Reading & Literacy

Federal Study: Four Reading Programs Don’t Have Positive Impact

By Mary Ann Zehr — May 06, 2009 1 min read
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A large-scale randomized control study released yesterday by the federal government doesn’t give us much insight into reading programs that are effective because it found that three of the four reading programs examined didn’t have a positive impact and one had a negative impact on students’ reading comprehension.

But Robert E. Slavin, a researcher and the founder of the Success for All Foundation, which developed the reading curriculum found to have a negative impact, dismissed the findings, saying in an e-mail to me that evaluations sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, which conducted the study, “repeatedly evaluate programs by imposing them on teachers and school leaders who are not interested in them and are likely to implement them haphazardly, if at all, and then find, over and over again, that nothing works.”

I wrote a story about the study, “Reading Programs Found Ineffective,” that was posted at edweek.org yesterday.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Curriculum Matters blog.