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Special Reading Programs

The purpose of this research is to examine the key points contained in Allington's article regarding special reading programs. The plan of the research will be to set forth Allington's principal arguments, and then to discuss his views on the structure of past, existing, and proposed remedial-literacy programs for children who have been identified as more difficult to teach than pupils in the educational mainstream.

Allington says that children who have been identified as learning-disabled compared to typical elementary school students are so labeled by reason of problems they have in learning to read and write. To meet the needs of such marginalized students, a "second system" of education (99ff.) has evolved since the late 1960s to run parallel with the "first system," geared toward educating students in the mainstream. Allington provides a legislative history of second-system programs designed to include rather than exclude marginal students from mainstream education, but that have resulted in expansion of nonclassroom educational personnel (e.g., paraprofessionals, social workers) to handle special-education needs of marginal students, while excluding them from mainstream classrooms.

Thus special programs serve needs of institutions and personnel rather than those of special-needs populations. Further, the tendency is toward perpetuating "the assumption that the problem is primarily one of deficient students" (104) rather than deficiently conceived second-system programs or, more generally, deficient first-system programs. Exclusion of deficient students from mainstream populations has masked the failure of schools to educate all children, while also perpetuating a bureaucracy "long practiced at ridding itself of the responsibility to educate hard-to-reach children" (105).

Allington notes many different proposals, programs, and policies aimed at reforming American education, first in regard to calls for increasing literacy...

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Special Reading Programs. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:13, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701563.html