Children are assessed in the first grade, and those who are in the bottom 20 percent of reading proficiency are given a series of 30-minute tutoring sessions.

"There's no one single magical key to reading proficiency," Mr. Pesce said.

Follow-ups with the participants reflected the maintenance of reading levels and for some avid readers, additional leaps in reading proficiency.

Students also demonstrated higher math proficiency, particularly in elementary and middle school, and a slight improvement in reading proficiency in middle school.

In this way, miscue analysis provides a naturalistic viewpoint and the resulting analysis of reading proficiency is both qualitative and quantitative.

Many careful studies of reading proficiency find that exposure to literature (sometimes called whole language instruction) also has value.

In all, 36 percent of white fourth graders achieved reading proficiency on this year's test, compared with 16 percent of black students and 15 percent of Hispanic students.

In recent national standardized tests, California's fourth-graders surpassed only those in Mississippi and Louisiana in reading proficiency.

I'm not talking about reading proficiency.

The school tested best in the county in reading proficiency in the New England Common Assessment Program test in 2008.