Are taxpayer-subsidized infomercials and payoffs to friendly commentators the federal government's answer to education problems? The U.S. Education Department's secret million-dollar taxpayer-financed marketing campaign to sell the No Child Left Behind Act is only a symptom of what's wrong.

Former President Ronald Reagan used to say that government is not the solution, it's the problem. But we are in the post-Clinton era, and in 1997 former President Bill Clinton told us in Northbrook, Ill., to get over "our love of local control of the schools."

While national media are filled with pictures of horrors all over the world, the biggest tragedy in the United States rates only local stories. I'm referring to the sad, sad tale of how public school systems promote millions of children all the way into high school without ever teaching them how to read.

This situation wasn't pictured on network television, or even on CNN or Fox, but the Orlando Sentinel gave its customers the bad news on New Year's Day. Only 32 percent of Florida ninth-graders and only 34 percent of Florida 10th-graders can read at grade level.

That means two-thirds of Florida public school students are marking time in legally enforced incarceration in government buildings that are euphemistically called schools. Think of all those hours those illiterates have available to create mischief, annoy teachers and other students, and get into trouble.

Why is anyone surprised at the truancy and dropout rates? Wouldn't you - whether you are a student or a parent - check out of the system if it just baby-sat you for nine school years and never taught you how to read?

This high rate of nonreaders is not new; it obviously has existed for years, and I've reported it in this column over and over again. If ninth-graders can't read, we can infer that they couldn't read in the eighth grade, or the seventh grade, or the sixth grade, etc., but were promoted anyway.

  What made this a 2005 news story, according to the Sentinel, is that school officials "are panicking," but not because of the appalling illiteracy rate. It's because the No Child Left Behind Act is enforcing accountability and nonreaders are giving entire schools a bad name.

The state of Florida gives a letter grade to each school each spring. A school can drop a whole letter - as from a C to a D - and be hit with a financial penalty if poor readers fail to improve two years in a row.

This threat has motivated schools into serious action, and their solution to this depressing report is predictable. Spend more taxpayer money and hire a new set of teachers to teach high schoolers what elementary school teachers were already paid to do.

Orlando school officials have decided to experiment with three new reading approaches: Scholastic's Read 180, which relies heavily students using computers and comes with a price tag of $439,000; McGraw-Hill's SRA Corrective Reading at $130,000; and Strategically Oriented Intensive Reading Instruction at $84,000. Continued...