For middle- and upper-income kids, Whole Language seemed to help, or at least not to obviously hurt. For minority and low-income kids, however, it was an unqualified disaster. By the early 1990s California's scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress ranked lower than every state's but Louisiana. Other states that adopted Whole Language experienced similar test-score drops. In 1998 two major research efforts, the National Research Council and the National Reading Panel, found that the lack of Phonics contributed to lower rates of achievement for most students.
