Tyson’s Corner

It’s disturbing to read all of the controversy surrounding literacy education and to think that it has been manufactured by political opportunists trying to privatize American education.  Everybody wants to blame someone else for the supposed reading “crisis.”  Once again, Open Court is being bashed, as well as the DIBELS test.  (I still use a similar method to obtain fluency scores for my students.)  Last year doctoral students from GSU led workshops at our school to instruct us in doing Running Records, similar to DIBELS, but we were later told that we didn’t have to take running records at all.  What a waste of time that was for us as well as the trainers!  Why not just let teachers use their best professional judgment to teach their students to read?  Some students will read in spite of our methods, others need an orderly phonetic approach, still others look for “chunks” as they make connections and learn word meanings.  I will continue to use anything that works!