Directors of ‘Reading First’ Plagued by Anxiety Over Budget Cuts

The federal Reading First initiative is not likely to survive if massive funding cuts are not reversed, several state directors for the program told federal officials at a meeting here this week. Key elements of the program—reading coaches in each school, professional development for teachers, core reading programs and interventions, data analysis, and accountability measures—must all be sustained to ensure that it improves reading instruction at participating schools, they maintained. “How do you do all this when you are dealing with a 61 percent cut in funding?” asked Lynann Barbero, who oversees the Reading First grants for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “When you put all the pieces into a structure and pull out one of the pieces, it falls apart.”

This from Education Week (subscription).