Did Reading First Work?
In September 2006 an internal report detailing the U.S. Department of Education's handling of the multibillion-dollar Reading First grant program criticizes Bush administration officials for steering funding awards to certain educational publishers and for illegally dictating to schools which solutions they must use. The scathing review question's the Education Department's integrity in awarding grants and requests that it make immediate changes to its review process. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said her department will comply with the recommendations. (ESchoolNews.com)

Dr. Krashen observes that this brouhaha over awarding grant money has resulted in a defense of Reading First itself. Secretary Spellings insists that RF has been successful, citing three pieces of evidence: A rise in NAEP scores, a study from Michigan State, and test scores from the State of Washington. The International Reading Association notes that two studies provide evidence of the effectiveness of RF: “Keeping Watch on Reading First,” from the Center for Educational Policy, and the Reading First Implementation Evaluation. He maintains that none of these five sources provide any convincing support for Reading First.

He adds that Reading First, based on a 2000 report of the National Reading Panel, has been heavily criticized by a number of scholars who point out that there is insufficient evidence to support the panel's claims that phonemic awareness training significantly improves children's reading, that the published research does not support the claim that systematic phonics instruction is superior to less intensive instruction, and that there is no evidence that skills-based approaches are superior to whole language.
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Omissions and Distortions from The Lexington Institute:
Comments on Torrance (2006)
The Lexington Institute recently published a paper, Immersion, Not Submersion, claiming that English immersion has been a great success in California. Dr. Krashen points out that this conclusion is based entirely on one finding, the increase in the percentage of English learners who score in the highest two levels of one test, the CELDT. His response to this claim argues that the paper contains a number of distortions and ignores reports finding that dropping bilingual education did not accelerate the English development of California's English learners.
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Dr. Stephen Krashen is Professor Emeritus of Learning and Instruction at the University of Southern California. He is an expert in the field of linguistics, specializing in theories of language acquisition and development. Much of his research has involved the study of non-English and bilingual language acquisition.  Recently Dr. Krashen's research has focused on reading and its effects on language acquisition and academic success.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Krashen began promoting the "natural approach" to language teaching, which he laid out in a landmark text he co-wrote with Tracy Terrell. His ideas about the difference between learning and acquisition have strongly influenced the field of ESL/EFL for several decades. He has published hundreds of books and articles and has been invited to deliver over 500 lectures at universities throughout the United States and the rest of the world.

In the past five years, Dr. Krashen has fought to save whole language and bilingual education in the United States and, more recently, has been lobbying for "recreational reading" and better stocked school libraries because of research relating both to higher achievement.

Dr. Krashen's theory of second language acquisition
Dr. Krashen's current web site