Should Elementary Teachers Learn How To Teach Reading or Just Wing It?

Reading instruction is one of the very few areas where it is not the case that "more research is needed." Education policy makers have had the theory and the evidence for decades. The central problem they face in providing effective reading instruction and a sound reading curriculum stems not from an absence of a research base but from willful indifference to what the research has consistently shown. In The Academic Achievement Challenge, the last book she wrote before her death at the age of 78 in 1999, Jeanne Chall makes this point over and over again, with exasperation and sorrow.

She spoke to many of her former students in the Boston area regularly, including me. In one of my last conversations with her in 1998, I asked her what kind of reading research she thought was still necessary. Her answer was quick and cutting:  We don't need any more. It's clear what we should do. It's been clear for decades. The problem is that we don't do what the research evidence supports, and in fact often do just the opposite.