Allington's Talk at LAT

Dr. Richard Allington, emeritus professor at the University of Tennessee, gave a talk at the Literacy Association of Tennessee's annual meeting this week in Murfreesboro, TN. I was not able to attend his session, but I heard from attendees that he said that Governor Bill Haslam should go to hell for signing the #SayDyslexia bill into law. See, Allington doesn't believe in dyslexia. He thinks it doesn’t exist. He hates the #SayDyslexia bill so much that he thinks the creator of the big should be shot.  

After this information was posted on Twitter, it started to gain some momentum. The Literacy Association of Tennessee put out a statement, the International Literacy Associations responded, and even a state representative sent a statement to the University of Tennessee about this.

I have been given audio of the presentation. You can listen here. Below are some notes from the tape. I will not respond (okay, I will once) to the many inaccuracies and other outlandish statements not based on the current research.

• Starting at 4 minutes in part one, Allington talks about the Say Dyslexia bill.  Allington said he would have told then Governor Bill Haslam to “Just veto it and shoot whoever made the bill.”
• Starting at 8:30, he talks about dyslexia not existing. He claims at 9:20 that dyslexia practitioners don’t know what they are doing. 
• Around 12:30, he says that you should read a certain dyslexia advocate, “If you are interested in hitting a dyslexia advocate over the head, you should read” her book. 
• At 16 minutes, it seems like he says his son only learned to read because he experienced his first male teacher. ​
• In part 2, starting at 4:20, Allington says that he thinks phonics should be taught “outside of the school day.”
• Around 11 minutes, he goes on anti reading fluency rant. 
• At 12:30, “I don’t know how many more studies we need to demonstrate that phonics is not the answer.”
• At 13:00, he says that National Reading Panel Report said, “phonics instruction appears to contributed only weakly, if at all, in helping students to apply these decoding skills to read text.”
  
• I went to the report and found that section. It was a section about phonics with older readers, which they had limited data on. On that very same page, this was also reported, “In sum, these findings show that systematic phonics instruction helped beginning readers acquire and use the alphabetic system to read and spell words in and out of text. Children who were taught phonics systematically benefited significantly more than beginners who did not receive phonics instruction in their ability to decode regularly spelled words and nonwords, in their ability to remember how to read irregularly spelled words, and in their ability to invent phonetically plausible spellings of words. In addition, phonics instruction contributed substantially to students’ growth in reading comprehension and somewhat less to their oral text reading skill.”
• At 21:00, he talks about how there is no research backing the instruction that dyslexia advocates want in schools.  
• 21:45: Allington says about Haslam signing the Say Dyslexia bill “I wish he knew he was going to hell for that. I don't think he probably does.” 
• 22:45:  “Decoding dyslexia offers the same old bad advice, but with a new face. DD is a new organization. As they describe themselves a parent led organization. None of which are true. Still bad advice. Advice without any evidence.”
• 23:45 he talks about how dyslexia advocates are taking drugs. At the end of the clip, an advocate gets up to speak, but the audio cuts off.