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READ RIGHT® History Because Dee had refused the special program, the school administration asked her to sign a release of liability form that basically said that because of the refusal, the school was no longer responsible for her son’s reading. As Dee signed the form she realized that she alone was now responsible to help her son solve his reading problem, but she had already tried everything she had learned getting her Ph.D. in reading, and nothing had worked. She didn’t know what else to try, but she knew she had to find an answer. She was convinced in her heart that it was her problem and not his—there was nothing wrong with her child. The problem was hers. She was supposed to be the reading expert, but she didn’t even know enough to help her own son! The Search Anyone who has had a child with a serious reading problem appreciates how much pain this problem can bring to the child and to the family. Dee’s son would come home from school crying, "I just want to be average." He tried hard, but it was very frustrating. He just couldn’t get the reading. Meanwhile, Dee was trying to figure out how to proceed. Since she had recently completed the Ph.D. program, she was very current in her knowledge of the latest research and current thinking; unfortunately, none of it had worked with her son. She knew that she had to step out of the field of reading and look for solutions elsewhere. She was driven by the deep conviction that nothing was wrong with her son and the determination that if there was information "out there" that would allow her to help him, she would find it. The most challenging problem she faced was that she didn’t know where to begin the search. She didn’t know what she didn’t know. Finally, after much reading and thinking, Dee was able to formulate two fundamental questions that, if answered, she believed would shed light on the question of how reading might be more effectively taught. How does the brain learn a process? What is a brain doing when it reads excellently? It took Dee three years of research to come up with the answers to these two questions. She studied and synthesized information from many disciplines in her search, including cognitive psychology, schema theory, information theory, neuro-biology, linguistics, language acquisition theory, reading theory, and interactive constructivist learning theory. Finally she had gathered and synthesized enough information to develop a new theoretical perspective that integrated both learning theory and reading theory. From this new theory base she developed a new methodology for teaching reading. Her son was her first student. Breakthrough By now Dee’s son was supposed to be in fourth grade, but he had been held back in third. Struggling terribly with reading, his self-confidence and self-esteem were shattered. Dee began working with him, applying her new methodology. She was hoping for an incremental improvement. What she saw was a complete elimination of the reading problem in three months. She was amazed. "I think I’m on to something here," she thought, "but who’s going to believe me. I have a case study of one, and—oh by the way—he’s my own child!" Based on her son’s remarkable success, Dee felt she had made a breakthrough, but she was going to have to test it thoroughly to convince herself and others that the experience with him wasn’t a fluke. So she set out to systematically test her new methodology with school children of different ages and reading profiles. She took a job as the special education teacher in a K-8 school and for five years used her new methodology with children categorized as Learning Disabled, Dyslexic, ADD, and EMR. She also worked with Title I children—those who are behind in reading but do not qualify as learning disabled or cognitively challenged. Regardless of the label the new methodology worked quickly and effectively to eliminate every child’s reading problem. Even one 13 year old child with Down’s Syndrome learned to read using Dee’s new methodology, although the child advanced at a much slower rate than the other children. In spite of the successes, Dee couldn’t get the support of the key administrators in her district to expand the program. Even though there were five elementary schools in the district, and the extraordinary gains made by her students were carefully documented by test scores, the administration did not take steps to expand the program to the other schools. They felt that Dee got the results she did because of her expertise in reading as evidenced by the Ph.D. Dee knew that wasn’t true, but since she was the only one in the world implementing the new methodology, she had no evidence to confirm her conviction that others could be easily trained to implement it too. Next Dee took a job as the reading specialist in a junior high school so she could test the methodology with a population of older students. From the theory, she expected the older students to progress more quickly than the younger students had. This in fact proved to be the case. The next population she wanted to test was young adults, so she took a job as the reading specialist at a community college and for five years worked with struggling readers entering their freshman year. Again her reading students eliminated their problems in incredibly short times. She also helped to set up community-based literacy programs sponsored by the community college. She trained tutors who successfully tutored both adult native speakers with reading problems and immigrants with limited English communication skills. Now she had the evidence that others could be effectively trained to implement the new methodology. An
Opening For nearly 12 months Simpson networked with various companies across the country searching for the best practice in literacy programs. Other companies were using local literacy groups, community college programs, and various computerized reading programs, but no one was achieving excellent results. Employees progressed very slowly. Many got discouraged and dropped out. Then Simpson heard about Dee’s Read Right program. It sounded more promising than any of the other programs they had examined, so Simpson decided to run a pilot study in a Shelton, Washington sawmill. The results of the pilot study were extraordinary. It worked quickly for every employee who wanted to improve his reading, regardless of how far he had gone in school or the nature of his specific reading problem. Consequently, Simpson hired Dee to set up a corporate-wide program. Over the next three years Simpson rolled out Read Right in 19 different manufacturing plants across the United States including its eleven paper plants. The program was so successful that in 1996 Simpson won the first annual award within the paper industry for the most outstanding literacy program in the United States. The
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