Older students get less reading instruction _ and tests show it.(The Orlando Sentinel)

ORLANDO, Fla. _ Rashaun Jackson can sound out the words in his books, but he sometimes doesn't have a clue what they mean.

"I read the stuff really good, but I've never seen some of the words before," Rashaun said. "Sometimes I get it, and sometimes I don't, but I'm getting better."

Rashaun isn't a 9-year-old learning to read storybooks. He's a 14-year-old high-school freshman struggling to understand his textbooks. He is one of thousands of Florida middle- and high-school students facing the grim possibility they will not graduate because they can't pass the state reading test.

Educators stress the importance of teaching children to read by age 9. In Florida, the emphasis on young students means little help is available for children like Rashaun _ an Evans High School ninth-grader who reads like a seventh-grader.

Florida's reading crisis is most severe among its older students, according to a Florida Department of Education report to be delivered Friday to Gov. Jeb Bush.

Thousands of older students never have mastered more than basic reading skills, if they even learned those. They're foundering in Florida's middle and high schools, where there are a limited number of reading classes and an acute shortage of well-trained reading teachers.

The evidence?

_Last year, 47 percent of fourth-graders, 57 percent of eighth-graders and 62 percent of 10th-graders failed to meet minimum standards on the reading section of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

_The higher failure rate for older students coincides with the drop of reading courses offered in middle and high schools. While 100 percent of elementary-school students take reading, just 45 percent of middle-school students and only 13 percent of high-school students do.

_Middle- and high-school students who take reading usually don't get a well-trained teacher. Just 302 of the 1,956 teachers of reading in Florida's secondary schools last year _ 15…