A Senate appropriations subcommittee has also voted to eliminate funding for Reading First, according to this article by my colleague Alyson Klein. So it looks like these efforts by the Reading First Advisory Committee to send a statement to committee members may be too late.
Meanwhile, there’s all kinds of discussions going on via the listservs and bloggers, including a very interesting take on the situation by Tim Shanahan here. Shanahan says that RF could have survived through the scathing inspector general’s reports or the disappointing results of the federal impact study, but not both.
“Under the circumstances, Reading First is ‘politically toxic,’” he writes.