NAEP Results Offer Scant Insight Into Best Reading Strategies

As educators look for evidence of what works and what doesn’t in teaching reading to struggling students, it may be tempting to draw comparisons between the 11 big-city districts that took part in the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

But given their vast differences in demographics and instructional approaches, and their mostly incremental improvements in scores over the past few years, the data provide little insight, observers say, into which strategies are paying off.

In North Carolina’s 120,000-student Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, where schools have been teaching a highly structured commercial reading program for fiveyears, 4th and 8th graders scored above the national average on the tests, as they...