Why Johnny Can't Read

Molly O'Connor

Leanna Longoria

• 1955: Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do About It, by Rudolf Franz Flesch
• 1988: Why Johnny Can't Read, but Yoshio Can, by Richard Lynn
• This article is about the difference between American schools and Japanese schools. It discusses the evidence of Japan's high educational standards. It allows discusses how European children scored about halfway between the Japanese and the Americans.
• 1997: Teaching Johnny to Read
• Congress directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to increase its understanding of learning disabilities and how reading develops. The agency financed a series pf studies that have followed about 2,500 young children, some of them for as long as fourteen years.
• 2012: Why Johnny Can't Read: Redux, by Steve Nelson
• When it comes to school, we've designed an entire educational system around the assumption that children will begin to read at the same time.  Some research suggests that placing children in advanced settings for their developmental age may actually delay their mastery of reading and comprehension.