The Economic Impact of Low Reading Achievement:

Step 1: An intern or intern team (up to 3 interns 80 to 120 hours each, depending upon the efficiency of the students and course requirement) will inquire about and use appropriate course and professional resources to document the economic impact of low literacy.

Step 2: As part of the project, students will explore a controversial reading intervention program that claims that K-3 reading instruction in virtually every class in America is the cause of low and mediocre literacy. Significant areas of neuroscience directly challenge the efficacy of popular early reading instruction. The science identified by Read Right developer Dee Tadlock, Ph.D., was published in 2005 in the book, Read Right! Coaching Your Child to Excellence in Reading (New York: McGraw-Hill). That and other documents supporting the concern will be provided to interns.

Our Objective for this Project:

We seek to have an independent source investigate the economic impact of widespread low and mediocre literacy in the U.S. and decades of failure. The inquiry will also examine popular and controversial reading theories to determine whether the dominant theory of early reading instruction could possibly be the cause of chronically low achievement. We predict the evidence will add up to suggest that low and mediocre reading skills have a negative economic impact--and that impact has continued for decades.

The controversial approach to reading development and reading intervention we propose to include in this project is called Read Right Methodology, developed by Dr. Tadlock 35 years ago. The success of Read Right is credited to its alignment with how the brain learns a process, as well as strategies that overcome the brain's inherent limitations to working/short-term memory. Because of these limitations, the idea that children must learn to read syllable by syllable and/or word by word is problematic. Read Right methods work around this obstacle. Thus, we will connect interns to current and former Read Right students, parents, and education administrators who eliminated reading problems rapidly by purposefully avoiding the act of decoding even a single word. First-hand sources will include a state department of corrections program serving teens and adults using the controversial methods in prisons statewide to rapidly improve reading ability.

Project Deliverables:

(1) Final report with executive summary and supporting documentation. Organized as follows:

a. Table of Contents

b. Executive Summary

c. Documentation and analysis of the economic impact of low literacy.

d. Documentation and analysis of the "Reading Wars," an ongoing debate in the field of education about the best way to teach reading (education scientists advocate for five skills taught explicitly and Read Right Methodology which suggests the reading field is wrong about how the human brain uses phonetic information efficiently, and also wrong about the concept of "five separate skills.")

e. Documentation and analysis of the effectiveness and economic impact of the presently dominant view: reading must be explicitly taught as five separate skills--two of which include phonemic awareness and decoding, as compared to Read Right's alternative view, which rejects decoding. Reading achievement of both will be compared and connected to economic impact.

f. Concluding section: Intern observations, summations, and questions.

g. APPENDIX: A. List of all sources; B. Economic impact models applied to the work; C. All brief articles used as evidence and/or to provoke thought (if copyright permits); D. Miscellaneous.

This project is managed by Rhonda Stone, Master of Public Administration (emphasis: education policy specific to reading development). At times, students will meet and/or speak with Dee Tadlock, Ph.D., Read Right developer. The level of supervision and mentorship will include the following: (1) Ongoing access to the project manager via telephone and email; (2) weekly team meetings; (3) bi-monthly individual check-ins; data guidance and report critique from Dr. Tadlock before the final deliverable is due.