{"id":1273,"date":"2019-09-15T04:18:15","date_gmt":"2019-09-15T09:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/?p=1273"},"modified":"2019-08-30T13:25:26","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T18:25:26","slug":"the-hidden-cost-of-dyslexia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/blog\/2019\/09\/15\/the-hidden-cost-of-dyslexia\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hidden Cost of Dyslexia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What words may look like for dyslexics. Photo via WiredUK<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Many years ago, I had a 9th grade student named R.\u00a0 \u00a0R. was a nice kid, but never seemed to be able to earn better than Ds and Fs, no matter how hard he worked.\u00a0 His handwriting looked like a kindergartner’s, with a mix of capital and lower-case letters in huge block form with some letters missing in words or turned the wrong way.\u00a0 His spelling was like a kindergartner’s too, mostly at least semi-phonetic but sometimes wildly off base.\u00a0 He could always answer questions if I read the story aloud in class and asked him about events verbally, but independent reading was painfully slow and comprehension was hit-or-miss.\u00a0 Finally, in the middle of 9th grade, another teacher and I pushed his counselor to have him screened by the local Area Education Agency.\u00a0 Turns out R. was dyslexic.<\/p>\n

I would love to tell you that from that point on, R. had all the support he needed and sailed off into the sunset as a beacon of success but the truth is that while R. was a hard worker, there were a lot of things in the system stacked against him, not least the lack of available, frequent services at the high school level to help him overcome the dyslexia.\u00a0 Additionally, he was forced to retake his failed freshman classes in Summer School, where the maximum grade he could earn was a D-.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because the thinking of the administration at the time was that if you couldn’t be bothered to do the work during the school year, you should only be allowed to earn a D- (the minimum passing grade) in Summer School. We argued against this strenuously on the basis of R.’s identified issues, that the failure wasn’t a behavioral issue, but were denied. Although R. was now considered a special education student, his parents didn’t understand the program well and were hesitant to advocate for him or push for accommodations.<\/p>\n

R. was very much on my mind this week when I watched a CBS Sunday Morning<\/em>\u00a0piece called “Dyslexia: Cracking the Code.”<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the most astonishing assertions in the piece is the prevalence of dyslexia among school children cited by Drs. Sally and Bennett Shaywitz, the directors of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, who place the occurrence at one in five children.\u00a0 A quick Google search will show that others place it somewhat lower, at between 5-10% of the total student population (which is 50.8 million). Translation: somewhere between 2.5\u00a0and 5.1\u00a0million school children with dyslexia.\u00a0 If the Shaywitzs’ estimate is correct, the number rises to 10.1 million.\u00a0 Another sobering statistic?\u00a0 Of all children with reading difficulties, 70-80% have some form of dyslexia, which can range along a continuum of mild to severe. The implications of these statistics for elementary teachers and parents should be galvanizing:\u00a0 if a child is struggling with reading there’s a 2 to 3 in 10 chance it’s dyslexia.\u00a0 Reading problems are the canary in the coal mine.<\/em><\/p>\n

One of the Shaywitzs’ key findings is that dyslexia is not connected to intelligence.\u00a0 In fact, actual IQ is usually considerably greater than a dyslexic child’s ability to read and the gap between the two gets wider as the child moves up the grades unless there is intervention.\u00a0 \u00a0 And intervention is often not as available or comes too late, especially for low income families.\u00a0\u00a0Picture that for a moment:\u00a0 an intelligent child not able to participate in classroom activities which involve or require reading.\u00a0 As s\/he moves up the grades, reading comprises more and more of the curriculum so s\/he becomes more and more isolated from what’s going on in the classroom.\u00a0 It’s not hard to extrapolate the consequences of this:\u00a0 anxiety, shame, acting out, shutting down,\u00a0 dropping out.<\/p>\n

Enter a remarkable tuition-free charter school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana called the Louisiana Key Academy. The Louisiana Key Academy’s entire student body is made up of children with dyslexia. The goal of the school is to provide dyslexic children with the support and tools they need to learn to read.\u00a0 Absent that support,\u00a0 students would face reduced rates of graduation from High School, reduced entry into colleges, and increased chance of incarceration.<\/p>\n

The director of the Louisiana Key Academy cites a chilling finding:\u00a0 in one Louisiana maximum security prison, over 50% of the inmates screened and tested were dyslexic.\u00a0 A similar study in Texas<\/a> found that 80% of inmates in Texas prisons were functionally illiterate and a substantial portion of that illiteracy was caused by dyslexia, particularly by “poor single word decoding,” or the inability to accurately distinguish one word from another. A more recent study<\/a> found that 48% of Texas inmates were dyslexic.\u00a0 If dyslexia in the general population is one in five, in prisons it’s more like one in two.<\/p>\n

But diagnosis is often spotty, with some people being identified after elementary school (like R.) and others (like most inmates) not being identified at all while in school. Instead they learn to think of themselves as poor readers, bad students, dumb kids.\u00a0 \u00a0For many kids the lack of adequate screening for dyslexia at an early age allows them to slip through the cracks because high school teachers are generally not equipped to identify or address reading difficulties.\u00a0 There is a persistent myth that students can’t be screened for dyslexia until they are 8 years old.\u00a0 The director of the Key Academy believes children should be screened after Kindergarten. Given the potential consequences of not being diagnosed, she is absolutely right.<\/p>\n

To me it further underscores how critical elementary reading programs are, and how pivotal those teachers who instruct and monitor progress toward mastery of these skills.<\/p>\n

Give this one a watch.\u00a0 You can find it on the CBS Sunday Morning<\/em> website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Many years ago, I had a 9th grade student named R.\u00a0 \u00a0R. was a nice kid, but never seemed to be able to earn better than Ds and Fs, no matter how hard he worked.\u00a0 His handwriting looked like a kindergartner’s, with a mix of capital and lower-case letters in huge block form with some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1273"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1285,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions\/1285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}