Pursuing Proficiency

In "Americans Are Closing the Book on Reading, Study Finds," Jennifer Howard reported on To Read or Not to Read, the widely covered document issued by the National Endowment for the Arts: "Even Americans who have studied at the graduate level saw their reading skills atrophy: 51% were rated proficient readers in 1996, but only 41% made that grade in 2003." In "What's Proficient?" - a 2004 paper easily located on the Web - Bella Rosenberg of the American Federation of Teachers followed that slippery word down the rabbit hole of NCLB to that Wonderland where she found that it could take 166 years for 12th-graders to reach proficiency in reading - not the 12 years that the law required.