"Policy Perspectives" presents visiting authors' own views and/or research on issues relevant to schools and communities nationwide. The idea that reading skill is largely a set of general-purpose maneuvers that can be applied to any and all texts is one of the main barriers to our children's overall low achievement in reading, argues…

Describes two experiments which demonstrate improvement in reading speed as a result of an uncomplicated BASIC computer program which automatically assigns phrase structure to grammatical sentences to produce syntactically formatted text. Both experiments indicate poor readers are aided by this type of format. (MBR)

Race and socioeconomic class differences in children's reading performance are influenced by social and motivational factors. For example, children from poverty backgrounds are more likely to attribute success to conditions outside personal control, and thus do not experience as much pride in achievement as middle class students who have learned…