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With Tears Streaming
Posted August 6, 2020
by Linda Diamond, founder & former president, CORE and author of Teaching Reading Sourcebook and Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures
I just finished listening to Emily Hanford’s last podcast on APM, What the Words Say.
My husband wanted to know why I was crying. I answered, “because I am so angry and so frustrated.” We have known for years how to teach reading, yet as a nation we still aren’t doing what we should. Reading instruction should not be a matter of personal philosophy or preference anymore than a medical intervention should be based on philosophy. Hanford’s most recent podcast hits so close to home. At CORE we had two consultants working with educators in juvenile court schools. They know that failure to learn to read is a direct route to prison.
Who are these incarcerated young people? They are largely Black and Hispanic youth who will tell you they were never taught to read. While in youth incarceration they are finally learning what should have been taught in school. Listen to Emily Hanford’s podcast to hear the words of the young men she interviewed. Ask yourself why this injustice continues, ask yourself why educational malpractice continues. If we mean to be warriors for equity and social justice, ask why we allow this. If we do not change how we teach reading and if we do not intervene for older students before it is too late, shame on us.
I like to think we have come a long way as a nation. However, if we cannot even guarantee this most basic skill, if as a society we perpetuate the Jim Crow laws that prevented Black Americans from learning to read, then we have not come far at all. We should all cry in anger and shame.
4 responses to “With Tears Streaming”
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I was emotionally moved and angry before, during, and after I listened to the APM Report yesterday. I, too, have spent decades attempting to right this wrong in our society. The pandemic has only made educational malpractice and educational inequities more visible to more people. I am hopeful that once we can put the pandemic behind us, some real improvements can be made.
I am in agreement that Emily’s podcast and the research itself points to the key ingredients; Language Comprehension and Decoding (Word Recognition) necessary to achieve the goal of reading and comprehension. I feel angry towards the politicians who have elevated this injustice, the school districts who turn their head at research despite the growing numbers of students reading below level, the administrators who carry on the status quo instead of embracing SOR, and finally the teacher education programs who continue to take our tuition dollars and deliver incomplete instruction. I am part of several Face Book groups where like minded colleagues are eager to learn HOW TO DO BETTER! My thirst for knowledge is plenty but the well of SOR is deep…I’ll continue to learn one webinar and one book study at a time. Thanks to all the teachers who seek this knowledge so we can do our part to teach reading and return self-confidence to ALL. Hopefully the knowledge gap will close one student at a time.
Linda, as a Special Educator of many years, I feel your frustration. When the Reading Panel published their findings I thought it would be discussed in our schools, in our trainings and that everyone would be learning from its findings. When our universities, medical centers and the IES continued the research and to publish, I thought their findings would make its may to the district and state level, but sadly, no it did not.
There is a disconnect between research knowledge and our school system. The vast amount of teachers (and these are good teachers), do not know about the research and how to apply it to their practice. We have not re-educated our administrators and teachers. We are stubbornly holding on to what we learned in our past education programs and trainings.
By ignoring the evidence and not examining our instructional practice we are failing all our students, but make no mistake, if our white student’s poor reading performance resulted in poverty and incarceration, we would have found solutions.
Mary Baker-Hendy
We cannot wait for the pandemic to end before we begin to make changes in how reading is taught. Instruction has moved to a virtual medium. We MUST use that medium to teach what is needed.