The Governor's Reading Initiative
Increase awareness of students' reading skills levels in kindergarten through the third grade.
Promote reading programs as priority recipients for Academics 2000 funding.
Make reading programs a top legislative priority.
Encourage the state's new Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund board to support innovative technologies to improve reading.
Support excellence in teacher training.
Motivate school districts to make pro-reading program decisions.
Stimulate private sector initiatives.
Encourage parents to share in their childrens' education.
Governor Bush refuses to believe that in a state as great as Texas, we can master rocket science but not reading scores. A child who can read has a better shot at learning -- at life -- at achieving dreams. That is what we want for all children -- a fair shot at the best possible future. In the Bush Administration, nothing is going to take a higher priority.
"As Governor, my number one priority for Texas
is that every child learn to read."
Texas is facing a crisis. Too many Texas school children cannot read. Twenty-Five percent of Texas school children who took the TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills) reading test in 1995 failed. That's 350,000 children who do not have the most important basic skill to enable them to learn. Approximately, 90,000 of them were third and fourth graders -- an at-risk population in the making. This crisis does not confine itself to the classroom; it leads to further problems in our society. Children who never master reading will never master learning. Many will drop out of school. As uneducated adults, they face a life of frustration and failure on the fringes of society. Large numbers turn to crime and wind up in prison. Many others eventually join the welfare rolls.
Texas spends billions of dollars on public education every year, yet we still have hundreds of thousands of students educationally hamstrung because they are missing the one skill that can make all the difference in their lives -- reading.
Governor Bush believes that this crisis in Texas is unacceptable. He has announced that his most profound goal for Texas is that each and every child learn to read.
The goal of Governor Bush's Reading Initiative is for all students to read on grade level by the end of third grade and to continue to read on grade level throughout their school careers. The key elements of the Reading Initiative are: