Confessions From A Disabling Professional
As one who benefited from a school system before it became the self-serving industry it is today, and, now as a granny concerned for future generations, I am constantly searching for explanations how and why all this went wrong. I am from Canada, and I see we are very backward in monitoring our education services. Neither our media nor keen educators as Greg Ashman probe or do investigative work to bring forth troubling information about Reading Recovery, for example, and ask the obvious question — How can a discredited methodology be allowed to continue to do harm to young students? I have anecdotal information that RR is also a common practice here as it is in New South Wales, Australia.
I’ve been reading a book — The Future of Whole Language, 1996, by Susan Church (at that time a whole-language consultant in Nova Scotia, Canada)— and this is what is said about RR — “ . . .the real danger of Reading Recovery lies in its success. Because the program does seem to help children on their way to becoming readers and writers, it lets the institution off the hook. It allows us to continue to blame the children for their failures . . . “
It does seem, doesn’t it, that whole-language enables the production of more jobs in education by the act of predictably disabling a portion of students as fodder for the sub-industry of “remediation” or “intervention”.