"If we can't get to kids by the third grade, they are going to be lousy readers for the rest of their lives," Reid Lyon, cheif of research on learning disabilities at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), told the reporters. His branch's recent longitudinal report on how children learn to read confirmed the importance of emphasizing the early grades, he said.

Reading problems show up in the first grade, agreed Robert Slavin of The Johns Hopkins University, whose Success for All reading program is used in hundreds of low-income schools around the country. High-income families get immediate help for their children, but "there is no rescue for poor children," he said.

Slavin said ensuring children are reading by age nine is "a noble goal that could be attained if we put all energies to it." He likened the campaign to President Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon, "but he didn't ask for volunteer scientists to do it," he pointed out. The strategy may be good for volunteers and help some children, but the basic solution for the 4.8 million children who are failing at reading "is to change what is going on between children and teachers in grades K-3."

All of the panelists discussing the great "reading debate" at the Education Writers Association seminar agreed that teacher knowledge about how children learn to read is essential. If they were well prepared, the debate between phonics and whole language might not be so important, they said.

Teachers waver on phonics, said Marilyn Adams of Harvard University, because half of the children in the primary grades "absolutely get it" when it comes to learning to read, "and the other half don't and are totally bored by phonics approaches." Lyon said the polarization between the two different strategies for teaching reading "is hurting kids" because it hides the research base which says certain conditions must exist in order to learn to read. Teachers are able to handle methods, but they are at a loss when reading does not come easily to children, he said.

Teachers need to be well-informed about how children learn to read, he said. This includes the critical awareness of sounds of language, the ability to process sounds that are heard, word recognition, and converting alphabetic print into sounds and messages. Reading is something that is learned and does not come as easily as speech, Lyon's research emphasizes, and relies on how children hear and manipulate sounds even before they see the printed word. Poor readers need explicit instruction, but also need to use interesting material to develop sound recognition, which is where whole language can be helpful, he said.

The complexity of learning to read is why "we need a massive retooling of teacher preparation and development," Slavin stressed. He said Title I was not being used effectively in elementary schools because its resources should be focused on classroom teachers in the first few grades, not spread around and dependent on specialists.