It's a mighty tall order.

Some might say too tall. This summer, an academic center is cranking up in Florida with the express purpose of blowing life back into a public school system that has posted failing marks in reading for nearly 30 years. It's hardly a new idea, but this time-thanks to unprecedented political backing-it just may work.

In February, Gov. Jeb Bush announced a plan to retrain roughly 56,000 elementary school teachers to teach reading within the next three years. As a partner in this mammoth enterprise, he created the Florida Center for Reading Research, and put the headquarters at Florida State.

A cornerstone of his "Just Read, Florida!" initiative begun last year, the brand new center started off staring at a mountain of homework. Its job is nothing less than developing the right weapons that teachers across the state can use to fight reading problems that are crippling so many of Florida's youngest school children for life.

The governor's idea-spun off from his brother George W. Bush's "Reading First" effort embodied in the $26.5 billion No Child Left Behind Act which Congress passed in January-is to have all of Florida school children reading at their grade level by 2012.

Did we say "tall order?" Consider:

Today, nearly half (47 percent) of Florida's fourth grade students cannot read at their grade level, according to statistics gathered from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test; 57 percent of eighth graders are in the same boat, as are 62 percent of 10th graders.

Florida's standard reading instruction methods simply aren't geared to help struggling readers much beyond first grade. As a consequence, each year a large corps of essentially non-readers gets yanked, pulled, and pushed through an educational system in which they have very little hope of gaining ground.

To help such kids--typically those from low-income households and minorities--Torgesen and other FSU researchers developed an intensive phonics-based reading program that is showing promising results in some of Leon County's most challenging first- and second-grade classrooms.

Besides phonics, the programs stress building children's reading comprehension, vocabulary and language fluency. Despite Torgesen's success, his programs and those endorsed by both the George and Jeb Bush administrations have been criticized by some reading researchers as being too focused on phonics. They say that children learn better if they are immersed in good literature, and given interesting and meaningful writing assignments from the beginning of first grade. Phonics, they say, should be taught only incidentally, as a small part of the overall reading program (the whole-language method). Additionally, they argue that Florida is ignoring scientific research that suggests that teachers will never be able to make every child a proficient reader as long as their classrooms are crammed with 25 or more students.

Republican leaders in Florida's legislature this year shot down numerous attempts by Democrats to earmark extra money for reducing class size in K-3 and other grades. In the meantime, Sen. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami, is pushing a constitutional amendment for the November ballot that would require classrooms in prekindergarten through third grade to have no more than 18 students. The amendment would allow 22 students-per-classroom in grades four through eight and 25 students in high school.

Excerpt From: States Reading Woes Focus of New Center, By David Cox