The Reading Wars Go Back Hundreds of Years

Public schools don't have the money to give every kid with learning disabilities the best treatment. It's not just cost that's kept public schools from giving kids with dyslexia what they need. The reading wars in the U.S. go all the way back to Horace Mann, the father of the public schools movement. Man believed children would better understand what they were reading if they first learned to read whole words. This came to be known as the whole language approach and is now called phonics.