Bringing Speech Recognition to Reading Instruction
By Marilyn Jager Adams , Education Week

As everyone who follows such things knows, U.S. students, as a group, do not read very well. Yet, if you are among those who have read about this—indeed, if you are among those who are reading this Commentary, then you (and most of your friends, neighbors, relatives, and colleagues) are very likely a member of that subset of Americans I would term the “hyper-educated.”

By “hyper-educated,” I do not mean extraordinarily highly educated, though many are. By “hyper-educated,” I mean that you accept that becoming educated is part of the fabric of life; you never questioned that your children would be educated, and you raised them accordingly from the start. In fact, most of the children of hyper-educated Americans read quite well; that is good. Not so good, however, is a resulting tendency for too many of the hyper-educated to think of children with reading difficulties as the exception.

To the contrary, among U.S. students, it is good readers who are the exception. As documented yet again by the recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, report on reading for 2011, only one in three U.S. students is able to read and understand grade-level material. Still worse, this statistic holds across school grades and has barely budged over as many years as NAEP has tracked it. Moreover, the degree of the literacy deficit is tightly correlated with the extent to which children depend on school (as distinct from home) for their formal education. The irony, of course, is that the fundamental mission of public schooling is to offer educational opportunity—including laying the foundation for reading well—to all children, regardless of what their homes might offer.

Lots more of this article here: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/11/29/13adams.h31.html?tkn=TOCFt6GJBisoYEWrd%2FhtqZYnHYeeegEhT3bL&cmp=clp-sb-edtech