Reading Improvement Surfaces as Key Battlefield

Instead of promoting the three Rs, the two candidates for California’s top public schools job, in the final week of a suddenly energized campaign, have chosen to dwell on the first: reading.

Delaine Eastin, seeking a second four-year term as state superintendent of public instruction, is depicting herself on television as a champion of smaller classes to help children learn to read.

Gloria Matta Tuchman, an Orange County teacher who is challenging the incumbent in Tuesday’s election, vows in her TV advertising to help all students learn to read by third grade and to learn English.

Neither candidate advocates shortchanging writing and arithmetic, those other Rs. But the tilt in their advertisements reflects the intense public interest in reading instruction and, in part, the priorities of their donors.

Matta Tuchman’s underdog campaign got a late cash infusion of $515,000 from a Bay Area philanthropist, David W. Packard, who favors “systematic and explicit” teaching of reading skills such as phonics. Eastin’s largest donor, the California Teachers Assn., which has given her $275,000, supports increased teacher training to help students reach the state’s ambitious new targets for reading skills.

But while the candidates are talking about reading, their messages are constrained by the first commandment of California politics: Thou shalt speak to voters in 30 seconds or less. As a result, many of the nuances in the debate over reading instruction are lost.

Here’s what voters are seeing:

* An Eastin commercial that began airing Monday on television stations in Southern California, Sacramento and the Bay Area opens with a narrator saying, “When a child learns to read, a whole world opens up.” To that end, according to a script of the ad, Eastin “fought and won” a battle to cut class size in elementary schools--a claim that Matta Tuchman disputes. The ad segues into criticism of Matta Tuchman’s support for a plan to offer some parents vouchers to help pay private school tuition, and it closes with an image of Eastin reading to children.

* In a Matta Tuchman ad, airing this week in Southern California, the Central Valley and other markets, the candidate says: “Smaller class sizes are helping, but we need to do more. Every child a reader before third grade. Up-to-date textbooks. English language instruction for all students.” The candidate, according to the script, also denounces gang violence in schools and plugs her 33 years as a classroom teacher.

Robert Calfee, the dean of education at UC Riverside and a member of a panel that recently drafted new state standards for what students should learn, said he has been disappointed in the substance and tone of what the candidates have said on reading and other issues.

“They are using the words that matter to the public,” Calfee said. But he added: “I’m not sure what either of them have in mind when they talk about reading.”

Calfee said there are no firm data yet on how class-size reduction helps reading instruction. And he said there are a wealth of questions that the candidates could address but haven’t. Among them: how reading should be tested, what new textbooks should include, and what connections exist between reading and other language skills such as writing and speaking.

In televised debates, the candidates have expanded on the issues only slightly.

Last week on Los Angeles station KCET-TV Channel 28, Eastin said she would like to expand the state’s class-size reduction program to have 20 or fewer students per teacher from kindergarten through fourth grade, 26 to 28 students per teacher from fifth to eighth grade and other reductions in high school grades. The current program targets kindergarten through third grade and grade 9.

Matta Tuchman, in that debate, pushed a reading program grounded in phonics and deplored the performance of students under Eastin’s tenure. Three-fifths of the state’s third-graders--many of them not fluent in English--tested below grade level in reading last spring.

“They need to have mastery of reading,” Matta Tuchman said. “It’s called literacy, English literacy. If [you] cannot read, you can’t do anything. You cannot even read your high school diploma. That’s what’s happening.”

That there is even a contest at this point is something of a surprise. Eastin, a Democrat in a nominally nonpartisan office, had opened up a wide fund-raising lead over the Republican Matta Tuchman by early October. But Packard, who has through a foundation helped fund a phonics-intensive reading program in several school districts, altered the dynamic of the campaign with his endorsement of Matta Tuchman and two donations.

Eastin is leading Matta Tuchman by a nearly 3-1 margin, according to a recent Times poll, but about half of likely voters are undecided. Matta Tuchman, who co-sponsored the new anti-bilingual education law, Proposition 227, finished second to Eastin in a five-way race in June, forcing a runoff.