For nearly 40 years, from 1930 through about 1970, more than 85 million American schoolchildren learned to read using the Dick and Jane readers that were part of a series published by the Scott Foresman Company. The books took their name from the series' lead characters who, with a dog named Spot and a kitten named Puff, inhabited a nostalgic, innocent American landscape of white picket fences and neighborliness. So deeply have the Dick and Jane stories been etched into the minds of the Baby Boomer generation and their immediate predecessors that the repetitive phrase "See Spot run! Run, Spot, run!" is today remembered by millions as the very first sentences they could read on their own. It has been estimated that four-fifths of the nation's schools were using Dick and Jane readers, ranking the books with the venerable McGuffey Readers of the nineteenth century as...