Kudos to Stan Goldberg. It's a call for sanity! We cannot be reading and ESL specialists without training and credentials in those fields. SLPs would howl if anyone could "research and select a method" for speech and language disorder remediation, and then put out a shingle to treat them. Likewise, we are selling other professions short.
I have enough to handle with oral communication disorders, without watering down my program to the point of ineffectiveness from overwhelming numbers of students with reading difficulties. Schools actually have specialists to work with reading difficulties and second-language acquisition. Imagine! It's ASHA's leadership that needs CEUs in the real world of an SLP servicing two, low-income, year-round, public elementary schools, where almost 80% of the 1,500 students are not primary English speakers. I would guarantee 30 hours of insight, not irrelevant CEUs!
Our profession is on a dangerous, misplaced, "me too" mission to create "relevancy." The need to remediate oral communication disorders exists and it's relevant. If students can't verbalize what they know or comprehend oral information, how will they succeed? Someone needs to stand for the remediation of oral communication disorders, and it's about time that ASHA stood for them and for the school SLPs remediating them, and not for watering down our profession.
Pamela McKeehan
Fullerton, CA