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  • Writer's pictureThe Dyslexia Initiative

What is Grassroots?

by Ashley Roberts

We hear a lot in this country about grassroots. It's a sort of the buzz word of modern political and various advocacy movements that really found rallying points in The Tea Party and then Occupy Wallstreet. Many organizations are quick to call themselves grassroots, but what does that really mean? I mean really?


"Something grassroots is at the most basic level of something, down there in the dirt with the roots of an idea or activity. ... The grassroots is the most fundamental, basic level of well, grass, but also ideas or political movements." www.vocabulary.com


"Ordinary people regarded as the main body of an organization's membership." www.Dictionary.com


That's pretty simple.


Ordinary people.... So that's you, me, the stranger on the corner, the waiter, the pilot, the teacher, the parent, anyone and everyone, ordinary people.


In our struggle to change the literacy landscape in education, in our fight to unseat the havoc that Whole Language and it's descendants have wrecked on literacy in this country, it will take all people to stand up and demand change. Everyone will have to be involved. Everyone will need to use their individual power and constitutionally protected freedom to alter the trajectory of destruction we are universally facing.

They called them the Reading Wars. Some think they are over. They never ended.


Science is clear on how reading should be taught. CRYSTAL CLEAR! There is not one single drop of irrefutable evidence on what science has said about HOW the brain learns to read. Yet, science is so far removed from the practices happening in American education that it's laughable. It's almost like Laurel and Hardy's Who's On First skit.


Educators take this movement as an affront to their profession, but it's not. School teachers cannot help those theories they were taught in their undergraduate and graduate programs. They cannot help the fact that even as the scientific research is conducted on the very campuses they walk around as they earn their degrees, that their educational college is deaf, dumb and mute to the science that surrounds them.


To change literacy, to fix education and to save our dyslexic children, this means that all citizens have to rise up. It can't be a few leaders calling their movement a grassroots movement when all they want are social media numbers so they have more "influence" when they go lobby for change. It is so much more than that. It has to be so much more than that.

We at The Dyslexia Initiative are asking you to rise with us. We are a grassroots movement because we want to not only educate you and help you be the best advocate you can be, we want to empower your voice for change.


We need you. Our children need you and the literacy crisis that is engulfing this country will only continue to grow until each of you demands change. It is through our united voices risen together to the deafening roar that it can be that education will finally see the light, that the laws will change, and that our children's education, their future will be more secure.


Please! We need you! Each and every one of you! Each blade of grass is a person, a voice.


Rise with us! Be the #DyslexiaRevolution!


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