Teach Effectively!

Lydia Stanton, an early teen with Down Syndrome, learned to read last summer, according to a news feature by Laura Bruno of the Boonton (NJ, US) Daily Record. Over the summer Wendy Stanton, Lydia’s mother, sent Lydia to an intensive reading program that accomplished what five previous years of schooling had not: Given the Lindamood-Bell training, Lydia progressed to 1st grade reading skills. Ms. Stanton the elder is suing the local education agency to recover the costs of paying for summer and further Lindamood-Bell tutoring.

The legal battle began when Stanton wrote a letter dated June 13, asking the district to provide Lydia with instruction this school year at Lindamood Bell.

In a June 20 letter from the school psychologist, Toni DeCotiis, the request is denied.

“In the opinion of the Child Study Team, the intensive four hour per day phonemic awareness immersion program which you are requesting for Lydia is not appropriate for her learning needs and will not be beneficial to Lydia,” DeCotiis writes.

DeCotiis acknowledges Lydia’s progress is slow, but is consistent with her abilities.

“Although slower than hoped for, Lydia’s progress in reading appears to be consistent with her cognitive abilities, which have been found to be in the first percentile when compared to her age peers,” she writes.

This story reminds me of a talk, entitled “Reading and the Mentally Retarded: Look! Look! See Who Could Be Going to Court!” that I gave in June of 1977 in New Orleans to the national convention of what was then called the American Association for Mental Deficiency. (I also mentioned this in a post last year; there’s more on the legal cases in that post.) In that talk nearly 30 years ago, I noted the evidence from studies showing that children with MR could learn to read when provided with systematic, explicit instruction. I connected that evidence with several cases then pending in the courts in which parents alledged that dyspedagogia was the cause of their children’s reading problems; these parents were suing the schools to force them to use effective teaching practices. I speculated that parents of students with MR could join the suits once they learned that there were methods that would permit their children to learn to read, too. Danged if that something close to that hasn’t come to pass!

Link to Ms. Bruno’s story. There is supposed to be a video of Lydia reading, but I couldn’t get it to download. The link, http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061015/VIDEO/61013002/1203/NEWS01, bounces back to the page showing itself; if I could watch the girl read, I’d have a better idea of whether her performance is closer to the level described by the school, closer to a level reflecting real reading, or closer to the “miraculous breakthrough” her mother describes. Flash of the electrons to Liz Ditz for her post alerting me to the story.