public schools

You might try this :)

Ohio Office for Exceptional Children
614-466-2650
Website: www.ode.state.oh.us/SE

Well not just any tutor is going to do much. I have seen kids with years and years of tutoring that made minimal progress. Albuquerque has some before and after school tutoring, but it is not systematic in any sense.

A kid with serious reading failure is going to need a tutor who uses some type of systematic expicit phonics program. The usual phonics (if they even do that) will do little. Most of the tutoring in schools is louder and slower of what goes on the classroom. As for explicit systematic tutoring, I am speaking of something like Orton gillingham (OG) or some OG based program. There are others out there, read the material on this website on reading and get yourself educated.

Some schools *do* offer OG programs like Wilson. So you can check around. A common problem in the later is that the school doesn’t offer enough of it or tries to put too many kids in a group.

Do your research and find out what they are doing and if they are doing enough of it to make any difference. If not, you can either get a tutor (trained in something like the above) or tutor him/her yourself.
An excellent book on the subject is Sally Shaymitz (sp?) “Overcoming Dyslexia”.

—des

Considering O-G and spin-offs have a proven track reacord of helping many children with dyslexia overcome the worst of their difficulties, what is it going to take to implement widespread use of it?

It occurs to me that if just a few schools who are in danger of failing NCLB and risking sanctions would put these programs into place, we might see a “miracle” occur.

Does it simply boil down to money?

Well Dad, I think that if they used something like a PG spin off or some similar approach (ie Jolly Phonics) to all kids in early grades, and more intensive comprehension strategies later on, they *could* afford
to introduce OG or LiPs with some few kids that would need it.

Right now they have such crazy reading failure levels that it would indeed be expensive to implement such a thing as having all these special ed kids worked with with some trained person (in OG, et al).

—des

Dad, it is worse than money, it is a religion.

It would be *much cheaper* to buy effective reading textbook programs when the primary grades replace their curricula in the next five years. And you could get high-quality well-designed materials and use them for ten years, rather than five, so you immediately would halve the materials cost. You wouldn’t need all the extras that are used to supplement ineffective books and you would have far fewer kids in special ed, and then you could afford to get the best programs for those fewer kids in special ed who really really need them — and these programs can be used over and over so in the long run you’d come out ahead there too.

Problem is that when you say the word “phonics” the majority of teachers and education professors still try to ward off the Evil Eye. Until that changes you are not going to get very far.

Well too true, I’m afraid. It would be cheaper.

I think it would also be cheaper (in the long run) to take kids with reading failure at 7-9 and give them intensive remediation, instead of thinking about it for about 4 years and then finally labeling them as spec. ed and then not doing anything as they try and muddle their way thru things and maybe when they graduate get a job at McDonalds.

Btw, heard this exact case today! HS kid is reading at second grade level and the schools are saying they can’t do anything and that you know he will be lucky if he gets to work at McD. YIKES. Is that a waste for our society and that kid???

Talk about expense!!

—des

You know, y’all are just reinforcing the theory I have adopted as one underlying cause of the apparant growth in LD’s over the last 20 odd years.

The accountant in me wonders if anyone has done an honest cost-benefit analysis of using proactive screening for LD’s in first grade and applying O-G “boot camps” in the summer break to see how many can be reached rather than let them lag farther and farther behind until it becomes nearly impossible for them to ever remediate…

A study involving 4 prisons in AZ found that about 40% of the men incarcerated their have some form of dyslexia (compare that to the “estimates that 4-6% of school age population have it). Average cost of incarceration in this country is about $40K/yr and rising steadily.

What would the cost be to provide O-G to every child who can’t learn to read using whatever version of whole-word is being used today? $40K/yr?

(I will ignore the human cost in this, which can never be truly priced.)

As far as the Theocracy of Education, that is best dealt with by proving them wrong (actions vs. words, and all that ;) )

The Scottish Rite offer O-G as their pet “charitable” contribution. I can think of very few finer causes in the US. Has ANY LEA teamed up with them to attempt wdie scale recovery of dyslexics?

Sometimes I don’t know whether to get angry or cry.

>adopted as one underlying cause of the apparant growth in LD’s over the last 20 odd years.

Well of course, some of it is just identification. And there is the actual increase caused by babies living instead of being severely handicapped or dead. Then there is the increase of the underclass. But there must be some increase that is not really measuring LD but some lack of teaching caused by schools doing multiple non-school related tasks, trying to educate everybody in one big pot; increase of administrative tasks by teachers (teachers are actually supposed to analyze test results using long forms and convert this to usable data), etc. etc.

>The accountant in me wonders if anyone has done an honest cost-benefit analysis of using proactive screening for LD’s in first grade and applying O-G “boot camps” in the summer break to see how many can be

I’m sure it hasn’t been done. Lots of reading failure can be prevented intervening early on and you don’t even have to use OG, just more intensive instruction. I think Open Court has a model for this. This has been proven over and over. Then you take the kids who don’t make it thru this type of program and you do a more systematic program, well I think it has been done. Summer wouldn’t be enough. But I think if you get these kids before grade 4, when the content areas get more troublesome, well that would/has worked very nicely.

>A study involving 4 prisons in AZ found that about 40% of the men incarcerated their have some form of dyslexia (compare that to the

Yes we see this data over and over again. Also in the juvenile prison population. And there are (too few) programs of teaching those kids systematically and reducing recidivism, and they work.

>What would the cost be to provide O-G to every child who can’t learn to read using whatever version of whole-word is being used today? $40K/yr?

Not hardly!!!!

>The Scottish Rite offer O-G as their pet “charitable” contribution. I can think of very few finer causes in the US. Has ANY LEA teamed up with them to attempt wdie scale recovery of dyslexics?

Well it has been done in limited nos. in limited areas. LMB has worked with native populations in Alaska in the public schools for example.

>Sometimes I don’t know whether to get angry or cry.

me neither.

—des