The Joy of Reading and the Scandal of Child Illiteracy by Dr Marlynne Grant, March 31, 2026

 

Original article link

 

As usual, here are extracts and my comments:

Brain Rsearch - Dr. Sam Bommarito Part 2

                                                              

The following was tweeted by Kerry:

Kerry Greaves @KerryGr76867180 Feb 4

The reasons Reading Recovery is being banned in many states - it works for few and when it doesn’t, the child is blamed…

Luqman Michel

The question to ask is why does it work for a few and not the rest. Also, why does phonics work for some and not others?

Why does phonics work for any child, with no acuity problems, when using my book?

 

Dr. Sam Bommarito @DoctorSam7

Those are all kinds of research questions with plenty of research to answer them. Your claims around your book need to be verified with actual research studies. I know you are doing good work- but for wide-scale adoptions of what you are doing, that kind of field testing needs to be done.

Musings of a centrist by Dr. Sam Bommarito - Part 2

                                                                        

Here is another extract from Dr. Sam’s post:

There is more than one way to teach phonics. I’ve written about that point many times.

Some students NEED a synthetic phonics approach. This is especially true for dyslexic students. The key place where folks working under the balanced literacy umbrella went off the tracks was their failure to ensure dyslexic students got the synthetic phonics they needed. In some instances, that involved giving them little or no phonics. In other cases, that involved giving them the wrong kind of phonics. The wrong kind of phonics for them is phonics taught using inquiry methods- analytic phonics being the best example of that kind of approach.

The main point I want to make again today is that it is time to try something we’ve never tried in the whole history of the reading wars. That is to adopt a centrist position, using ideas from all sides.

Sharon Vaughn - helping kids with reading problems

 

The following are from the blog post by Kathryn Solow that I posted yesterday.

All of this advice applies to college professors as well. We have to remember that professors are people too.

So what does this mean in practice?

It means that we have got to stop shaming and blaming professors for what they do not know and were never taught. Many of these professors started out as classroom teachers. They took the same reading methods courses that the teachers did. They completed the same projects. They learned from the same professors. They are just as much victims of a broken educator prep-system as classroom teachers are.

My comment:

YES! Professors are people too. However, these professors/educators/researchers should think and be responsible for what they write. They should be willing to admit a mistake and move on. I have far too many examples of this but will, for now, give just a few examples.