On Target on Reading

No student wants to spend even one precious summer day bottled up in a classroom. But those who participate in Oxnard’s new mandatory summer school for poor readers will have a lifetime to be glad they did.

The program is designed to help make sure that every student who enters an Oxnard Union High School District high school has a fair chance to do well there. Whatever grumbling it may inspire, both students and their parents should take full advantage of this innovative effort.

On Monday, all eighth-graders in Oxnard will begin taking tests to measure their reading ability. Those who score at or above grade level can prepare to hit the beach when the school year ends. But those who read at sixth-grade level or below will be required to spend July catching up.

“When they enter ninth grade that far behind, they have real problems in all of their classes,” said Superintendent William Studt. “They fall behind, get frustrated and have a tendency to drop out.”

To break that cycle, the district prescribes about 90 hours of comprehensive work on reading--four hours a day for 24 days.

Requiring students to attend summer school if their skills aren’t up to snuff is something new for California schools. To remove any doubt about the district’s authority to do so, state Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) sponsored a bill that specifically permits such a requirement. The state Senate Education Committee unanimously approved the measure last week.

Making sure its students arrive on Day One with the most important skill they’ll need to succeed is in line with the Oxnard district’s ongoing campaign to keep more kids in class and engaged in learning. One measure of its success: The dropout rate declined from 11% as recently as 1989 to 4% in 1995, 2.9% in 1996 and 2.3% in 1997, Studt said.

Among its other strategies, the district has hired attendance callers, who phone a student’s home on the day of an absence, and dropout recovery workers, who visit students’ homes if absences become frequent.

We applaud the Oxnard Union High School District’s aggressive efforts to give its students the best education possible, whether they like it or not. It’s an especially tough and important challenge considering that the communities it serves tend to be less wealthy and more diverse than those served by many other school districts in Ventura County.

We don’t expect that the teachers in this program will be greeted by a lot of smiles on that first day of July classes. School officials probably won’t receive many thanks, either.

At least not right away.

The ability to read quickly, clearly and without struggling is crucial to success in school and nearly any good-paying job. Making sure its incoming freshmen all start out with that skill is the nicest thing the school district could do for students who have begun to fall behind. Believe it or not.