OPENING DOORS A study of the Read To A Child program in the South Bend School Corporation - Essay Example

It is unfortunate that 40 percent of all nine-year-olds score below the basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).Moreover, there is a continuing gap between white students and African-American and Hispanic students. While 69 percent of African-American and 64 percent of Hispanic students scored below basic in 1994, only 31 percent of white fourth graders did. This is caused due to various socio-economic conditions coupled with lack of background knowledge of phonemes or speech sounds to the children belonging to this community.

This is the reason that several ambitious projects aimed at enabling a child to read at grade level have been initiated both by the government ('No Child Left Behind' and 'America Reads') and volunteering agencies. One such project initiated by South Bend Community School Corporation is "Read to a Child Program" with a mission to ensure that a child develop a love for reading and is able to read well and independently by the end of the third grade. Reading is not developmental or natural, but is learned and requires a lot of practice, caring environment, background knowledge and motivation not only to be provided by the school but also by all the care-givers, parents, grand- parents, relatives, other community members and volunteers.

Children who fall behind at an early age (K and grade 1) fall further and further behind over time. Longitudinal studies show that of the children who are diagnosed as reading disabled in third grade, 74% remain disabled in ninth grade (Fletcher, et al., 1994; Shaywitz, Escobar, Shaywitz, Fletcher, & Makuch, 1992; Stanovich, 1986; Stanovich & Siegel, 1994). Treatment intervention research done at The National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) educational research program has shown that appropriate early direct instruction seems to be the best medicine for reading problem.

The purpose of providing extra instructional time is to help children achieve levels of literacy that will enable them to be successful through their school careers and beyond. This paper is meant to study the policies and practices and strategies being employed towards the target of achieving proficiency in reading by our young readers both by the government and volunteering agencies especially in South Block Community School Organization and how effective they have been in achieving the task at hand and what further improvement in the strategies and practices and learning designs are called for in order to make the programs more effective.

Located in north-central Indiana, South Bend Community School Corporation is St. Joseph county's oldest and largest school corporation, and the fourth largest school corporation in Indiana and apart from traditional students, it caters to the needs of a significant number of special needs students and students coming from different ethnic background , resultantly the achievement gaps which are differences in the levels of learning among different demographic student subgroups because of their socio-economic conditions and exist nationally, are much wider here than anywhere else.

The challenge of bringing these students at par with other students of the same