Once upon a time, believe it or not, kids routinely learned to read in the first grade. Having learned to read, they then started reading to learn. Wow, what a beautiful thing that was.

 Our Education Establishment has very skillfully undermined this age-old template. Now, due to an onslaught of bogus approaches, we have children in the sixth, seventh or eighth grades who are still in the first grade, by traditional standards.

 You know this is true because every few years the NAEP tests show that more than half of fourth-graders and more than half of eighth-graders are below proficient in reading.

 Anyone hearing about these perspectives for the first time is invited to read this further discussion "System Failure: reading and education in ruin."

http://www.examiner.com/article/system-failure-reading-and-educatio...

 Virtually everything you read about education is straight-out dishonest if they don't tell you right off that we must fix reading before anything else will help.

(This photograph shows the level of "system failure" we are up against.)