What a monumental task it is, making New York City's public school system worse, but worry not, it's well underway. Diana Lam, Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning, and her boss, former Microsoft antitrust prosecutor, Joel Klein, Chancellor, have already installed a reading-writing program based on a "child-centered" Progressive education theory exposed as preposterous more than seventy years ago. It is a program that utterly and proudly ignores all scientific evidence of the past four decades concerning the process of representing--encoding and decoding--the sound units, phonemes, of language. Scientists in a number of disciplines now know quite well how children...