This is a blog posting that is currently attracting some interest and it is a very important topic as parents are often frustrated and distraught about this issue:
http://www.spelfabet.com.au/2016/01/how ... 35#respondHow can I get my child's literacy problem taken more seriously at school?
Do read the full post which is of international concern.A parent from the Dyslexia Victoria Support Group tells me the title of this blog post is one of the main questions asked on their Facebook page.
Sad, eh? But teachers are good people, and the system fails them too. How frustrating to have kids in your class who you’ve never been taught how to teach to read/spell, year after year! So let’s just get on with fixing this problem, so we can put this question out to pasture.
Normalising failure
Most teachers are taught and equipped to teach early literacy in ways that set up around 20% of students to fail. The most common approach is called “Balanced Literacy“, a dog’s breakfast of approaches that contradict each other, don’t make much linguistic sense and aren’t based on the best evidence.
Years of “Balanced Literacy” and its even-worse predecessor, “Whole Language”, in our schools mean that it’s now considered completely normal for about one in five children to not learn to read for a whole year or more, despite trying their hardest. As Dr Louisa Moats says, we need to be outraged about this.
Parents are told to “wait and see”, and that intervention will be provided in the following year, but the intervention is often Reading Recovery, so it’s not likely to help long-term (click here and here for details). Other programs based on Balanced Literacy logic such as the widely-used Leveled Literacy Intervention (Fountas and Pinnell, which to my knowledge has no peer-reviewed research support), ditto.
The $1000 assessment
After a couple of years of miserably watching their child struggling and failing, parents are typically advised to pay nearly $1000 for an assessment to identify the source of the problem. A more honest and fair system would also assess the curriculum. “Balanced literacy” is frankly toxic for many children, and should IMHO not be served in schools. We ban nuts from schools because of their serious consequences for a minority of children.