If you want to kill your literary career, Jonathan Swift advises, write in praise of something—especially something that has been criticized by an Inspector General. Still, after three years working in the weeds as a volunteer, I cannot resist the urge to confirm some good news: Reading First has emerged as the most popular part of the No Child Left Behind law and the most effective federal education initiative today.

How can an effort that the US Department of Education's Office of the Inspector General has faulted for mismanagement and failure to follow the law possibly be such a success? Because in what matters most—achieving the law's basic goal of ensuring that all children are reading at grade level by the end of third grade—Reading First has inspired more progress in the last three years than in the prior thirty. The feds have managed to combine the right mix of policies, funding and leadership to attack a complex technical problem that the federal government was never designed to solve: illiteracy caused by faulty teaching.

Reading First requires states to set up competitive grant programs for low-performing, high-poverty schools that require them to use scientifically based instructional techniques and assessments that are valid, reliable and administered in a timely manner. Such practices amount to a sea change for thousands of districts and the state education agencies (SEAs) tasked to support them. It has not been easy.

As a parent volunteer I got a dose of the program's tough love firsthand when I helped the Atlanta Public Schools draft its application for Reading First funds. Our proposal was shot down for including an unmanageable hodgepodge of reading curricula, some sound, others not. The district leadership was indignant and my vanity was bruised. Still, I had to admit: the state was right to demand that we learn to follow the dictates of reason and science when spending taxpayers' money.

Atlanta re-applied and won Reading First funds last year, but the district's blind self-assurance that it knew best (even when it clearly did not) taught me to discount the complaints swirling about the program as so much dust kicked up by ignorance and a titanic struggle over money. I learned through my own errors trying to help people who did not want my help that the most reliable judges of Reading First are not the educators who fail to win grants or who win grants but fail to follow the program's guidelines; nor the vendors who worry too much about market share and not enough about kids; nor the ignorant outside the program who mythologize it as an evil. The most lucid analysts of Reading First are the teachers, coaches, principals, coordinators, state directors, trainers and federal staff who are working hard to implement the program as directed and who have something to show for their efforts.

Reading First is spawning thousands of these successful acolytes in cities, suburbs and small towns across the country: hard workers of all types who have accepted the challenge to teach—indeed to learn better how to teach—America's hardest-to-teach children. Dismissive of the fuss about a program they love, they are struggling mightily to teach the adults as well.

Millions of dollars will be spent investigating Reading First before the program comes up for reauthorization next year, but many benefits are already evident.

1) Preliminary data show that the achievement gap in schools and states that have followed Reading First's guidelines is steadily closing—for every category of disadvantaged student, in every grade of the k-3 program.No other federal program can boast such clear gains in student achievement. Data are particularly impressive from states that have used the program's generous funds earmarked for administration (20 percent of the grant instead of the usual 5 percent) to create strong infrastructures to support their districts. These states include Washington, Arizona, Alabama, Michigan and West Virginia (to name just a diverse few).

2) Bigger than the data shift is the shift in attitude: the excitement, resolve, and spirit of inquiry coursing through schools that were rudderless only a few years before. Great teachers blame nothing but their own teaching when a child fails to learn to read. Reading First has inspired more of these teachers than all of its misinformed detractors combined. Rarely has there been such sobriety, candor and humility in education.

3) The program has elevated universal early literacy as an important national policy goal and weakened the resistance to teach and above all assess reading skills in the early grades. Whereas most states begin testing in grade 3, Reading First schools must answer for their results in k-2. They are thus less likely to 'save' their best teachers for the higher grades.

4) The program is forging a consensus on how and how often to assess reading skills, and on the need to use the results quickly to reshape instruction. Reading First educators may not always know what to do about their students' data, but they can no longer ignore it, as they could when it didn't exist or when it wasn't scientifically valid. The program is generating a trove of meaningful data on early childhood reading achievement and a serious attempt to make sense of it.

5) The program is creating a new generation of leaders whose influence will likely grow as others under pressure to produce see their success. Several SEAs have already adopted Reading First's tenets and training statewide and are exploring how to graft its virtues onto the feds' larger and less focused programs, including Title I and Special Education. Districts are likewise redeploying funds to expand the program's system of coaches, assessments and curricula district-wide. Many SEAs are prodding teacher-training programs to revise their reading courses to focus more on evidence-based practices.

6) By insisting that curricula be based on scientifically-based research, the program has strengthened the incentive for publishers to improve their products and provide more training on their use. The new generation of basal readers, though far from optimal, are better than what teachers were using before and are better supported. Barring a reversal of federal policy, the next iteration ought to be better still.

7) The program offers the strongest evidence yet that the federal government can improve student achievement by prescribing rigorous standards and requiring states and districts that want federal funds to meet them. The main difference between Reading First and its failed predecessor, the Reading Excellence Act, is that Reading First adds money for external evaluation and allows grants to be cut off if evaluators find a grantee has failed to follow the program's guidelines or produce adequate gains in student achievement.

8) The program's design offers a model for what other education efforts will need to be successful:promotion of evidence-based pedagogy, valid and timely assessments, accountability for outcomes in a focused domain, sound professional development, and an adequate support system at the state and national level.

9) Reports to the contrary, the highest-performing Reading First directors say the program is well managed and intelligently demanding. The DC staff are respected for their knowledge, responsiveness, and skill in promoting the uncompromising dictates of science without trampling on state laws. The program's technical assistance centers, dedicated to serving the SEAs (the key leverage points through whose improvement the feds can best impact thousands of districts), have proved so useful they have become the states' preferred source for training and expertise on how to teach reading.

10) The program has re-confirmed that reading instruction is an empirical science no less technical and predictable than astronomy or medicine. Districts and states that followed Reading First's research-based guidelines most closely got the best results. The question is no longer whether Reading First's prescription works but how to get more educators to follow it.

"The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed," Montesquieu observed. Transforming education into an evidence-based profession is the work of generations. Even the most successful Reading First educators say that they're nowhere near where they need to be, that they still have much more to learn, that the tipping point against backsliding is still years away, and that the federal government needs to keep up the pressure and the support for reading education reform. Good horses on a sloppy track, they remain vastly outnumbered by unenlightened superiors, parents and peers. The forces of ignorance, egoism and greed could snuff out their embers at any time.

Fears about Reading First's sustainability keep even its most ardent cheerleaders awake at night. Will the urgency die? Will the focus shift to adolescent literacy or math? Will the Inspector General's report slam the door on the courageous efforts to keep junk science out of the classroom?

"The habit of inattention is the gravest flaw in the democratic character," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America, back in 1839.Reading First has strengthened our democracy and helped the nation's poor. Can we pay attention long enough to build on its success?

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