The making of a black underclass: Samuel Blumenfeld exposes policies leading to academic failure

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Saturday, August 17, 2002 | Samuel Blumenfeld

[Mamzelle]

"auditorially discriminate" sounds...)))

I was not a special ed teacher, but I am dubious of this distinction. If someone can understand the speech of others (ie--can hear and understand the teacher), there's no apparent reason, IMO, that they couldn't "sound out" words. I don't oppose including picture flash cards, but at the early stages of learning to read, the alphabet sounds and "sounding out" must be mastered--particularly with the average reader rather than a natural one. Even the natural reader ought to have these skills...he may someday want to learn Spanish or Russian.

With a phonics program, visuals are and should be included. Children should start reading simple phrases aloud immediately, and lots of coaching over unfamiliar words builds confidence and skills. Spelling drills and tests bore teachers, but they do not bore children as much as we'd like to believe (so that we'd then have an excuse to eliminate those drills and tests). Little stories with rhyming and alliteration are surprisingly effective. I do not believe reading education is mysterious ... but as RR said, what is simple is not necessarily easy.

[Aquinasfan]

In a few short weeks, many thousands of black children will enter first grade in public schools all over America where, inside of a year, many of them will become full-fledged reading failures and, thereby, future members of the black underclass.

It's like the freakin' Bataan death march.

All of these kids would have been better off if their schools had burned down over the summer. Then they would know that they don't know, rather than thinking that they know when they don't.

[Aquinasfan]

A lot of truth in this article. However, dyslexia is not created by teaching methods. It involves the amount of light admitted into a person's sight mechanisms.

There was an explosion of dyslexia diagnoses in California when the state implemented a systematic whole language curriculum. The article also mentions that there is a high correlation between dyslexia and ADHD. 75% of children diagnosed with ADHD are dyslexic.

This link explores the link between sound recognition, phonemes and brain activity.

[TomSmedley]

I contend that this decoding (phonics) is a very easy thing for a reasonably competent child to master quickly. It is tragic that so many children are not ALLOWED to master it, get it over with, and go on to faster and more comprehensive reading.

According to Mr. Blumenfeld (and it seems true in my experience as a home-schooling dad) -- you can teach a ready child to read in about 30 hours. It takes Japanese kids 4-6 years to memorize enough ideographs to read a Japanese newspaper. Now, if we teach English as though it were Japanese, we can stretch out a one-week project into many years of job security for "educators." The people who profit from the problems they create.

[Aquinasfan]

ADHD and dyslexia

It is not uncommon to find a family where one child has ADHD, another dyslexia or learning difficulties, a third dyspraxia and it is quite common for an individual to suffer from more than one of these conditions. In fact:

* "As many as 65% of children with ADHD also struggle with at least one other learning disorder, and sometimes bipolar disorder and/or Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) [14]

* 50% of dyspraxic children also have ADHD [14]

* Some 30 to 50 percent of children with dyslexia have ADHD and vice versa. (The Dyslexia Research Institute puts this figure at 60%)" [14]

* It is estimated that 60% of people with Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) have ADHD and 50% have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and that there is a high association of these disorders in their family histories [15].

[lonestar]

"auditorially discriminate" sounds...)))

I was not a special ed teacher, but I am dubious of this distinction. If someone can understand the speech of others (ie--can hear and understand the teacher), there's no apparent reason, IMO, that they couldn't "sound out" words.

Did you ever teach a child with articulation problems? Not phonics, I hope.

If you have a kid with a chronilogical age of 6 and mental age of 8 years, that child should be reading above grade-level. But some can't read. Just as some people see things backwards, some don't distinguish sounds nor are they able to remember the sequencing of sounds. They are going to have a problem learning to read with the phonics method. They may learn all the auditory/visual symbols but they can't remember sounds in an order.

Sorry not to respond to you sooner but I was out of town for the weekend.

[Mamzelle]

As I said, I was not special-ed, nor a speech therapist. I do maintain that decoding skills, learning to associate symbols with sounds, is essential and not difficult for most kids if you just provide the resources and get out of the way. Tailoring a specialized reading program for particular disabilities was not my realm, nor should it have been. I didn't take it amiss that some kids had to "slog through" rather than sail through, and I didn't regard them as difficient. I have three of my own, all very different.

[lonestar]

As I said, I was not special-ed, nor a speech therapist.

I am a speech therapist.