About
I’m a mom of an amazing boy with a super power called dyslexia, but dyslexia is only a strength if a child is identified for their learning difference and given appropriate evidence-based reading interventions, as early as possible. I’m five years into my journey as a literacy advocate, but when I first began, I was overwhelmed trying to understand what types of reading programs were truly aligned with evidence-based best practices. My son’s school and his intervention teachers told me that their small group intervention lessons with him were “evidence-based.” They believed they speaking the truth, but they were very wrong. The program they used was Fountas and Pinnell’s LLI (Leveled Literacy Intervention), a failed balanced literacy program, that has now been banned, along with many other such “balanced literacy” reading programs, by state legislations across the country, for their failed methodologies that encourage students to guess at the words, rather than explicitly teaching children how to decode. What my son needed instead was a Structured Literacy approach, one that taught him how to read, spell and write explicitly, directly, systematically and cumulatively.
I started Until All Can Read because when you start down this path, there’s a good chance you may not know what Structured Literacy is or why it’s vital for all children (not just those with dyslexia) to become strong readers. A debunked theory about how children learn to read still dominates reading curricula, teacher prep programs and classrooms across our country, leading to a literacy crisis where more than 60% of our 4th graders aren’t able to read proficiently at grade level.
I hope you will use this site and its collection of articles and resources to raise awareness in your communities, so that we can affect change and bring evidence-based Structured Literacy practices to all of our children, not just those who can afford if through private tutoring or schools. Reading is an essential life skill and I’ll keep advocating for Structured Literacy and the Science of Reading in our classrooms…