Dyslexia interventions a simple fix for America’s reading crisis

A tumor growing inside a young child’s body gets quick attention. To leave it to fester, to metastasize, to endanger a child’s life, would be criminal.

Yet, Texas public schools routinely allow another sort of cancer to thrive, one that can be almost as debilitating and disastrous to a child’s life. It’s called dyslexia, broadly defined as an unexpected difficulty with reading. The callous disregard that Texas policymakers show dyslexic students is even more irresponsible when you consider a jarring statistic: Dyslexia is believed to affect one in every five people.

With help, dyslexics can become best-selling authors and rocket scientists. Left undiagnosed, a dyslexic becomes the mother who can’t read her daughter a bedtime story, the husband who can’t buy an anniversary card for his wife. And sometimes, dyslexics become the jobless, the homeless and the incarcerated.

But dyslexia is not a hopeless affliction, as once believed. Scientists can observe its effects through brain scans as easily as they can observe a tumor. Like cancer, it can infiltrate many aspects of a person’s life. Also like cancer, it can be treated. While it cannot be cured, it can be overcome with effective, preferably early, interventions as simple as group reading several times a week. But where are the interventions?

This is the question Dr. Sally Shaywitz is still asking after some 30 years of studying dyslexia. It’s a question every Texan should be asking, too.

“Rather than a knowledge gap, we have an action gap,” Shaywitz, a professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine, told me in a recent interview. “We have to act on the knowledge we have, and we haven’t done that, and it’s absurd.”

Shaywitz is also co-director,

with her husband Dr. Bennett A. Shaywitz, of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. The two nationally known dyslexia experts will be in Houston this week, speaking to a sold-out crowd on Wednesday at the annual Lenox M. Reed Seminar, sponsored by Houston’s Neuhaus Education Center.

They’ll argue that one answer to our nation’s reading crisis may be in plain sight.

Shaywitz’s research shows that the reading gap between dyslexics and other readers is already present by first grade. While some factors leading students to read below grade level are tough to mitigate, dyslexia is not. It starts with identifying dyslexic students early on, a process simplified by an inexpensive, evidence-based screening tool developed by the Shaywitzes that takes teachers mere minutes to complete.

Closing the gaps

That, followed by effective reading instruction, could help close the gaps that bedevil student progress.

Shaywitz said schools often wait years, or until the child fails, to take action. By then, some students have become convinced that they’re dumb, and others have given up. They don’t know that their weakness in reading is actually correlated with higher cognitive strengths, such as reasoning, problemsolving, vocabulary and comprehension. They don’t know dyslexia is diagnosed in part by an observable discrepancy between the child’s slower reading and higher intelligence.

They don’t know why dyslexics struggle. Shaywitz explains that while speaking is natural for the human brain, reading is artificial. Our brains have only been doing it around 5,000 years. Decoding visual images into sounds takes time to learn. While 80 percent of the population does this automatically, dyslexics do it manually, in part because they rely more heavily on a less-efficient part of the brain. They use up more attention reading and get tired quicker than strong readers.

Many dyslexics don’t know the long list of high achievers who suffer from the same reading problems, Shaywitz said, including famed filmmaker Steven Spielberg, bestselling author John Grisham, financial executive Charles Schwab, and plenty of celebrities, from Anderson Cooper to Jay Leno.

“We have to stop judging people by how fast they read,” says Shaywitz, who routinely fields desperate calls and emails from parents struggling against stigma and illinformed educators to get help for their children.

Early identification

Identifying dyslexics early could help prevent behavioral problems, declining motivation and dropout rates often seen in students who struggle with reading, Shaywitz said. In rare, tragic cases in which seemingly hopeless reading problems lead students to contemplate suicide, it could save a life.

“You have depressed kids, anxious kids, kids who give up on themselves. That’s not who we are as a society,” Shaywitz said. “What are we doing to our communities, families and our country by wasting all of this talent? It’s crazy. It really is.”

Consider these stats: In Texas, 27 percent of thirdgraders did not pass the reading portion of the state assessment test last year, according to the Texas Education Agency. About 20 percent of the population is believed to be dyslexic. Yet, as recently as 2015, Texas identified only 2.5 percent as having the common reading disability.

How many Texas thirdgraders are dyslexic and don’t know it? How many could read at grade level, and pass the state assessment, if they just knew the problem, knew what to call it and got help?

Texas, of course, hasn’t been a hospitable place for students of most any kind of disability. The U.S. Department of Education found in January that Texas violated federal law by depriving eligible students of special education services through an arbitrary cap.

That federal investigation also found that the vagueness in Texas’ policy on dyslexia may have steered students away from federally funded special education services, violating federal law. The TEA presented a draft corrective action plan last month, but the state needs to go beyond mere compliance with federal law.

Texas needs to appropriate more funding for dyslexia, including education and training for teachers who may simply be unaware how easy it is to detect reading problems, and proven, effective ways to teach reading fluency.

Those who fear the cost of such interventions shouldn’t, said Shaywitz, who details the methods in her book, “Overcoming Dyslexia.”

‘Good teaching’

One common tool for improving reading fluency, which involves having a student read the same paragraph aloud repeatedly under the guidance of a teacher or parent, has been found beneficial to many readers — not just dyslexics. Verbally building vocabulary and general knowledge of a subject helps a dyslexic student decode it more easily in print. And schools actually could save money by reducing behavioral problems involving students who struggle with reading.

“It’s not like this is some rare, new pharmaceutical thing. They’re not going to go broke with this. It’s good teaching, good intervention,” she said.

The science is there. The tools are there. Now we need the will of Texas policymakers and education leaders to make dyslexia a priority, once and for all, and to stop it from robbing the potential of our students and our state.