The next year and a half should bring a flood of data about the effects of the federal Reading First program, but most of those studies are not quite ready to be released, two scholars said today at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, in Chicago.

Beth Gamse, a principal associate at Abt Associates Inc., a private research firm in Massachusetts, and Marc Moss, a senior analyst there, described the design of a federally financed study that will compare elementary schools that have received Reading First grants with demographically similar, high-poverty schools that have not received such grants.

Last year Abt Associates released a preliminary report, prepared for the Education Department, that found that most Reading First schools are in fact using the instructional strategies that are required by the federal law that established the program. Reading First schools are also devoting significantly more time each day to reading instruction than their counterparts are.

But the potentially juiciest material in the continuing study — information about students’ reading achievement — won’t be analyzed and released for several more months, Ms. Gamse and Mr. Moss said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives education committee announced a list of people who will testify at an April 20 hearing on allegations of mismanagement and conflicts of interest in the program. The committee’s chairman, Rep. George Miller, Democrat of California, has issued a subpoena to Deborah C. Simmons, a professor of special education at Texas A&M University, because her lawyer allegedly failed to return phone calls from the committee last week. In her former position at the University of Oregon, Ms. Simmons helped to create a “consumer’s guide” that many states relied on when purchasing textbooks under Reading First.

Some critics have objected to Ms. Simmons’s simultaneous role as an author for Pearson Scott Foresman, whose textbooks have been used in Reading First. In an e-mail message to The Chronicle in January, Ms. Simmons strenuously denied using her role as a Reading First consultant to steer states toward purchasing Scott Foresman textbooks or any other commercial products. —David Glenn