Letters to the Editor NWA

Be suspicious of tactics advanced in LEARNS

There is a lot to be said about the LEARNS Act, including the fact that it is just one big voucher scheme. Even opponents of the bill say there are some "good" things about the bill, like having literacy coaches and high-impact tutoring. I am here to say that the literacy coaching and the high-impact tutoring proposed are NOT good; they are very BAD. These programs are created by the same people who have created the false "literacy crisis" so that they can manufacture pseudoscience solutions to a problem that does not exist.

Look at who is behind this high-impact tutoring. Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accellerate, his newest creation to help "model policy agendas" in Arkansas through high-impact tutoring. Who is Kevin Huffman? Most recently he was commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Education. He was known for destroying neighborhood schools and replacing them with charter schools. Advocates pushing for his removal in Tennessee filed a petition on Change.org that said "We do not want a corporate-driven, profit-seeking, reform-minded appointed person representing us in office any longer. Through his actions, Kevin Huffman has hurt the students and teachers of TN."

Before this he was in senior management for "Teach for America", another privatization scam https://dailycampus.com/2020/10/05/the-teach-for-america-scam/. His former wife and partner in crime is Michelle Rhee, who is the formerly disgraced chancellor of DC Public Schools. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-school-scandals-tell-me-that-its-not-great-and-that-youre-dealing-with-it/2018/03/10/b73d9cf0-1d9e-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html.

High-impact tutoring is just another corporate-driven, profit seeking initiative that employs third-party vendors who are absolutely not experts in education. They are frauds. This is also true of the "literacy experts" who will screen K-3 students for reading and then provide coaching. This program based on "The Science of Reading" (another corporate scam) is a very harmful approach for our children. The creators have become much more sophisticated in fooling even the specialists. Google is flooded with hyped up "studies" and institutes. See https://plthomasedd.medium.com/dismantling-the-science-of-reading-and-the-harmful-reading-policies-in-its-wake-d15d9fe6d8e0.

The bottom line is that those of us who are experts in literacy, reading instruction and dyslexia know that some children start reading at age 4 and some children don't start reading until age 8. Longitudinal studies consistently show that kids who start reading at age 4 and kids who didn't start reading until age 8 are just as successful at school by time they reach the eighth grade. It is inappropriate and unethical to diagnose a child with dyslexia or with a reading or writing disability before the fourth grade. Reading and writing is the abstract representation of oral language. K-3 is a time for children to fully develop their oral and aural language skills through play, interaction, story-telling and more. Language development is real, but encoding and decoding abstract written symbols are separate skills. Labeling children as dyslexic or failures at this young age actually does much more damage than good.

Read about "The Perils of Legislating Literacy with Suspect Science" by Rob Levine. See https://racketmn.com/science-of-reading-minnesota-read-act.

Carol Widder

Fayetteville

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