No Child Left Behind Law`s Reading Scheme Effectiveness Doubted
By: Tommy Elder, Jr.
Apparently, the much hearlded program that would lift struggling students up with their peers educationally recently stumbled. Maria Gold of the Washington Post reports that students enrolled in the Reading First, a Federal Grant Program designed to assist elementary schools in increasing reading scores- failed to demonstrate the objective desired.
From its inception- critics of the program contended that Reading First relied too heavily on phonics teaching and fails to ``foster understanding.`` Additionally, some Congressional Democrats contend that conflicts of interest and mismanagement also exist within the program. Federal examiners, for example, uncovered the fact that some individuals who assisted in its monitoring possess financial connections with the publishers of Reading First materials.
Addressing the impact of the No Child Left Behind Law- House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D Wisconsin) said of Reading First that it represented a `failure.` The United States Senate`s Chairman of the Educational Committee- i.e. Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy noted that the Bush Administration `put cronyism first and the reading skills of our children last.`
In her advocacy of the Reading First Program- Education Secretary Margaret Spellings once compared the efforts in this plan of enhancing the teaching in schools with students from low income families with that of discoving `the cure for cancer.`
Roughly, 1.5 million students covering 5,200 schools use the Reading First Program.
More abstracts about the Washington Post