Research Paper on:
The Reading Crisis by Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin

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same level of ability as a so-called "mainstream" child. Bibliography lists 2 sources. BWreadin.rtf "The Reading Crisis" By: C.B. Rodgers  - November 2001 -- for more information on using this paper properly! Introduction In 1984, reading expert Jeanne Chall discovered a correlation between textbook  quality and learning. She saw a direct relationship between the years in which textbooks were edited to make them less complex, SAT scores also went down. In an interview for  Time (12/3/84), she notes "They made the curriculum easier, and they made it easier, and they made it easier" (pp. 68) The principal way of making the curriculum easier was  to focus on the textbook, the single item that provides between 70 and 90 percent of the content of a class curriculum. It is the process which has come to  be known as "dumbing down." Bowen (1984) explains: "The roots of dumbing down go back to the 1920s, when schools began systematic testing of students and concluded that the curriculum  was too hard. ...A key instrument was a set of readability formulas designed to measure the difficulty of a text. Most of the formulas are based on three factors: word  length, sentence length and the number of uncommon words. For example, a 15-word sentence or a three-syllable word may be rated too tough for first grade" (pp. 68). "The Reading  Crisis" The fundamental Chall and Baldwin ask in "The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind" is how can America, as a collective society afford to not teach children  to read? Their book reconsiders the issue that has often been referred to in educational circles as the "fourth-grade slump" in reading achievement. The point they make is that the