Barbash's review
of Reading First programs in four states and in the Bureau
of Indian Education is important because it highlights critical factors essential to reading improvement:
strong leadership, effective professional development for teachers and principals, data - driven differentiated instruction, specific coaching and guidance to ensure
implementation fidelity, and continuous program evaluation.
The authors suggest this might be related to
implementation fidelity problems with student - centered approaches, and I suspect that's a factor.2 It's also possible, though, that much
of the underlying research is just not as
strong as we'd like to begin with.