This executive summary discusses our current understanding of the difficulties that children with reading/learning disabilities encounter as they start down the road to reading and summarizes research on early identification and intervention. The focus is on children in kindergarten through second grade. Findings from the analysis indicate: (1) the less efficient word reading of students with reading disabilities (RD) overloads working memory and undermines reading comprehension; (2) early identification of children most likely to encounter reading problems may constitute the first step in reducing incidence and severity of reading disabilities; (3) individual differences in prereaders' phonological awareness are among the best predictors of later reading success; (4) targeted phonemic awareness instruction with prereading children leads to significant gains in phonological awareness and in word-level reading skills; (5) when both phonetic awareness and decoding instruction are incorporated into a reading program, participants outperform students who received either alone; (6) more explicit approaches to teaching phonics lead to more positive decoding outcomes; (7) wide reading is essential for developing fluency, but students must become expert decoders before they can read widely; and (8) the level of reading accuracy necessary for a student to benefit from direct instruction ranges from 90 to 95 percent. (CR)