Not all pupils ready to learn at the same age.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Svea Gold For The Register-Guard

Ask any teacher. The rigid testing required by the federal government puts extra stress not only on teachers, but also on the students. It takes valuable time away from actually reaching children.

Nevertheless, our kids need testing - not the simplistic kind that is threatening to schools, but the kind that yields information schools need to be successful.

Children can read at the elementary school level, the "No Child Left Behind" advocates proudly point out. But they then can't comprehend why in middle school 50 percent have trouble reading the required material. Being politicians, with no concept of education beyond the fact that it is a vote-getting buzz word, they don't know that there are certain realities that can't be legislated away.

One of these was stated already in 1964 by Louise Bates Ames: 36 percent of the children in special education classes had nothing wrong with them; they simply had been taught to read too early. Schools are pressured to teach reading too soon. At the UCLA School of Education, boys were not taught to read until they were 7 1/2 years old. Parents who had enrolled their children there were appalled. What were they doing to their little geniuses? Once these kids got to middle school, however, they took off and were highly successful.

Another reality is that at the age of school entry, boys are at least six months behind girls in their development, and yet the same test scores are expected of them. We take only chronological age as entry requirement. Some children take longer to develop than others.

You can't simply, by signing a bill, erase the fact that not all children have the skills for formal education. If you are demanding testing, check for this: Does this child have the finger dexterity to hold a pen? Does he know his right side from his left? If not, how can he tell which way to read a word? Is he one of the 11 percent who are born left-sided and we are forcing him to be right?

We have smart children. Because of television, they have been exposed to a world that children 50 years ago never even knew existed. The flip side of this is they have not learned to focus beyond the flat image of the TV screen.

Can their eyes focus on something written on the blackboard and then adjust to the paper on their desk? Can their eyes track across a line of print in quick, involuntary eye movements? Are they having a problem crossing the midline, and so must use one eye to read half of the line and then switch to the other eye? No wonder they tend to lose their place.

Do children have auditory delay? They are still trying to understand what the teacher said in the first sentence and are missing the second one. Can the child sit still, and if not, why not? There are many reasons for that.

Children with such deficits may learn splinter skills, but these skills do not translate into more sophisticated reading. Nor are these problems a life sentence. But because children overcompensate for them, teachers may not know they exist and can't address them.

There are many programs designed to be used in the classroom to make sure that children are neurologically ready for school. Statistics show that these programs help. Once ready, children will learn in half the time.

If we ignore the real needs of our children, the cost in educational dollars is nothing compared to the emotional cost to the children who know they are smart but failing in school. Teachers already know this; legislators must be made aware. What are we waiting for?

Svea Gold is the author of "If Kids Just Came With Instruction Sheets."