Why Arnie Duncan and His Team Get Let Off the Hook

The Obama administration was really more focused on high school and college than on early childhood and early elementary. A 2008 study found that students in schools receiving funds for the reading first program basically had no better reading skills than children in schools that didn't get those funds. Some of the most interesting explanations came from a research group called MDRC they suggested that maybe the reason that there was no statistically significant difference between the reading scores of students who received programming funded by reading first and those who did not. It could be that these kinds of practices are simply far more widespread than critics of whole language would care to admit.