If teaching was the problem, tutoring would be the answer.

When school starts, it is a positive thing for many children. With new shoes, colorful backpacks, high hopes and aspirations, they climb onto buses, exit automobiles, and walk expectantly into schools to begin learning!

For other students, it is a dreaded event. For them, little positivity is associated with this yearly ritual. The above expectation seems to not be available to them. Year after year they are held in, held over, and held back because they are not successful, despite the best and most extensive efforts and expenditures of teacher training, curriculum, and tutoring.

If teaching (and all the efforts that surround it) was the problem, tutoring would have worked a long time ago.

A principal well-versed and trained in all tutoring methods says it best, “I was a reading specialist under ‘No Child Left Behind,’ and for six years, learned and implemented ‘best practices’ for students, principals, and teachers. We learned how to identify student weaknesses and skills through the Texas Primary Reading Inventory. The TPRI was diagnostic and gave us some good information on basic skills of our students. We re-taught, re-did, re-thought, and used every kind of targeted intervention we could think of, but still managed to ‘leave some students behind.’ When I saw SOI, I knew I was seeing the missing link to the education of students who struggled and students who were not achieving to their highest potential. I can’t put into words the joy and sense of peace I had knowing that we were going to meet those needs.”

Enough said.

Welcome back to school, students, teachers, and administrators.

May this be your best year ever!

written by: Renee Anderson, Senior SOI Consultant