WHAT WILL POWER4Kids ACHIEVE IN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS?

Within the next five years, the POWER4Kids Initiative will have studied and compiled performance data on the most widely distributed instruction and intervention programs used in this country. We will also study the most recent reading programs that have been development, through scientific grants, by teams of scientists in the language centers of research universities around our country.

Thousands of students across a variety of settings and geography will participate. This research will provide not only the empirically-based facts on which programs meet the bar of excellence in teaching American children to read, but will provide five essential components of education that are vitally important as practical and trustworthy tools necessary in the evolution of academic performance:

	STANDARDS FOR GROWTH to give the local education boards reliable benchmarks on "appropriate and reasonable" progress that can be expected in the reading skills of children who are currently falling behind.
COMPARATIVE MATRIX to provide unbiased evidence, which compares instructional reading programs by the following factors: the time a student will spend in a program; the grade-level gain in reading skill; and, the cost of the program. LEARNING PROFILES to establish understandable categories of the most familiar learning differences in our nation's children (strengths and weaknesses).
	TARGETED INTERVENTION TOOLS to give educators up-to-date knowledge on which programs and methods specifically accelerate skill development in areas of weakness within a child's Learning Profile.
	CLASSROOM SETTING LIMITATIONS to supply concrete guidelines on the student-teacher ratio needed for a program to effectively produce sound improvement in a student's reading ability.

The POWER4Kids Reading Initiative's initial focus is the evaluation of public school and private clinic reading programs for children ages 7-12 (second through sixth grade) who have already fallen a year behind their peers in their reading ability. The second focus is on public school reading programs for ages 5-8 (K through second grade). As the research studies move to completion, we will commence the next phase of this project, which is to 1) construct professional development training (Real and Virtual Interactive Teacher Training/Seminars) on the programs that meet the bar of excellence in teaching reading education; and, 2) begin mobilization into the school and afterschool programs.