More on the DC meltdown

Brent Staples of the New York Times has chimed in on the recent Washpost expose of a special education crisis in the Washington D.C. schools. In a column titled "How Schools Pay a (Very High) Price for Failing to Teach Reading Properly," he writes:

The instructional techniques for helping [learning-disabled] children are well documented in federally backed research and have been available in various forms from specialized tutors and private schools for more than 50 years. Even so, few public schools actually use the best practices.

This failure to follow best practices is particularly surprising in D.C., which apparently played a central role in a Federal study of how to help struggling readers:

The early intervention study was so successful that it later became a partial basis of the sound reading provision written into the No Child Left Behind law. But researchers who worked in Washington at the time now say that they could barely get an audience with the school system's leadership, which appears to have been invested in unproved strategies and business as usual.