I was listening to the radio the other day when I heard a commercial from two sports heroes who are starting a fund raiser to help children learn to read better. They wouldn't have to jump into the fray to save our children if the universities would teach the teachers to teach right!
This reminded me of a story from my friend, Donna. She went to the junior high with her daughter for a meeting and heard several other mothers talking and complaining that they were having to take their kids to Sylvan Learning Center to bring their reading up to grade level.
One mother was furious because while she was signing her son up at Sylvan, the registrar said, "We see this all the time. We're getting a lot of students in for this problem. Everyone who went to this school district was taught the wrong way, and we're having to fix it." (Ad-libbed)
The mother was so angry to find out that the schools were using a "discovery" type of learning model that didn't believe in teaching spelling or correcting children's spelling. They let the children write whatever they wanted however they wanted. The result was years of illiterate children.
At the time this mother took her son for tutoring, the school district had been using this "innovative" method for a decade and was still using it. (It was probably another failed program from Project Follow Through and the Whole Language fiasco.)
So I'm thinking, if we know what the research-proven best reading method is, phonics, why are schools sticking to failed methods, requiring parents to pay for expensive remedies? Something is definitely wrong here. Must be political. Doesn't purposely-failing our children, year after year, border on evil?
Ciao
http://godfreymethod.com/default.aspx
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