A desperation move

     Bill Clinton's Education Secretary Richard Riley was making the rounds on Capitol Hill last week, hawking the president's costly little brainstorm called "America Reads Challenge."
      Mr. Clinton's goal is to ensure that all American kids are able to read by the time they finish the third grade -- a modest expectation, to be sure. (In an earlier age, third graders would have been reading actual literature, not struggling with Dick and Jane, or Heather Has Two Mommies, but never mind.)
      At any rate, to accomplish this task, Mr. Clinton plans to marshal an army of 1 million volunteers who will fan out to the nation's schools and community centers to teach tykes to read. To dragoon this army, Mr. Clinton plans to employ his beloved AmeriCorps: Some 11,000 of these paid "volunteers" will do the recruiting. And he plans to employ 25,000 reading specialists -- aided by 100,000 college students who would be compensated for their time with work-study funds -- to teach that army how to teach reading.
      Total price tag for this venture? Upwards of $2.7 billion over five years.
      One doubts this massive boondoggle will find favor in the Republican controlled Congress. This is not to say that our kids don't need help with reading: Indeed, 41 percent of fourth graders who took the most recent National Assessment for Educational Progress failed to demonstrate even the most basic reading skills. Millions of youths shuffle out of the public schools clutching high school diplomas without having achieved "literacy" by any useful definition of that term.
      The problems in the public schools are legion: Idiotic experiments in "whole language" have managed to dumb down the entire school-age population of whole states, notably California. In many schools, a breakdown of classroom discipline has made learning virtually impossible. Trendy course work emphasizing self-esteem over academic excellence has encouraged kids to feel good about being stupid. The teachers unions have made it virtually impossible to fire incompetent instructors.
      President Clinton's pricey "America Reads" scheme is a desperation move, and a tacit admission that the public schools have failed in what must be seen as their most fundamental task -- teaching kids to read. Reading is, after all, the most basic discipline: A student who cannot read well will never master any other academic subject, let alone derive any knowledge from the Internet -- that toy Bill Clinton insists every student should learn to use.
      If teachers aren't teaching kids to read, what on Earth are they doing -- and does this question occur to Bill Clinton's pals in the National Education Association? One would think the NEA would be gravely insulted, not to mention hopping mad about the America Reads proposal, which is very nearly an overt indictment of the public schools. That the NEA remains mum on Mr. Clinton's proposal testifies to that organization's slavish devotion to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. But perhaps that silence also betrays the NEA's recognition that a pall of failure hangs over the public schools.