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Reading Rockets offers a wealth of reading strategies, lessons, and activities designed to help young children learn how to read and read better. Our reading resources assist parents, teachers, and other educators in helping struggling readers build fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills.

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The Bush administration's program, No Child Left Behind, is a plan for educational reform that is targeted at changing the use of federal funds to close the achievement gap and improve achievement levels. The following is excerpted from the executive summary.

The NAEP 2000 reading results provides further evidence of a longstanding gap in verbal skills between rich and poor children in the United States. This article describes the history of this achievement gap, speculates on its causes, and makes recommendations for closing it.

Reading skills provide a critical foundation for children's academic success. Children who read well read more and, as a result, acquire more knowledge in numerous domains.

It seems, suddenly, de rigeur for advocates of particular approaches to early literacy instruction to assert that the "research says" particular curricular and instructional policies are necessary or, at least, appropriate.

The phrase "reading war" has been the popular description for long-running disagreements about the best way to teach children to read. Fierce battles have been waged by academics and theorists since the late 1800s (McCormick, 1999), with classroom teachers often spinning like weathervanes as they tried to align classroom practices with the prevailing winds.

The call for higher standards is a common but problematic one that disregards students, according to this author. The author points out five fatal flaws of the standards movement, in terms of motivation, pedagogy, evaluation, school reform, and improvement.

In this provocative article, the author argues that reading achievement hasn't changed much in several decades, and that many common notions about a reading crisis are, in fact, myths.

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