"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Urban Renewal: New Alliance Research Shows U.S. Urban Economy Will Grow By Billions of Dollars If High School Dropout…

In order to be a good reader, your child must be able to do two things at the same time: (1) decode the words on the page and (2) understand what the words mean. Early reading instruction focuses on teaching a child how to read single words. But being good at reading single words is not the only skill your child needs. Once your child has become…

Visual stress is the experience of unpleasant visual symptoms when engaged in reading and some other visual tasks. There is currently no objective diagnostic test for this condition, which affects a substantial proportion of the population and which can disrupt development of reading skills. The reliability of subjective reports of symptoms has…

Fluent reading is an important goal of reading instruction and is becoming a significant measure of reading development. This article describes the fluency coach model--a model for improving reading in the classroom. The fluency model incorporates these elements of successful practice and effective instruction, including: (1) modeling fluent…

Two pressing education reforms entail improving students' reading skills and improving high schools in the United States. In this article, the authors focus on both of these issues by adding the voices of students in an underperforming high school to the discussion about reading reform. We present the results of a larger study pertaining…

This 2-year longitudinal study examined initial evidence of progress in reading for 1,512 children with and without identified speech-language and/or learning disabilities (LD-SLD) in the context of the explicit literacy instruction provided in Michigan's Reading First (RF)schools. The findings suggested that children with LD-SLD labels…

Fluent reading hinges on automatic word recognition, yet little research has investigated the acquisition process with repeated exposure to novel words. In this study, elementary students in grades three to six were asked to read two-syllable pseudowords five times each (in varied sequences) during two sessions (n = 49). The goal was to study…

The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of a method to improve reading fluency in children with dyslexia. The method, which we named "subsyllabic," was aimed at automatizing the recognition of syllables within words in connected texts, presented by ad hoc software. Two versions of this method--one self-paced and the other one with…

Evidence indicates that secondary level students are not making adequate reading progress to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) by 2013-2014. According to The Education Trust, reading skills of African American and Latino high school seniors are not commensurate with the reading skills of white middle school students. The 2005…

There is a recent interest in volunteer tutoring programs and research has suggested effectiveness in improving reading skills. Previous research found that the Help One Student to Succeed (HOSTS) volunteer tutoring program increased reading fluency and comprehension over a 5-month interval (Burns, Senesac, & Symington, 2004). The current…

This annual report highlights SREB's recent achievements and how its services are helping the 16 member states rise to the challenge of improving education at all levels. The report also includes remarks from the Board Chair and President, acknowledges chief contributors and lists members of the Board, Legislative Advisory Council and SREB staff.…

In this research we evaluated two methods to improve the reading fluency of struggling readers. Poor readers in Grades 2 and 4 with (n = 17) and without (n = 20) learning disabilities were randomly assigned to one of two fluency practice variations or to a control group. Students in the treatments practiced reading aloud under repeated or…

Argues that applying the rhythm of speech to print will lead to improved oral and silent reading. (FL)

In this study we investigated reading development from kindergarten to third grade for 1,913 economically disadvantaged children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. Characteristics of the child, the family, classroom instruction, and school composition were used to model influences from multiple levels of children's…

This article features the Project of Excellence, a program that was designed to engage families in an interactive community-based school literacy program. The authors discuss how they created the Project of Excellence. Although the goal of the Project was to improve the reading skills of young children, the focus of the Project was directed toward…