Why Johnny still can't read.

From my colleague at the Seattle Times comes this column on what makes for a successful school. His take is based on the The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity. I'll have to actually crack the cover of this book to determine whether it rises above the annual cache of books promising to transform education.

Yesterday, I spent the morning at an elementary school in an affluent Seattle neighborhood watching a teacher teach reading to third-graders. This teacher is touted as being one of the best at unlocking the doors in the brain that lead to reading fluency. The bulk of academic problems begin with trouble reading, which compounds academic problems down the road.

This class was so hard for me to watch in part because I read well and I learned to read early. I never had to go through the building blocks of reading and trying to do that now is like an architect trying to tell you how they built a building. Unless you went through every step, you don't know. One thing I learned is that the biggest predictor of reading success is having good sight memory (you see a word once and remember it from then) and having high phonemic awareness, knowing the sounds letters make.

Later in the morning I met a former architect who quit her job to volunteer full time as a reading tutor at the school. Watching her pull apart the building blocks of reading to get to the origins, the way kids learn the sound of ph or what it means when they see ck at the end of a word, gives me hope for improving America's literacy rates.