On the recordAugust 31, 1998
I'd just like to make a couple of observations. First of all, I'll think about this high school scholarship thing. The only high school scholarships directly for service, community service we have are the ones that I announced at Penn State a couple of years ago, where we give a modest scholarship that's matched in the local community to one person for outstanding community service in high school. So we now have 1,000 colleges and universities providing reading volunteers through the America Reads program to go into schools to help young children learn to read, and most of them are work-study students. But a lot of them are not eligible for work-study, and they just do it anyway. There may be something we can do on that, and I'll think about it. The other thing I'd say is that I'm a big fan of the Reading Recovery program. And if you look at the research, it has about the best long-term results of any strategy. But there is a reason for it. It's very expensive, because it's so labor intensive. And it's something that maybe Secretary Riley wants to talk about this a little bit. We've discussed before that whether the generalized assistance we give to school districts for supportive programs like this, or the States, which then the school districts get, should be more focused. And we've tried not to sort of pick and choose among the various reading strategies because of the limited amount of money and the large number of programs underway in the country. But there's no question that the Reading Recovery strategy, particularly when you've got a lot of young people whose first language is not English, has had, I believe, the best long-term results, but it's because it's so labor intensive and is quite expensive, and it's something we need to look at. Dick, you want to say anything about this? [Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley praised the Reading Recovery program's contribution to national education goals.]
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