In teaching children to become good readers, we need to ask hard questions about the relative efficiencies of conflicting instructional methods, several of which, like the STAR experiment, have an apparently good basis in research. The fact that a method has been shown to yield positive effects on reading comprehension or vocabulary gain doesn’t mean that it meets the more stringent theoretical requirement of attaining these positive effects efficiently. These are the kinds of issues that a teacher, school administrator, or policymaker needs to have addressed, and it is the duty of the researcher who is familiar with both the data and the relevant literature to ponder and try to answer these theoretical questions about opportunity cost, quite apart from ideology and educational philosophy.