“What if the medicine we have been prescribing is only making matters worse, particularly for poor children? What if the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to drill kids on discrete skills but to teach them, as early as possible, the very things we’ve marginalized—including history, science, and other content that could build the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand both written texts and the world around them?” In The Atlantic, Natalie Wexler argues that we’re not doing a good job of teaching kids to read (and actually understand what they’re reading). Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong.