2.

All across the country, plans for our annual NEA celebration of literacy are in high gear. The New York Stock Exchange has invited the Cat in the Hat to ring the March 2 opening bell. On that same day, rock stars read at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. And newspapers are revving up to participate in a "Write What's Right!" essay contest featuring the Dr. Seuss book The Sneetches.

NEA's Read Across America is becoming a noble and necessary national day of reading, and we can be proud of our achievement. But for America to become truly a literate nation, a one-day celebration, as we all realize, simply isn't enough.

For America's children to go all the places they need to go, all of us in NEA need to help ensure that every single child can read at grade level by the end of third grade. In short, we need to match our celebration with substance.

Toward this end, this month's NEA Today is featuring a new tool that can indeed help us reach our end-of-third-grade goal. On page 42, you'll find a review of what we think is the "Reading Resource of the Year," our choice for the year's single best work on the teaching of reading.

This important, groundbreaking new resource is from the New Literacy Standards Project. It's titled Reading and Writing, Grade by Grade, Primary Literacy Standards for Kindergarten through Grade Three.

Forged by a diverse group of reading experts, Reading and Writing fuses the best from whole language and phonics, the two approaches to teaching reading that have been doing war against each other for far too many years. This new book represents a triumph of common sense, after years of ideological battling.

Within Reading and Writing, you'll find sensible standards that can help students achieve. These standards are simple. They are straightforward. And, in Reading and Writing, they are illustrated by vignettes that show, level by level, exactly what students who meet the standards are able to do.

Add to these print descriptions the two CDs that accompany the Reading and Writing book, and you have a truly wonderful resource for both teachers and parents.

How can we help parents see the importance of paying more attention to resources like Reading and Writing? That's where NEA's Read Across America comes in. Over the past two years, hundreds of thousands of NEA members have used Read Across America activities to spotlight the joy--and importance--of reading.

How about you? Ready to join in the fun? Ready to participate this year in NEA's Read Across America? To get more information about the Sneetches writing contest and hundreds of other events around the country, just check the Web at www.nea.org/readacross.

Let me close with a personal request. This year, NEA's Read Across America is going to be emphasizing tips for parents who want to help their children become terrific readers. We're looking for tips to share. Have some? To forward your tips via E-mail, just follow the instructions on the Read Across America Web site. Thanks!

Comments? You can E-mail me directly at BobChase@nea.org.