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‘Reading First’ Research Offers No Definitive Answers

With the end of the six-year period of Reading First on the horizon, no clear empirical picture has emerged of how well the federal program is doing at a national level in bringing struggling readers to proficiency.

Preliminary findings from the long-awaited Reading First Impact Study suggested that the $1 billion-a-year funding for the program has had no impact on students’ reading comprehension.

But those findings did not answer many of the research questions that lawmakers required the evaluation of the program to address when they created it under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Those questions, which many in the field say are critical, include whether the program and the research base undergirding it have been effective, and which approaches, programs, and assessments for teaching struggling readers...