The gist of this article (and a wave of them that have appeared recently) is that reading comprehension problems are caused more by a lack of content knowledge than by a lack of reading ability. The example used to demonstrate this is an old canard from 1987 wherein a person who doesn't understand baseball terms will fail to understand text about baseball. Which while true on the face of it is more of a lesson in the need to define your terms than it is a lesson about why children can't read. Why? Well - the answer here is that we're going to have to teach them about baseball, right? But, how are we going to teach them about baseball? Content knowledge isn't this magic stuff that can be put into a child's head. It requires reading comprehension.
As an aside, the writers promulgating this kind of nonsense should know better. It is well known that language is generative - that is, we can use existing things to make new things (The Simpsons plays with this all the time - which is why 'embiggen' is a perfectly cromulent word). There is a range of grammatical structures, semantic and metaphotical methods, and context-sensitive factors that all go into this. It's why we can read words that are msspeled, and how we can use language to build a knowledge of things we don't already know. That - and not 'content knowledge' - is the skill we're developing when we learn to read. Otherwise, we'd have to memorize every single fact, which besides being an absurdity, is pretty much impossible. The content knowledge people, though, have something to sell. Buyer beware.
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