Some notable philanthropic achievements:

•  She launched a program to cover 100% of the cost for all 11,000 Dollywood employees to go to college.

•  She started “The Imagination Library” 31 years ago. She worked initially to honor her Dad who could not read or write. A staggering 300,000,000+ books have been gifted since its inception.

At a reading conference in March, Mark Seidenberg, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, warned of “overteaching” phonics, spending too much time on extended explicit teaching of increasingly obscure phonics rules. Any time spent going over these rules is time that’s not spent working with a variety of different texts, he said.

Once they’ve mastered foundational phonics, Seidenberg said, many children pick up on the nuances of language through what’s known as statistical learning—the ability to generalize patterns from lots of exposure to text.