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Brainy Moms
Brainy Moms is a parenting podcast with smart ideas to help moms and kids thrive! Hosted by cognitive psychologist Dr. Amy Moore along with rotating co-hosts Sandy Zamalis, Teri Miller, and Dr. Jody Jedlicka, this weekly show features conversations and guest experts in parenting, psychology, child development, education, and medicine with practical tips to help moms navigate the ups and downs of parenthood. We're smart moms helping make moms smarter...one episode at a time!
Brainy Moms
The Brain Science of Reading: Why America's Children Are Falling Behind (Part 1) with Donesa Walker
Wondering why America's children are struggling to read fluently? Is your child struggling with reading? Reading and dyslexia specialist Donesa Walker joins Dr. Amy and Sandy on this episode of the Brainy Moms podcast to unpack the alarming decline in America's reading performance revealed in the latest Nation's Report Card.
With the wisdom gained from 30+ years working with dyslexic students, Donesa challenges our fundamental understanding of reading instruction. "Reading begins in the brain, not in the classroom," she explains, revealing why conventional approaches often fall short despite decades of educational reform efforts.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn as we explore the neurological foundations of reading. Cognitive skills like processing speed, working memory, and visual-auditory processing, and reasoning form the bedrock upon which reading is built, yet traditional interventions rarely address these crucial elements. This explains why many struggling readers show the "two steps forward, one step back" pattern despite receiving specialized instruction.
We also chat about Louisiana's remarkable reading turnaround story, where targeted interventions and a holistic approach moved the state from near-bottom to 16th nationally in reading performance. While celebrating this success, Donesa cautions that addressing America's reading crisis ultimately requires parents to recognize their crucial role. "Every parent is a homeschool parent," she asserts, explaining why schools alone cannot solve our literacy challenges.
Ready to transform your understanding of reading challenges and discover evidence-based solutions that actually work? Listen now to gain practical insights that could change how you support the readers in your life.
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Hi smart moms and dads. We're so excited to welcome you to another episode of the Brady Moms podcast, brought to you today by LearningRx Brain Training Centers. I'm Dr Amy Moore here with Sandy Zimalis, and Sandy and I are excited to bring youa conversation with reading and dyslexia specialist Donesa Walker.
Dr. Amy Moore:Donesa has been working with dyslexic students and their families for more than 30 years. She spent 21 years as a teacher and reading specialist at all grade levels, from pre-K through college. As a district reading coordinator and dyslexia specialist, she assisted teachers in choosing curriculum for teaching reading and understanding reading disabilities, including dyslexia, along with personally working with students in small groups to succeed in reading. Donesa has a bachelor's degree in elementary and early childhood education and two master of education degrees, one in educational administration and one in reading. As a board-certified cognitive specialist, Donesa is also passionate about brain training and the ability to change the lives of those with dyslexia, adhd, traumatic brain injury and related disorders. She lives in Louisiana, where she owns and manages LearningRx Shreveport. Donesa is here with us today to talk about the latest reading results from the Nation's Report Card and to give us some insights on what might be happening with reading instruction and performance in America. So let's say hello to Donesa Walker.
Sandy Zamalis:Donesa, we're so glad you're here With the new Nation's Report Card results out. We just wanted to dive into that topic and share that just more information with our listeners about what that means, what we can do about it as parents. Why don't you take a second? And why don't you take a second? And we'd love for our listeners to hear a little bit about you, your story and how you came to specialize in dyslexia.
Donesa Walker:I was a teacher. For let's even go back before that, let's back up a little bit. My siblings actually had some struggles with dyslexia and I had never heard of it. I was in college to be a teacher and actually was not. I may be telling my age y'all, but a little bit back, it wasn't really well known. There wasn't really. When there was a learning disability or a reading difficulty, people just didn't know what to call it or what to do about it. So my parents had enrolled my siblings into a private school and so that's how I came to know about.
Donesa Walker:Dyslexia was basically through some. My siblings were brilliant. They absolutely had the gift of dyslexia, which this is the thing I think a lot of people miss is that dyslexia is an extraordinary gift and I think we fail to embrace that often because we see the dis in it and see it as a brokenness. And it's not a brokenness, it's a gift. You just have to know how to use the gift, and I think of this lovely little box that I have and it's something I give to my kids at Christmas and different in it and it's locked up in an unusual way and I put money in it and they have to sit there and puzzle out how to open it.
Donesa Walker:And once they figure out how to open it, there's great money inside, but it may take them a while to figure it out right Sort of like a puzzle that you have to put all the pieces together to see the whole picture. And that's the way I think of dyslexia. Dyslexia is not a brokenness, it's a gift that you just have to learn how to use, and so that became my passion. I had actually intended to go into medical school and become a medical doctor and that was kind of my gambit, and I made some transitions in my life because I became very passionate about finding out, reading and understanding reading, and so that just really spoke my language, and so I became a reading teacher. I mastered in that.
Donesa Walker:Further on, I learned other languages because I wanted to know how language encoded to the brain. So I speak multiple languages, grew up on the border, so that was part of a natural linguistic tendency. Anyways, when you're the only white kid in your kindergarten class, then that's what you did, right, you're the only English speaker and you defensively learn to speak. So I did. I learned to speak that, and so it made it very natural for me to pick up other languages, which is incredible. And again about the brain. So if you think about it, language starts in the brain and if you're exposed to multiple languages when you're young, then picking up languages is easier for you, right, and so that's one of the interesting things about it.
Donesa Walker:And, teacher as an instructor, these were things that I missed. So when I went to school to become a teacher, we spent a little bit of time learning about reading, but not a significant amount of time. We spent a lot of time about learning about classroom control and discipline and how to motivate your kids, and you know how to use curriculum and did all these, how to do great projects and centers. Now I will say that during the time that I went to college, the big flash was whole language Okay, and that was the big flash, okay. And so I went to a school where I actually had Becky Hechteman, who was a teacher, and she was not all about whole language. She wasn't totally embracing it. So she insisted that we also learn phonetics and the presentations of phonemes and phonographs and digraphs and all of this. But one of the things that has always amazed me is that most things I can say to a teacher and also he's struggling with phonemes and I get this blank stare.
Donesa Walker:Look like I don't know what a phoneme is okay, and I remember being a reading specialist and being in the public school system as the district reading coordinator, and it was our gambit to make sure that reading was taught across from K to 12. I'm in charge of training these teachers to integrate reading across all things, and I remember very specifically this biology teacher raising her hand as she goes. I went to school for science. I did not go to reading. I don't know what you're talking about. It's reality. It is. We make assumptions that teachers know how to teach reading and they do not. Okay, and that's not being an affront to teachers, that's not being a bad thing to teachers. It's that not all teachers were taught to teach reading. That's just reality. A math teacher was not taught to teach reading, and so a lot of us make assumptions that teachers were trained in all things, and that's like making an assumption that a doctor who does laparoscopic surgery on the colon is able to do heart surgery.
Dr. Amy Moore:It's not going to happen.
Donesa Walker:That's not where their specialty or their strength is. And so I think we have to embrace the fact that reading for all teachers is not what they know. Okay, and so they know if they know how to read, but they don't know how to teach that reading. And that's the beginning thing. And when we look at the nation's report card and we see what's happening, I think we're seeing that there is in some areas where we're learning to embrace the science of reading. But the truth of the matter is that is a slow ship to turn. I was taught 35 years to turn. 35 years, that's my lifetime, right as far as a teacher.
Dr. Amy Moore:Right. Well, it's interesting. So when you said obviously I'll age myself right along with you, I think we're the exact same age. Yeah, and so when I went through my teacher training program in the early 90s, I too was taught whole language. And I can remember when I came back to the classroom after being an administrator in DOD programs, when I came back to the classroom in the early 2000s, I was sent to a training in DI, in direct instruction, for reading mastery, and I thought this is horrible. This is not whole language. These kids are not going to like this.
Dr. Amy Moore:Oh my gosh, how can we I was losing my mind over the fact that can we just immerse them in print rich environments and read them lots of books? And they're going to, through osmosis, learn to read? Why are we torturing the kids with this cadence? And I didn't know what I didn't know at the time, because that isn't what I was taught. I was not taught to teach that way. So why all of a sudden? Right, but what I know now is that pendulum had swung way too far away from what we know about how the brain learns to read and we were pulling it back in. Right, but we were pulling it back in, kicking and screaming.
Donesa Walker:And I think that's exactly it.
Donesa Walker:So I think that there needs to be some grace for teachers in understanding that this is all new to many of them also, and many of them have been in the classroom for lots of years and they have dedicated their life to teaching the best way that they possibly know how, and either they have not been taught to teach reading or they don't understand the foundational principles of reading, and I think that's a really important aspect that we need to look at and understand.
Donesa Walker:Reading is not a natural process. Language for us to speak is a more natural process, but becoming even more challenging if we look at the environment of where we are right now and the fact that many children that we have in our classrooms right now who are in the cusp of reading years actually went through a period of time for COVID where masking was happening, where they weren't getting a lot of linguistics from other people and so they weren't having that exposure to rich vocabulary, to the enunciation of sounds, because they were hidden behind a mask or they were set on a computer. Or maybe you're down south, like I am, and you say your language differently and you drop your sounds. I do that a lot, and so I have to remind myself close your sounds. Because you don't close your sounds, you drop that last sound.
Dr. Amy Moore:Can you give an example or two of that?
Donesa Walker:I think you just heard my whole language right. I think you just what one of the things that we always tease about is like the word bada. It was like I'm about to go, I'm fixing to do it. These are the. This is a. This is what we do. We drop that last sound and we put it the other maybe pig Latin version.
Dr. Amy Moore:I say that all the time. I'm gonna go do this, but I'm from the south, so that's it.
Donesa Walker:I mean we do that. It's the funny, he can pecan puck on. It's all about how the language happens and I get in a lot of groups where we talk to different people and they're like that is not how that word is said and they're like, au contraire, my friend, it actually is said that way. It's the whole salmon and salmon. It's like the pronunciations. I remember very specifically getting in trouble with my English teacher in my freshman year because I said it was a peninsula anyways, arab, just different pronunciations that I would say wrong, caribbean, caribbean. So the pronunciations of words are challenging enough in the speech and then you start getting into things like homophones and homographs and all of the different meanings, multiple meaning words, and so English and the reading process is complicated. It's the most complicated language and many of us don't even know what we don't know.
Sandy Zamalis:I love that you brought up COVID because I think everything that happened in COVID has just been such, I think, a whiplash effect for teachers and for schools, Because first we had the pandemic and that caused a bunch of things and we changed the way we were teaching our kids for safety reasons and all that kind of good stuff. But there was also this big swell that happened with the science of reading and structured literacy and the new reading wars came back to life because we were talking about also this big swell that happened with the science of reading and structured literacy and that the new reading wars came back to life because we were talking about the different ways to teach reading. And then I know in my area there was this huge swell to train our teachers and we did letters training here in the area, a more Orton Gillingham based approach. But because they didn't get the scores that to shift fast enough and it's to think about. But because they didn't get the scores to shift fast enough and it's to think about that ship moving scores didn't shift fast enough.
Sandy Zamalis:So, lo and behold, they've switched again to a whole different reading program and all of the teachers in my area are so frustrated because they've had to learn so much in the last six years, Just revamp over and over and over again and having a hard time figuring out how to prioritize. The curriculum they chose this year is a really scripted curriculum that addresses, I think, one of the pieces that we should probably talk about about the NEP scores. But they really wanted to help build that knowledge base and build vocabulary, and so they picked a curriculum that was going to give that background knowledge and Dunny's I know this is a topic for you because you bring this up all the time so let's talk about that. About the NAP scores One of the biggest hurdles is that our kids don't have the background knowledge they need for those tests.
Donesa Walker:Right. So the fancy word in schools and maybe relating there is called schema or schemata, but basically it's filing cabinet. Okay, so the filing cabinet of the brain and the way the information is filed away in the brain matters for the reading process because it matters for the orthographic to link up to the sounds. So basically, your orthograph is the way that the word looks and the picture and how that links to that. So if you picture the word cat in the letter C-A-T, that is sounds that go to those letters, but the actual print is the orthograph and you have to link the phonemic awareness and the sounds, the phonics, to each of those sounds, to link that, your phonological awareness.
Donesa Walker:So being able to do that is a key underpinning and I think a lot of our kiddos struggle with that one, because print looked differently on a screen versus what it looked like in person, right? And so you think about all these babies that were on the naab and so you look at those results and it was fourth grade test, right? So think about this is like 2025, but these scores are 2024. So if you think about that, these babies were, these were learning, they were learning ortho print the link to what the word looks like, to what they sound like, when they were in covid. And then that year everybody went out, like around march. I remember very specifically because I was having a very big event here that I had worked months on, and the night before the event they called and said everybody's closed down as of tomorrow, and I was like you are kidding me worked on this forever.
Donesa Walker:So in March everything closed and so now these kiddos were just sent home and many of them did not have the resources. They did not have computers, they did not have the resources and the schools not have computers. They did not have the resources and the schools tried their best to get that, but it was really, really challenging. So that year, the rest of that year was lost, essentially when they went back in the fall. Many, many times those children were sent home because we still didn't have our brains wrapped around exactly how the spread was and that sort of thing. So many kids. As soon as one kid got sick, the whole class went home. So you have a very inconsistent year. So they were passed on. If they were in kinder, they didn't finish out their kinder year right Then first grade, it was hit and miss whether they were there and whether their teacher was there and whether their instruction was stable, and many just did here in our area, many just didn't even send their kids back for fear, and so it was just a very inconsistent year for 2021.
Donesa Walker:Okay, and so 21, 22, so 2020 was when we went out March, and then it was that next year, when we're in 2020, 2021 would have been the first grade year and so very inconsistent year, and those are foundational years. Those are the years that we say we are learning to read, okay, and then at third it should be changing to reading to learn. But if you never had your foundations of learning to read, then you basically start trying to create that. So really great brains, smart brains, try to create a pathway around that and what's the most natural pathway? We memorize it right and of course, this is right.
Donesa Walker:Before SOAR became very important or the science of reading became very aggressive and that body of research really got out there to everyone, we were still in this balanced literacy approach where we're trying to make sure that these kids are reading and they're getting set. It is a very unusual time frame, that transition to them. The second grade most of the children were still learning sight words. That was still the big push was memorized sight words and so word families and fall into those patterns. I spice kais rice and learn to read in that pattern and while there is some good to that, it does create a abnormality in the way that the brain learns to link orthographics to the phonemic awareness and the phonological.
Donesa Walker:So I think that had a big factor to it. Okay. And so when we get into looking at their test scores, and okay, there is not only did we not have growth, but we actually went backwards. And from the previous year it's really about that group. If we really look at that group of kiddos, so not only has the ship not turned completely, because it can't yet, but that group had a huge deficit. So I think we have to take the scores where they are and say what this does do for us is it calls us to action. Really, it's not about saying what did or didn't happen. It's not really about an excuse. My dad always said an excuse is a skin over reason stuffed with a lie. So basically, it's just. I know Amy will love that one. Embrace that one forever. Now, basically, what we do, I always pictured it like a potato. See, there's my ADD brain. Okay, now she's thinking it. She's oh my gosh.
Dr. Amy Moore:No, I'm getting ready to push back a little bit. I'm actually looking at the eighth grade results and so, while I think there's a lot of credence to the explanation that the fourth grade test scores reflect that, the instructional challenges, the instructional challenges how do we explain that huge decrease, especially in that lower quartile of four readers in eighth grade? Their scores went down even more than the fourth grade scores in that lower quartile went down. How do you?
Donesa Walker:how do you? Not only are they not having that literacy right that they need, but they missed some key schema, some key schemata building. That is going to affect everything for them. I honestly, I cannot tell you that I project reading scores to go up because if we look at the last 40 years, what's happened? We haven't had any gains or successes. What's happened? We haven't had any gains or successes and it's because we're not really looking at the foundational truths. As a group the three of us we actually know foundational truth wise, because reading starts in the brain and if you follow along with what the research says, we all know that reading has to begin in the brain. And if there's foundational weaknesses for these kids, then that is going to have huge repercussions when they get to those upper grades.
Donesa Walker:Let me give you a prime example, one of the things that was staggering for a school district. When I went to become the district reading coordinator, we started testing for kiddos and there was a ton of kids who had been missed, who were now eighth graders and not reading literately. In other words, they were basically word calling but they had no knowledge of the words or no uplink of the meaning behind that word. So they would say the word. They could pronounce the word, but they had no knowledge of what that word meant. So they would say the word, they could pronounce the word, but they had no knowledge of what that word meant.
Dr. Amy Moore:So they were functionally illiterate as well. They are functioning, yeah.
Donesa Walker:Functionally illiterate. But the problem is there is that we stop and not we like. After, okay, third grade, we're going to identify them as dyslexic or they're not dyslexic. If they're in eighth grade, there's no way they could just now be dyslexic, au contraire. That is where we see a lot of stealth dyslexia, and stealth dyslexia means that's been there all along. It was just missed because the child used the gift and creatively learned to work around, and so that's why you find a ton of children that are in those upper grades struggling. Or this is why you hear about kids who are graduating high school and can't read. They're functionally illiterate, okay, they've learned to word call enough to get them through that portion, and then they just they bottom out.
Donesa Walker:And so I do think that has a lot to do with the NAEP scores throughout the 40 years plus that we've looked at this. This is that we are stagnating in those areas because we're not really looking at the root cause. And I'm very passionate about the root cause, because the root cause can be so many different things for so many different readers, right. So, some readers, it can be because they're struggling with vocabulary and the uplink. Some readers, it can be because they're struggling with vocabulary and the uplink Some readers they just don't even know the codes to the English language which is where we've swung with the science of reading is that we need to do that. But there has to be a balance between those things and I'm not saying that I'm into balanced literacy, please don't take that wrong. But there has to be some structured, purposeful intent, not only in the classroom, but an embracing of understanding by parents, community, the powers that be, that reading begins in the brain and not in that classroom. And if you don't prepare the child in advance and if the parents don't, guys, if we go back and we say okay, I see, you two have glasses on, I don't have my glasses on because I had eye surgery, otherwise I would have glasses on, okay. So the reality is that we know if we can't see, we know we go have checkups, we get that done. We know what to do about that. We have trouble with our teeth? We go to a dentist. Okay. When we have trouble with our brain or the learning process, we go and complain to the school. And that is because they're seeing us, the authority on that, and I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that this needs to be understood from the parental side and understood from the school side, that reading begins in the brain and there's foundational skills that must be done in order to be a good reader and most people don't embrace that and understand that at a very early age.
Donesa Walker:If you're an eighth grader who has never experienced an escalator and you see that word, then you don't know how to say it and you don't know how to link it up. You have no knowledge of that and so you skip the word. Basically, that's what happens to you. I cannot forget my son, avid reader, loved reading, and he came to me one day and he said mom, what is a cathedra? And I said a cathedra. Okay, I'm not really sure what a cathedra is. I said, spell it for me. And he spelled it c-a-t-h-e-d-r-a-l and I was like, oh, cathedral. Okay, he phonetically said the word correct, but he had no knowledge because we didn't go to a cathedral, we went to a church. We never heard of a spire, it was a steeple. So it's just all about how we use our language and his schemata. His schema had never embraced that word, okay, and so he didn't know, as he was reading, how to make sense of that and he wasn't getting it Right, and so I think a lot of times we miss out on those aspects and we miss out on the fact that word building, language building, is a constant process. It is a process that is always happening.
Donesa Walker:I have a lovely student who has been working on the spelling bee. If y'all have never gotten the words for the national spelling bee, let me tell you Not only are they spelling demons to spell, but the meanings behind some of these words. And I am an avid reader. I read a book a night, every night, as my bookcase shows. I love it. I eat books just for fun. It's my enjoyment, my relaxation. I'm an avid author. I have over 20 published books. I just it's something I love. I love language, but it is astounding to me how many of those words I did not know, really did not know. It was really enlightening. I learned a lot. Let's put it that way.
Donesa Walker:My point is here is that it's always a learning process, not just the spelling, but the pronunciation of words and where they come from. And English is such a robust embracement of so many different languages, just kind of melting pot into what we do, and so I think that's part of the thing that makes it so challenging for that. So schools and moving forward. So I think, as we move forward and we look at these results and we say we can't pound down the schools, we have to take authority and ownership of this and say, yes, there is some responsibility and some ship changing that needs to happen. There's some changing of the guard that needs to happen.
Donesa Walker:But as a culture and a society, we also have to embrace that there's things that we need to do and we need to look at and say we need to be doing a better job of building vocabulary. We need to be doing a much, much better job of building the linguistic framework. That needs to happen for the learning process. We need to make sure that we're giving those foundational skills that are going to be critical. Every child needs to be sorting. Sorting is a primary skill to reading, but most people don't realize how important that skill is and so it's skipped. It's something like we don't need to spend time doing that and yet we're missing a critical skill that builds language.
Donesa Walker:One of the things that we do, as with our littles when they come in the four or five-year-olds is and you guys know- this is working on helping them with the language of over and under and between and these prepositional phrases that establish place in the brain, and that's a critical skill of categorization that matters to the reading process, the math process and the overall learning process, and so this is something that often is seen as unimportant, and yet it is one of the key skills to kids being successful with reading in the future.
Dr. Amy Moore:So what I'm hearing you say is there. Even though the education system has made strides to try and work on those foundational reading skills to help improve reading performance in America, there is a disconnect between decoding and comprehension. Those are the two ends of the reading spectrum that we hope to get through instructionally, but there's so much that needs to happen in between, and so we can't just teach decoding and expect this fluent reading to translate to comprehension, because we have to think about building all of the schema, all of those filing cabinets of information, all of that knowledge that's critical to the comprehension piece. Right, and then it comes back around too right? We can't even pronounce a word accurately sometimes if we don't have the prior knowledge to inform that pronunciation, like your example of your son saying cathedral instead of cathedral, correct.
Donesa Walker:And I think there's the Scarborough's Rope, and the Scarborough's Rope is the Holy Grail right now as far as reading is concerned, right, and so if you look at that, if you're not familiar with Scarborough's rope, is the holy grail right now as far as reading is concerned, right and so if you look at that, if you're not familiar with Scarborough's rope, you can google it. You can easily see that's become and there's the. It's called the reading rope. If there's another way, there's a writing rope, there's a math rope.
Donesa Walker:Now they're, we're doing ropes with strands. If we picture this as a strand, basically you have all these different pieces that have to play and they bind together. Ok, so you have the upper strand and you have the lower strand, and the upper strand is basically building that background, the background knowledge. That's our upper strand, that's our vocabulary, that's our, all of our things that are going to lead to good comprehension skills or visualization, all of those great, good skills. And then you have your lower strand, which is your decoding strand, basically getting to that process of phonological and phonemic awareness, and so trying to build both of those has to happen simultaneously and you have a whole plethora of things where this can fall apart and if you miss one strand, you miss something significant to the reader. Okay, and many readers who are compensatory readers cover up that loss, and the compensatory reader is a reader who's missing a significant strand, but they compensate by using other tools, other things to get them through that process.
Donesa Walker:In my practice, I am seeing a ton of kiddos now that are missing the imagination station for their brain, their visual sketch pad, and the visual sketch pad is super, super important for the reading process but you can't comprehend without it, like it is the skill, and so I see a lot of kiddos who are reading and then you ask them a simple question and they're like they read the words.
Donesa Walker:They're functionally illiterate because they can say every one of those words beautifully, but they created no meaning while they were reading those words. Okay, and that is why we're seeing more of the developmental language disorder. The developmental language disorder is growing at leaps and bounds right now in a crazy way, and I know that's not our topic that we're discussing today, but it feeds into why our scores continually have this tight ship that we just cannot get up. We cannot get that rope up because we're not putting all the pieces in play that need to be in play, and if you don't put all those different pieces into play in an effective manner and if you script too much, as Sandy was mentioning, if you get too much scripting, then you don't teach deep, you teach shallow, and then there's never that experience, and then there's never that experience.
Donesa Walker:And that I think that's my daughter-in-law is a teacher, a third grade teacher, and her scores were like some of the best in the state and they were the highest in her parish and she was like the other day we were talking about. She said I'm worried that same expectation is going to be placed on me with the current group of kiddos that I teach. And she said the difference is their background knowledge is much weaker and so as they go to third graders to test, they're going to have a harder time because their background knowledge is very weak and I don't have the time to teach deep. I don't have the time for them to experience it like that.
Donesa Walker:As a reading teacher. I remember this one eighth grade I was teaching Anne Frank and teaching the diary of Anne Frank.
Dr. Amy Moore:And.
Donesa Walker:I literally made my class experience it, really experience it. It was intense. I got the whole school on board. I had the kids draw to see what type of person that they were. I was. I really made them experience it. It was something and to the effect that the news came out because some people got upset, which you could see. Okay, the understanding of it was that this is a deep experience. So over the years I've seen a couple of my students who are now grown and I never have forgotten that. That ingrained me so deeply that I've never forgotten that Teachers don't have an opportunity right now to teach that deep.
Donesa Walker:Our parents need to understand that they're going to have to be building that vocabulary very deep. What the nation's report card is telling us is that we're not addressing the foundation where it needs to be. We have got to go out and we have got to get some of these machines, basically, and we've got to dig deeper. We've got to get down to the bedrock and if you don't get down to the bedrock, you're just creating potholes for the future. Okay, because you're leaving big old chunks of information out or rocks that are going to be messed up and it's going to cause issues down the path in that process. One of the things we have to embrace is that there's advantages to technology and AI and there's disadvantages, and we need to understand where those are and embrace those that are there. And we need to also understand where the potholes are with technology and we need to be scaffolding for that. We need to be building the pieces in place that can help us make that difference. Because if we're not going to get to this foundational issue, if we're not going to make the changes that are necessary, then this is going to be a perpetuation of weakness across the board.
Donesa Walker:And now, with politically and a lot of the changes that are happening across our country, with children being pulled and put into private schools and things like that I will like, here in Louisiana, the Louisiana Gator Scholarship was just introduced, which I think is amazing. It's a great process because it allows children here in our state to be able to take our parents, to be able to take monies through a scholarship and use for services for intervention for their child. So basically they're getting a card where they for services for intervention for their child. So basically they're getting a card where they can choose and create their own child's educational journey. I think that's powerful. I think we also have to help parents understand that every parent, like it or not, is a homeschool parent. Okay, here we go, you choose.
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Dr. Amy Moore:That's LearningRxcom. That's learningrxcom. I think that's a great segue, because I was sitting here thinking I'm not sure, as you were talking about your daughter-in-law's struggle of not being able to teach deep, that is not because she doesn't have the capability. That is the nature of the education system, right. It just does not allow us, it does not allow teachers the luxury to go deep.
Dr. Amy Moore:And so, then, is the school system even capable of fixing this problem, or will this fall on a supplemental educational intervention and the parents? Is that the only way to fix this problem?
Donesa Walker:I think it is. I think we have to embrace the reality as parents that we are ultimately responsible for our child's educational prowess. For our child's educational prowess, educational prowess varies from family to family. Educational attainment what you put your value system on varies from family to family. Right, my husband was a game warden and he grew up in game and fish and that type of things. One of the things that was really important to him was that our boys knew everything there was to know about every animal out under the sun. Okay, I can tell you how many laughing experiences that we've had about flying squirrels because I know nothing.
Donesa Walker:I've been married to this man for 28 years and I can tell you I hear a sound. I'll say what is that? He? He'll say it's a such and such duck and I'm like, okay, he knows the sounds of animals and I have no ability to do that. Okay, what I'm saying is that it's impossible for one person teacher, school, whatever to build that schema for every single child. You cannot ever do that.
Donesa Walker:I remember being an eighth grade teacher and I had this sweet little girl and she came into the classroom one day and she said Ms Walker, I have no idea why in the world. People are going to go stand around that board outside at six o'clock tonight and I said, marie, what are you talking about? And she said it says school board meeting at 6 pm tonight. Bada bing, yep, that's where she understood nothing about what a school board was. But there was a board outside that said school board meeting tonight at six.
Donesa Walker:Lack of knowledge, lack of schema.
Donesa Walker:She knew what the word board meant, but she didn't know what the board meant in that context, and I think this goes back over and over of the responsibility of us as a society to build those critical skills for kids, but also for parents to embrace that every parent has the responsibility of educational attainment for their child to be at the level that they want to be. And that's what you have to drive that bus. You have to think of the school and the different components, the extracurricular, the supplementary education services, the tutorials, all the different organizations like LearningRx that you partner with as your responsibility. You do not think that it is the school's responsibility to make your child's teeth straight. You do not think it is your child's responsibility to go to school and be able to make good choices about everything if you don't teach them to make those good choices, but yet you'll blame that on the teacher and on the school. You have to take that ownership, and I think that's the shift that we have to take as our brain and our responsibility and our responsibility.
Dr. Amy Moore:Wow, all right. Unfortunately we are out of time, but we are going to do a second episode so that we can dig into what that looks like for parents. What do parents need to know about the role that they can play in helping their children be strong readers, strong comprehenders, completely literate, right, how? This can't just fall on the teachers, because, as we've seen in the trends of the National Report Card over and over again, this just isn't something that schools can do alone, nor should they. Right From what I'm also hearing you say, you're going to have to tune in to our next episode to find out part two on what we can do about all of this.
Dr. Amy Moore:So, listeners, thank you so much for being with us today. If you liked our show, we would love it if you would leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple podcasts so that we get ranked higher, and getting ranked higher means we can reach more parents like you guys. We'd love it if you would follow us on social media. We are at the Brainy Moms on Instagram and Facebook. If you'd rather see our faces, you can find us on YouTube at the Brainy Moms, and that is all the smart stuff that we have for you today. We hope you feel a little smarter. We're going to catch you next time.
