Using Remedial Education Methods to Train Non-Readers
By Richard Hughes

    My "big idea" is simply to use long existing methods of remedial education to train non-readers to read. The attached report is "Project Review"  Fidalgo Elementary School's 21ST Century Program. This program ran for 6 years from 1988 to 1994 and involved the whole school. The methods and technologies used were, for the most part, 10 years old or more at that time. The program involved a mere 45 minutes a week. IQ's went up an average of 18.6 points and the school's MAT score went from the 70 percentile to beyond the 90th percentile. All these results were obtained under the oversight of the Psychology Department of the University of Washington. Those numbers may not be exactly what the report indicates because it was written during the last year of the program when the final numbers were not known.
    An entirely new method has arisen since then, called PACE (Processing And Cognitive Enhancement) and a new understanding of the root causes of illiteracy has made remediating illiteracy routine. None of this to my knowledge is being used by schools here or for that matter at Fidalgo Elementary. Many trainers have long given since up trying to interest "Big Education" in anything new. Most are not even working in the field because of the dificulty in finding clients. Parents usually consult the teacher of their child before embarking on training outside the school and they usually give us the thumbs down.

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