http://www.smh.com.au/national/educatio ... rkv1n.html
Reading Recovery: NSW government ditches 30-year-old, $55m a year program
The NSW government has abandoned a $55-million-a-year program that teaches students to read, 10 months after a damning review found the program that has been used in up to 960 schools for more than 30 years does not work.
The move, buried within the state government's $340 million Literacy and Numeracy Strategy announced on Wednesday, will see Reading Recovery lose its mandated status while the NSW government pushes ahead with a heightened testing regime from the first day of kindergarten to ensure struggling children are not left behind.
The program is a privately run proprietary program - only teachers who have paid for training are permitted to teach it. The initiative was developed in New Zealand during the 1970s to help struggling year 1 students with daily 30-minute lessons from a specially trained teacher and has now spread to the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
In March last year, Dr Moats told Victorian education leaders that it was "indefensible" to spend money on the program.
"The whole approach is based on ideas that have not held up to scientific scrutiny," Dr Moats said.
The NSW government's report, released on Wednesday, found widely used interventions are not always the most effective.
Education research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies, Jennifer Buckingham, said the move to dump dedicated funding for Reading Recovery was long overdue.
"It is excellent that funding allocated solely to the program is going to be freed up so schools can use it for other more effective reading interventions," she said.