'Reading First' article

I thought it would be nice to get some commentary going about the 'Reading First' evaluation article Uri emailed out. A quick summary for those who haven't read it: Reading First is a program focused on enhancing students decoding skills but, of course, also hoping to improve reading comprehension. Turns out it succeeded in the former but not in the latter. The article makes the point that perhaps rather than cut funding for this program it should instead now enhance funding so the program can be improved and continued. Basically, now, some are claiming the $40 million evaluation process was flawed. (The program only received $6 billion in funding.)

Evaluations and funding always get to me. I understand the need for empirical evidence, but someone is always going to claim that the study was inaccurate and doesn't portray the true results. It's more frustrating that when programs don't perform as they're expected to (or do in this case by improving decoding skills...but not enough improvement in reading comprehension) that at this point people often choose to stop funding altogether rather than to reform the effort. So, we have to start all over again. I think it makes sense to say...Reading First worked in this aspect, i.e. decoding, and not in this one, i.e. reading comprehension. How can we build onto the current program to improve students reading comprehension?