This book examines twentieth century reading education. Among the major educational issues reviewed are testing, diagnosis, individualized education, textbooks, readability, multiculturalism, bi-lingualism, disability, and technology. The book explores attempts by educators and psychologists to answer theoretical as well as practical questions about why only some students developed literacy skills. It examines the efforts to prevent reading failure as well as to aid those learners who had not learned to read. The four types of remedial programs explored are skills-based, language-based, literature-based, and technology-based. The book identifies the social, emotional, physical, and cognitive factors that have been linked to remedial reading instruction. Based on a review of more than 3000 primary sources from the 1800s to the present, extensive quotations have been integrated into the text to give readers a sense of intellectual involvement with the educators who are discussed.