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News of the Institute for Education Sciences' recent finding that Reading First does not aid students' comprehension has triggered volleys of argument between Reading First partisans and detractors.

Anyone reading the IES report the day it appeared could have predicted the response. Opponents of Reading First felt vindicated and called for its termination. Supporters objected that the findings revealed more about the shortcomings of the IES evaluation design--or the program's poor implementation--than about the Program's intrinsic merits.

I'll stay out of the crossfire for the time being, if only to make a larger point about the conflict: Namely, that supporters and detractors of any education intervention are destined to battle each other to a draw as long as as the United States pursues education reform on a shoestring. Whenever a promising reform strategy yields less than promising evaluation results, partisans for and against the reform inevitably argue over whether to attribute the results to limitations of the evaluation design, a failure of implementation, or the inherent weakness of the reform. This familiar scenario makes it very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Here are some thoughts on how to avoid the impasse: