http://www.nrrf.org/wp-content/uploads/ ... ction1.pdf
This is a 'must read' and a call for action - rightly so!Over the past century, there have been tens of thousands of research studies on how reading should be taught, including the elements of instruction required to produce proficient readers. In 1967 Harvard Professor Jeanne Chall reviewed all of the published studies on reading instruction from the beginning of the 20th Century and concluded that there was NO support for the sight word memory approach. The overwhelming conclusion from research at that point was that explicit, systematic phonics instruction produced proficient readers. Sight word instruction did not. Despite those findings, nothing changed in the education industry. Publishers continued to produce textbooks that ignored the research.
In 2000, The Report of the National Reading Panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies on reading instruction. That report was distributed to schools nationwide. The conclusion was the same as what Dr. Jeanne Chall had discovered more than three decades earlier. Billions of federal tax dollars were provided to all 50 states to adopt the research findings of the NRP, but the education community still adamantly refused to change what they “believed” to be true.
According to the Teacher Prep Report from the National Council on Education Quality (2013), colleges of education are woefully deficient in the preparation of prospective teachers on how to teach children to read. Thus, new teachers are influenced by those who have been using harmful instructional practices for a generation or more, and are saddled with textbooks adopted by school administrators who willfully and knowingly spend billions of dollars each year on failed instructional materials that perpetuate illiteracy rather then cure it.
Trusting parents send their children off to school each year fully expecting ALL of them to be taught to read by the end of first grade at the latest, only to be dismayed when that does not happen. National Statistics, year after year after year have indicated that fully one third of students cannot read proficiently at grade level by the end of third grade.
