ABSTRACT
We are in the midst of one of our nation’s largest social initiatives focusing on the remodeling of our educational system of public education. This initiative, No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), has explicitly acknowledged the importance of early reading proficiency by targeting grades three and four for determining the status of reading achievement/comprehension for each child in every public classroom in the nation. There are however, three levels of analysis (child, grade, school) that are used in addressing NCLB requirements for determining reading status. The first level of analysis is the individual child. Each child’s progress through the educational system is to be monitored every year. The second level of analysis involves a school’s ability to demonstrate grade level improvement (e.g., all third graders in the building) by determining adequate yearly progress (AYP) according to a standard of “proficient or non-proficient.” The third level of analysis is any state’s progress as reflected by the AYP data, aggregated up from local school districts’ data. These are the three levels of monitoring required by NCLB that are receiving much of the attention of researchers and evaluators responsible for data collections efforts. The overall strategy is to intervene at the individual student level in order to improve the reading proficiency of classes and grades of students within buildings across the school district. As mentioned above, proficiency at the school district level is then aggregated up to the state level in order to determine the progress that is made on a state by state basis.
