December 01, 2018

Meet Sue Dickson, a Hero of American Literacy

Jack Kemp

American Thinker offers this piece about what's wrong with our schools and how to fix them..

December 1, 2018

K-12: Meet Sue Dickson, a Hero of American Literacy

Sue Dickson is best known as the creator of Sing, Spell, Read, and Write, one of the most popular phonics programs.

Now in her 80s, she is still active as ever, pushing phonics however possible and refining a new approach.

The ups and downs in her career tell us a lot about the sad state of American education. In her college's pre-teacher program, she was taught nothing about phonics. Not only that, but when she started to teach first grade, her superiors constantly emphasized their verdict that phonics is useless and even dangerous.

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In 1986, the Selma (Calif.) Enterprise reported that Sing, Spell, Read, and Write is "an educational phenomenon" for its power at teaching Spanish-speaking students to read.

Arguably, K-12 reading has been a disaster for 85 years, and this short biography tells you why. The school system at every level was opposed to the best way to teach reading. Talk about comically incompetent. All the stuff that the professional educators claim to know was basically less than zero. Memorizing sight-words is a bad way to proceed. Children rarely learn to read fluently; additionally, they are harmed by the whole process...

Her newest venture is called Winning Reading Boost, developed in cooperation with the University of Florida's Lastinger Center, where it was shown to teach both non-readers and troubled readers, even in poverty-area schools, to read fluently in 90 hours!

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Ever since 1931, America had been on a two-tier system. The lucky kids learn to read with phonics. The unlucky kids, the great majority, learn various non-phonetic methods and stay illiterate, to one degree or another. It's a big scam and should be recognized as a preposterous and unnecessary national scandal

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