Thanks to those who helped promote the last ILEC webinar last. We had one of our largest number of registrants at 280. Our next one is on the 21st. Hope to see you there.
Dr. Sam Bommarito, ILEC team
• Tuesday, January 21, 2025, at 7:00 PM, EST, 6:00 PM CST, 4:00 PM EST.
“Pushing Back Against Science of Reading Mandates: The California Story.”
Panel discussion by Dr. Barbara Flores, Dr. Edgar Lampkin, Dr. Jill Kerper Mora, and Dr. Esteban Díaz
We are limited to 500 participants. CEU certificates from Minnesota State University are available. Register in advance for this free webinar:
https://minnstate.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bjKSXoVUTBSwGE_M2DnPdw
If you’re a California parent, like me, get tutoring, early and often – ideally from the very start – if your child is in a public school, until you’re very confident they’re reading to your satisfaction.
And if your distruct uses Units of Study, you need to go private or move.
You seem to be a bit behind the times. Calkin’s Units of Study now include a systematic phonics program. I’ve long advocated finding the phonics that fits the paticular child. I wonder what our Calfornain Parent finds best- EBLI’s speech to print or structured literacy’speech to print or Rasinski’s approaches which are based on repeated reading reasearch whose practices have found to have larger effect sizes than structured literacy.
If you’re a parent in California in a school with Units of Study you need to know that many states and districts have walked away from this program.
Ensure your child gets support outside of school, particularly in balanced literacy districts and follow https://ca.thereadingleague.org/ for the latest literacy information.
Before you decide that the newest version of Calkin’s Units of study won’t do the job I suggest you look at SOR’s recent track record. New York City adopted SOR- the next year reading scores went down. The NAEP (reading report card) has tracked reading scores for decades. SOR is now in wide spread use. Yet this year the reading scores DROPPED to levels even lower that the levels reached during the pandemic. That is a MAJOR red flag. The claim that BL lowered scores is not supported by an examination of the long term NAEP scores. Those scores have remained flat for decades, including the time before BL and the time BL came into widespread use. So BL wasn’t getting the job done BUT DO FAR THE CURRENT VERSION OF SOR HAS DONE EVEN WORSE. That makes my premise that going to extremes (SOR/BL) doesn’t work. The time has come to take a NUANCED view. Is time to draw on ALL the research. Dr. Sam.