The Institute of Education Science's final Reading First evaluation report is out today, and the news is mixed. Schools receiving funds from the program saw their students' decoding skills improve, but not their comprehension skills. Not surprisingly, Margaret Spellings focused on the former, and the press focused on the latter. And in his last hurrah, IES director Russ Whitehurst, the subject of a new Education Next feature, sided with the naysayers: "It is a program that needs to be improved," he told the Washington Post. "I don't think anyone should be celebrating that the federal government has spent $6 billion on a reading program that has had no impact on reading comprehension."
Well, let's keep a few things in mind. First, children can't learn to comprehend if they don't first learn to decode, so we shouldn't minimize the real gains made there. Second, as Whitehurst has admitted before, this is a study about the impact of Reading First funds, not its instructional methods. The schools in the "control group" may not have received federal dollars for reading, but many likely borrowed Reading First-style teaching strategies. So we really don't know anything new about whether or not those strategies work or not.
But even I, an ardent Reading First supporter, will acknowledge some political reality. With Democrats in charge of the executive branch and Congress, this program is cooked. Still, word around town is that the Obama Administration is going to have to do something on literacy. So here's a suggestion: focus on comprehension a la E.D. Hirsch. Promote strategies for schools to build students' content knowledge in history, literacy, science, and the arts, since that's the best way to build their vocabulary and comprehension abilities. That would be a worthy next step in the war against illiteracy.
