In the heated environment of last year's U.S. presidential election, the subject of education was a common sound bite, with both candidates describing the terrible state of literacy in our nation—and of course each candidate assured us that he was the person to fix the problem!

It is true that literacy is in a state of crisis in the United States. In 1998, the National Assessment of Education Process (NAEP) reported the rather alarming statistic that reading ability among the nation's children across all age ranges had not improved in the past three decades. The NAEP is often referred to as the “nation's report card,” because it is a federally based program that measures standardized test achievement test scores from students enrolled in both private and public schools across the nation.

On September 26, 2000, Dr. Donald N. Langenberg, chairman of the National Reading Panel (NRP), testified to Congress on the NRP's findings on the state of reading instruction in the nation's schools. The NRP is a 14-member committee that was formed in 1997 by a Congressional mandate. The committee has been charged with assessing the effectiveness of different research-based techniques of reading instruction, as well as the readiness of these research results for application to the classroom. In his testimony, Dr. Langenberg stated that there is no “silver bullet” that will simply solve the problem with literacy.