In the war over teaching reading, a U.S.-local clash

 By sticking to its teaching approach, the Madison, Wisconsin school system passed up $2 million under Reading First, the Bush administration’s ambitious effort to turn the nation’s poor children into skilled readers by the third grade. Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program. Other reading experts, like Richard Allington, past president of the International Reading Association, challenge the case for phonics. Read more about this ongoing controversy in this article from The New York Times.