Sunday, May 17, 2020

The number one cause of low literacy in America Dr.David Boulton




The following was published on 4.4.2018 by Dr. David Boulton on the Learning Steward website.



Over half of all the K-12 students in America are less than grade level proficient in reading. The psychological, academic, social, political, and economic costs are staggering. Yet it’s been this way for decades, despite designating ‘grade level reading’ to be a national priority, despite thousands of scientific studies, and despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent on reading instruction. Why? What’s so difficult about learning to read?


The prevailing wisdom would say, it’s because teachers don’t understand what is involved in acquiring literacy; they haven’t been trained, or aren’t following the instructional models that are out there.

Any child who has even a rudimentary spoken language could learn to read, if met and guided in a way that adaptively scaffolded them up from the language that he or she has. The fault isn’t in the kids, and it’s not the fault of the parents or teachers, either.

More accurately stated, the number one cause of low literacy in America is the archaic mental models that constrain the ways we conceive of, design, and deliver reading instruction.


My comment: This Dr.David Boulton is the guy whom I wrote several emails to in 2015 and 2017 telling him that kids are unable to read in English because they are being taught the wrong pronunciation of phonemes. 

In the article above he says that the fault is not that of teachers and then says the fault is in the delivery of reading instruction.

My post yesterday is from his website where he had said that learning to read in unnatural and now in this site, he asks what’s so difficult about learning to read?

That is exactly the same question I have asked since 2010. Not only have I asked that question but have answered it as well. After 10 years of not being able to get this simple message across to educators I then went ahead and produced 5 YouTube videos explaining why exactly kids shut down from learning to read. 

I believe we should stop this criminal activity of classifying kids who are instructional casualties as ‘dyslexic’ and then making innocent parents send their so-called dyslexic kids for therapy and intervention.

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