From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities
A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis
Quote 1: “The gap between proficient and less proficient readers widens over the elementary years and remediation of reading problems becomes increasingly difficult after third grade. Moreover, the long-term negative effects of illiteracy have been well documented.” (Al Otaiba & Fuchs, 2006).
Parents and teachers who want to study a well-organized, well-written, well-researched book on reading disabilities should take a serious look at Thomas G. Gunning’s Assessing and Correcting Reading and Writing Difficulties. Every chapter of Dr. Gunning’s book deals with an important topic that can drastically affect the success—and the failure—of children with reading disabilities. Although the book is written primarily for graduate students in reading or reading disabilities programs and for teachers, it offers great value to parents who need to advocate for their child with reading disabilities. By understanding its contents (as well as that in our book, Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds), parents can more fully understand what a reading evaluation should look like, what good instruction involves, what their child’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) should include.
Is inclusion always good? No. It’s not. That’s why the “I” in IEP stands for individualized. That why the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA) requires schools to have numerous placement and service options. That’s why IDEA requires IEP Teams to base all decisions about children’s programs on their needs, not their special education classification.
Inclusion is often good, but not always. Many children with reading disabilities need instruction that differs dramatically from that offered in general education classes. Even with major changes in curriculum and assignments, many general education classes are inadequate for teaching children with reading disabilities how to read.
It’s the end of the school year and your kindergartner or first grader is still struggling with reading. You think he has a reading disability. What should you do?
One of the first things to do is get an accurate, informed, and comprehensive reading evaluation. Without an evaluation, remediation is like doing surgery without x-rays or lab tests. This raises a critical question: How can I get the right evaluation?
You can pay for a private evaluation. This way, you can seek out a reading specialist with a good reputation who takes the time to listen to you and understand your concerns. As you might suspect, private evaluations can be very expensive, especially if the specialist has a doctorate in reading or a related area.
Heidi Anne Mesmer and Staci Cumming of Oklahoma State University have offered essential advice on improving the reading abilities of struggling readers. Unfortunately, schools often ignore their advice. Doing so imperils the future of struggling readers. First their warning; then their advice:
Their Warning:
“Many struggling readers are being asked to read books that are simply too hard …. For struggling readers the consequences of text-reader mismatches are disastrous and far-reaching. Often these students fall further and further behind…. Making sure that struggling readers have books that they can read is an absolute imperative.”
Recently, I reviewed the Gray Diagnostic Reading Battery-Second Edition for The Seventeenth Mental Measurements Yearbook. In the Gray’s manual was a wonderful quote that’s so important, it’s worth memorizing: “Too often examiners forget the dictum that ‘tests don’t diagnose, people do’ and base their diagnoses exclusively on test results, a hazardous enterprise at best. Test results are merely observations, not diagnoses. They specify a performance level at a given time under a particular situation, but they do not tell the examiner why a person performs as he or she did.”
Parents often ask me to recommend a specialized school or reading program for their child, who they say has “dyslexia.” Usually, they’re surprised by my first four questions: Who told you that your child has dyslexia? On what did they base their diagnosis? How did they define dyslexia? What is it that your child has difficulty doing? The reason I ask these questions (and more) is that many private reading services, including private schools, are ideologically committed to the concept of dyslexia. Whatever the nature of the child’s reading problem, they attribute it to “dyslexia.” Rarely do they use “dyslexia” in ways that have instructional value.
When comprehensively evaluating the reading of children with reading disabilities, many evaluators limit their evaluations to reading tests and perhaps a quick, superficial observation of the child in class. They fail to supplement testing with a structured analysis of the reader’s learning environment and the teacher’s instructional practices. As two leading university professors, Marjorie Lipson and Karen Wixson, concluded, understanding the struggling reader’s instructional environment is often key to remedying her problems:
From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities
A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis
Parents often ask me, “My child struggles with reading. What’s the best reading program for him?” Unfortunately, for two reasons, this question can’t be answered. First, programs do not teach reading–teachers do. As Richard Allington, past President of the International Reading Association, so rightly asserted: “In the end, enhanced reading proficiency rests largely on the capacity of classroom teachers to provide expert, exemplary reading instruction. . . . Teaching cannot be packaged. Exemplary teaching is not regurgitation of a common script but is responsive to children’s needs. In the end it will become clearer that there are no ‘proven programs,’ just schools in which we find more expert teachers–teachers who need no script to tell them what to do.”
