It’s been years since Jo-Anne Gross first hit the block button on me—LinkedIn, then Twitter (now X). At the time, it stung. But mostly, it felt like a badge of honour. Here was a self-proclaimed remediation expert, founder of Remediation Plus Systems, selling phonics-heavy interventions for dyslexic kids, suddenly deciding my free lessons and alternative views were too dangerous to engage with.
In the Children of the Code the researchers discovered beyond a doubt why kids shut down from learning to read. This information is suppressed from the general public. Did someone direct them to suppress it. Seigfried Engelmann had asked this question why important matters are suppressed.
Here is a small portion from the interview of Seigfried Engelmann by David Boulton.
Dr Martin Bloomfield:
Professor Elliott is extraordinarily well-researched, and it would do you good to pay attention to his, and others', voices.
I have paid attention to Professor Elliott and many other researchers. In 2010, I told Professor Elliott and Durham University that I disagreed with what was said about dyslexia. I requested that he read my posts on my blog. He replied that he would.
Then in 2014, he published his book. He either did not understand my blog posts or he did not read them.
If he had researched ‘dyslexia’ (kids who can’t read) for more than 50 years, how does he not know what causes kids to disengage from learning to read?
"There are none so blind as those who will not see".
Here is some corroborative evidence for you to ponder.
Ms. Nancy Hennessy who was the President of International Dyslexia Association from 2013 to 2015 said:
“……even if we settle on a middle number, let us say 10%; that still leaves a lot of children who are not dyslexic, whose brains are not wired any different way, who have reading difficulty.”
This part is quite interesting and I hope that I am not misinterpreting what Anna is saying.
Anna Stokke:
If we immerse kids in books and we make reading fun and we start with meaning and understanding, the reading will just come.
And I hear this sort of thing in math. all the time. So it's sort of like a top-down approach to teaching instead of a bottom-up approach. So in other words, the idea is to start children with problem-solving. They'll get excited about the problem and the foundational skills will just come after that. But as a matter of fact, you can't solve a problem, right, if you don't have the skills to solve the problem if you don't have the foundational skills to do it or the techniques to do it. Does that resonate with you in terms of what happened with reading?
This morning,19.7.23, I read the following tweets
Secretary Miguel Cardona @SecCardona
Every student deserves the opportunity to have a career in what they’re passionate about.
That’s why we are raising the bar in education.
Here is a comment by Tom Berend on Educhatter I wrote about. LINK
He said the following:
The students are not “learning disabled”. There is nothing wrong with the CHILD. There was a famous but horribly flawed experiment, ‘dowel tapping’ that created the dyslexia industry. It should be as infamous as the vaccine-causes-autism fraud.
And here is a link he shared and my comments:
Curriculum casualties, of which there are millions, could be virtually eradicated…(IDA)
International Dyslexia Association and National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development’s definition of dyslexia is:
The extracts below are from the post by Stephen Parker found here.
“We take no position on whether there are one or more ultimate causes of dyslexia. But we suggest that there is a common denominator in every case of dyslexia… an inability to decode. This is not to say that we claim to have identified the ultimate cause of dyslexia; for this, one would have to push the question one step back and ask why they cannot decode.” [12] (Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986).)
I read a well written blog post by Lindsay Kemeny. Here are extracts and my comments on the article. (LINK)
I have always tried to be careful with how I bring this up, because people get so upset and defensive when confronted with the fact that there is no research to support these reading strategies and, even worse, they are doing harm to students. But my patience is wearing thin on this topic. Just when I think that the tide is turning and that the majority of educators now realize the problems surrounding 3 cueing, I hear an edu-celebrity tell teachers on Facebook to simply “tweak” the strategies instead of get rid of them or a reader emails me asking me to take down this post stating that it’s only my opinion and that 3 cueing works. This particular reader told me not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but 3 cueing is exactly what needs to be thrown out. I stand by what I said. There is no research to support these strategies and you don’t need to take my word for it. You can read about it here, here, and here.
This morning
I had a tweet from www.understood.org
in response to my tweet. They linked the following resource. LINK
Here are excerpts and my response.
Dyslexia is a common condition that makes it hard to read. Some experts believe that between 5 and 10 percent of people have it. Others say as many as 17 percent of people show signs of reading challenges.
Instructional Casualties:Dr.G Reid Lyon: When we look at the kids who are having a tough time learning to read and we went through the statistics, thirty-eight percent nationally, dis-aggregate that, seventy percent of kids from poverty and so forth hit the wall.
Your posts seem to be the opposite of the science of reading. You tend to attack scientific research and claim your own anecdotes are superior to the work of actual scientists.
“As long as it is empirical, Americans are comfortablebut if it isn't empirical it is suspicious stuff.”
People with dyslexia have trouble separating words into phonemes, the sounds that correspond with each part of a word. For example, the word “dog” is broken down into the phonemes “duh,” “aah” and “guh.”Hearing these discrete sounds is a vital part of learning to read. But people with dyslexia hear the word only in its entirety: “dog.”
