Letter to the Editor: Blaming parents, teachers, students or pandemic isn’t solution to low reading scores in Quincy

I read the story, “Are they learning anything or are they just playing? Quincy pastor wants to address low reading scores,” and wanted to share some critical insights. The poor reading scores in our district are unacceptable and point to a systemic problem. Blaming parents, teachers, students, or the pandemic is not the solution.

I filed a complaint against Quincy Public Schools (QPS) 10 years ago, proving systemic issues. Since 2012-2013, QPS has used discredited programs like Reading Recovery, Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Caulkins. Additionally, QPS has never acknowledged dyslexia, affecting one in five students. They have never screened, evaluated, diagnosed or provided services for dyslexic students despite it being a recognized learning disability. As a former special education teacher, I left QPS because it refused to address dyslexia.

The discredited curriculum has harmed all students, not just those with learning disabilities. Seventy percent of students cannot read at grade level, leading to behavior problems. I saw this coming when I was being written up and ultimately resigned, unable to make changes from within.

I started a Learning Center to provide needed services, but without QPS partnership, we couldn’t sustain it. In 2016, QPS declined a grant that would have funded our tutors to support dyslexic students, falsely claiming they already provided these services. It’s now 2024, and nothing has changed. The problem lies with the curriculum. If 80 percent of students are not meeting standards, the curriculum is flawed. Despite multiple initiatives, the fundamental issues remain unaddressed.

QPS struggles to hire qualified special education teachers, often hiring untrained individuals, exacerbating the problem. We need a real investigation into the district’s curriculum and leadership to understand why they haven’t corrected these issues in the past decade. 

Why has Muddy River News never interviewed anyone from the district about the true state of the district and the failing curriculum? Trained special education teachers have been leaving in droves since before the pandemic, yet this didn’t raise a red flag about potential violations in special education. When teachers who speak up are written up, suspended and on the road to being fired, why would anyone else speak up? They leave the district, often changing careers entirely. 

The teachers who have left the district are where your real story lies because the teachers who work for the district are not allowed to speak at all about the failing scores — only sugarcoat them. Most of the teachers who are left truly are brainwashed into believing the curriculum that they are providing is working despite the actual data that shows it clearly is not. Muddy River News has never held Quincy Public Schools accountable for these issues, allowing the failing system to continue unchecked.

Using a quote from George W. Bush, “Is our children learning,” from over 20 years ago, only highlights the ignorance surrounding this issue. This problem started two decades ago, and while I caught it in 2010, even then, I was late to the game. It was George W. Bush who signed “A New Era: Revitalizing Special Education for Children and their Families” into law in 2001, which drove me to file the complaint with the Illinois State Board of Education.

This should have been a turning point, yet the district’s failures have persisted.

Brandy (Goehl) Neiswender
Quincy, Illinois