The Challenge: To ensure that all students have the reading skills they need for academic and lifelong success.
The Solution: Provide teachers with up-to-date information on how to use scientifically-based research to teach reading skills to children, and help them actually use the methods and related material in the classroom.
HOW NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND HELPS GET KIDS TO READ
Percentage of Fourth-Graders Reading Proficiently
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Reading is the essential skill
- Evidence strongly suggests that students who fail to read on grade level by the fourth grade have a greater likelihood of dropping out of school and a lifetime of diminished success.
- The president knows that reading is the key to all learning, a fact backed by decades of solid scientific research.
- That's why No Child Left Behind establishes the Reading First and Early Reading First programs.
Proven methods—the science of reading
The No Child Left Behind Act provides grants for state and local school districts in which students are systematically and explicitly taught five key components of early reading.
- Phonemic Awareness: The ability to hear and identify individual sounds in spoken words.
- Phonics: The relationship between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language.
- Fluency: The capacity to read text accurately and quickly.
- Vocabulary: The words students must know to communicate effectively.
- Comprehension: The ability to understand and gain meaning from what has been read.
Unproven fads, untested ideas have hurt our kids
- For many years, educators have been subject to many unproven fads and fashions in reading instruction.
- As a result, many teachers have not been prepared to teach reading to America's children with methods developed from scientific research.
- America has arrived at a literacy crisis with only one-third of fourth-graders able to read at a proficient level. This means that nearly two-thirds of fourth-graders have a greater likelihood of dropping out and a lifetime of diminished success.
- Too often the system has failed to offer teachers the very tools that scientific research demonstrates actually work in America's classrooms.
Reading First is the solution
- Building on a solid foundation of research, the No Child Left Behind Act provides professional development for teachers using scientific reading methods, and ensures student academic success through ongoing screening, diagnostic and classroom-based tests.
The Resources: No Child Left Behind provides roughly $1 billion for Reading First and Early Reading First. And this was just the first installment of the president's commitment for a six-year $5 billion investment to ensure that every child in America can read well by the end of the third grade.
Download this fact sheet. (It is in PDF format.)
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Official U.S. Department of Education web site.