Jerome H. Smith taught English in the public schools of Detroit, Michigan. For much of his career he was handed the students everyone else had given up on — whole classes of teenagers who were failing, reading years below grade level, discouraged, and labeled probable dropouts.

He refused to accept that they couldn’t learn. The problem, he came to see, was not the students — it was that no one had ever taught them to truly read. So he built the tool he needed: a step-by-step program that develops the one ability standardized tests really measure and most instruction never directly teaches — the reader’s inference skill. He wrote it, tested it in his own classroom, and refined it again and again, for more than three decades.

The results, documented in his own classes, were remarkable. Students gained, on average, two years of reading comprehension in a single semester — some as much as five. In a typical class, up to 80% showed measurable improvement on standardized tests. In his very first trial, a class of seventh-graders who were three and four years behind finished as many years above grade level as they had started below it.

What those numbers meant in real lives mattered more. Students who had been near-certain dropouts went on to high school, to college, and to careers. Young athletes he tutored raised their ACT and SAT scores enough to earn college scholarships. Many of the children he was handed — the ones the system had counted out — ended up out-achieving the peers who had never struggled at all.

That is the promise behind The Language Enrichment Program: it works best for exactly the learners who need it most — the ones who are behind the curve. It is self-instructional and self-paced, suitable for ages eight through adult, and it has been in continuous use and validation for over thirty-five years.

Jerome Smith is also the author of The New Treasury of Scripture Knowledge. His life’s work has always had a single aim — building readers one step at a time.