As a former special educator, and now English teacher who first worked with an economically disadvantaged rural population, and now works with an economically disadvantage urban population, I agree. Of course, I have a lot of opinions on education reform, but none of them is politically correct. But I would like to make a point: we talk about how NCLB has been a failure. What I hear not at all is some of the failures of IDEA and special education reform. I personally think that there have been some real failures with IDEA and LRE.

One size does not fit all on education. The teacher that is great for you might be terrible for me. SO, any overall education strategy has to allow and promote extensive varieties. Anybody who says they have THE method, or THE solution to education is full of it.

This is very interesting. Reading First is not a reading program, but a set of practices PROVEN by high quality educational research (most ed research is substandard) to work. There are at least two possibilities here:

1. all the high quality research research is wrong


2. the implementation was flawed. Poor materials sold to districts billed as "Reading First Compliant" by cronies of the Bush administration was used.


3. the assessment didn't measure what was practiced. Reading First addresses decoding skills in K-2. Comprehension is a different set of skills.
   

"A 2006 report from the Education Department's inspector general, John P. Higgins Jr., found that some program officials steered states to certain tests and textbooks. Congressional testimony last year revealed that some of those people benefited financially."

Stupid people - NCLB has nothing to do with children - it's just another example of Bu$hco pillaging the US Treasury for crony contracts. Duh!

They should've tried sub-contracting with Pizza Hut to implement Book-It! nationwide. I don't know what they put in those personal pan pizzas, but it might've been crack...

Direct instruction holds some hope for improving schooling but it will probably not help the poor more than others.

BTW if the problem is intractable we should focus on what we teach and efficiency. If we cannot make the children do much better on the stuff that they study now perhaps we can give them more useful knowledge (see left winger Alfie Kohn and right winger John Taylor Gatto). Perhaps if probability, the miracle of compounding interest, the simple basic principles of chemistry and physics (so people are not so easily ripped off) where pounded into students heads the would be resistant to state lotteries, credit card debt, chemical free products and petromisers/miracle carburetors. By efficiency I mean bang for the bucks we spend plenty of money now. If we reduce the bureaucracy we could have smaller class sizes and still save some money.

Also maybe we could make school more fun since we cannot seem to improve test scores or narrow the gap much.

The assessment was a comprehension test, yes, but isn't decoding without comprehension sort of useless?
You could argue, I suppose, that working on decoding skills will necessarily improve comprehension, but I work with kids, and I definitely have a few who read very fast and generally accurately but have absolutely no conception of what they are reading. The ones who go slowly and sometimes need help sounding out words but understand what they have read are, in my opinion, much better off, and easier to help because they tend to enjoy reading more and so will practice more willingly, whereas the low-comprehension kids have less desire to read (after all, what does it have to offer them? second graders aren't good at thinking long-term) and will tend to practice less, so that it is easier for higher-comprehension kids to improve their decoding than it is for low-comprehension kids to improve their comprehension (if someone has research suggesting otherwise, I would be very interested to see it; this is based mostly on my own observations).

Also, while education reform is my big interest right now (being the hopefully future teacher I am), I agree with Ezra that it is not the whole story.

I'm with you, Ezra. The effects of poverty on kids' ability to learn are many and will overwhelm most of even the best interventions. I don't think it's an accident that we're seeing a decline in school achievement that parallels a time of increased economic insecurity for most American families. I think that we're culturally disinclined to make what seems like an obvious connection, however; it flies in the face not only of GOP propaganda, but also the Horatio Alger part of the American mythos. We just don't want to acknowledge that many kids are virtually doomed from birth.

It's worth saying there's little in the way of partisan, or ideological, victory here.

I think what this study shows is that, given a certain baseline of preparation, after a couple centuries, we've pretty much figured out how to teach kids to read. The fight over phonics/basic skills vs. comprehension is really a fight at the margins of instruction but has been blown up into the ideological reading wars. The nut we have yet to crack, as Ezra suggests, is how to get everybody to that first day of school at that baseline of preparation.

Wow, some really great comments here. Does "Reading First" mandate a certain teacher to student ratio? And isn't it basically proven that smaller class sizes leads to better outcomes? It just seems like a no brainer to me, especially when I talk to just about all of my teacher friends. The more students they have, the less attention each student will get. We seem to throw out mandates all the time, so why can't we mandate an effective ratio? Isn't this really all about the bottom line?

Paying for textbooks and programs goes into the pockets of a few, whereas mandating a 10-1 student to teacher ratio means more money for ordinary folks like you and I. Its too bad this country values military protection against non-existent threats.

There's nothing at the policy level that can be done to improve education at this point. As for improving economic prospects, it doesn't do any good. Kids tend to do about as well as their parents did. If you improve the economic prospects of high school dropouts, you still end up with the next generation being high school dropouts, just high school dropouts with better economic prospects.