Advocate ‘beyond frustrated’ at Right to Read Manitoba delay

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This article was published 17/01/2024 (628 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE Manitoba Human Rights Commission is behind schedule and its deep dive into the schooling experiences of local students with dyslexia and other learning disabilities is likely to be released one year later than planned.

The commission launched its latest “special project,” also known as Right to Read Manitoba, at the start of the 2022-23 school year.

A final report containing recommendations to ensure all students have access to timely screening, intervention and accommodations across the public school system and boost literacy rates overall was originally slated to be shared with the province by the end of last year.

Both a backlog of complex complaints made during the COVID-19 pandemic — many of them about mask mandates and vaccination requirements — and overwhelming interest in Right to Read Manitoba have pushed back that timeline.

Executive director Karen Sharma said she was taken aback by the number of online surveys completed in detail last spring as part of the multi-pronged project.

“To get 700 responses from Manitobans, for us, affirmed that this is an important issue for folks in our communities,” Sharma said. “And so far, as we’ve been looking at and coding the data, we have been surprised by the stories that we’re hearing.”

The responses that have stuck with her are ones shared by individuals who have a high school diploma yet never truly learned how to read, resulting in “downstream impacts” on their post-graduation lives.

Following a literature review, the commission collected wide-ranging surveys from students, caregivers, teachers, administrators and other stakeholders who have taught or supported students with reading disabilities.

The next-phase — in-person and virtual public forums — has been pushed back from the fall. No dates have been set, but the MHRC is planning to host hearings before the current school year wraps up and conclude the initiative with a series of stakeholder-specific consultations.

The probe is long overdue for Twila Richards, a teacher who has a child with a dyslexia diagnosis and has personally grappled with learning disabilities.

“I’m beyond frustrated,” said the advocate who first approached the commission almost seven years ago with concerns about gaps in reading instruction.

Dozens of similar reports led the agency, whose mandate involves administering a complaint process and providing education on human rights issues, to undertake an in-depth examination of the issue.

“I don’t want anyone to experience what I’ve experienced as a student, I don’t want anybody to experience what I’ve experienced as a parent and, as a Manitoba teacher, I want teachers to have the knowledge and training (to help struggling students),” Richards said.

Dyslexia advocates in Canada and the U.S. have grown increasingly vocal about the shortcomings they see in public school curricula and professional training for educators in recent years.

The local “reading wars” were reignited by the findings of Ontario’s Right to Read inquiry, released in 2022, that concluded status-quo instruction was dismissing research on learning disabilities and failing children with related diagnoses.

While Richards does not believe that one-size-fits-all in education, she is a proponent of structured literacy — the traditionalist side of the debate on literacy education — and applauded the report from MHRC’s eastern counterpart.

She is among a group of educators who, citing a body of education and neuroscience research dubbed “the science of reading,” want schools to focus more on systematic teaching, stressing the importance of mastering letter-sound associations, recognizing sound patterns and decoding words.

These advocates have been pitted against colleagues who lean towards philosophies that tout fostering a love of reading by creating engaging environments that are rich with interesting texts, while encouraging students to guess unfamiliar words on a page using context and pictures. The latter criticize the former for promoting “drill and kill.”

Manitoba Education released new guidelines for reading instruction over the summer to address questions about the contentious debate and the local commission’s ongoing project.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca