Congressional Democrats are gleefully wrapping up the throat slitting of Reading First, a gutting described here by my colleague Greg Toppo. Forgotten in the assault on the $1 billion-a-year program is why it was launched in the first place. The decline in literacy skills had reached the point where it was deemed a threat to national health, which is why brain researchers at the National Institutes of Health undertook elaborate trial experiments to determine how best to teach reading. The lessons learned were incorporated in Reading First, an attempt to lure schools into using effective reading programs.

Most at risk were black males, who for years have been steered into special education classes due to reading problems that had less to do with disabilities than a failure to teach. That leads to poor high school graduation rates, which in turn leads to a lifetime of problems that amount to a health crisis.

So what has changed in this crisis that would prompt Congress to kill this program? As seen in the Edweek chart from 2007, nothing. Note the role gender plays in these graduation rates with every group, but especially black males. Full story found here.

 The Congressional actions prompted a curse from the usually affable Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. From Toppo’s story:

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings reacted angrily Tuesday to the “outrageous” cuts and called them “political theater.”

Under President Clinton, she notes, Congress put more than $300 million a year into reading.

“Now we’re going to turn back the clock, not only to pre-Bush but pre-Clinton (levels),” she says. “I bet it’s been a long damned time since the federal government spent no money - zero - on reading.”

She predicts that after the election, lawmakers will come to their senses. “I hope cooler heads will prevail,” she says. “If I had a nickel for every person who said, ‘Thank God for Reading First,’ I’d be a millionaire.”

 So why did Congress do this? Read my previous post to get some of the flavor.

  

 

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 8:01 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.