“Statistically, more American children suffer long-term life-harm from the process of learning to read than from parental abuse, accidents, and all other childhood diseases and disorders combined. In purely economic terms, reading related difficulties cost our nation more than the war on terrorism, crime, and drugs combined.”
Children of the Code and the National Institute for Family Literacy
Perspectives on Language and Literacy, Spring 2012
Shocking, isn’t it? More long-term life-harm from the process of learning to read than from all of those other horrors combined.
Years ago I heard national expert Jeanne Chall say, “If a child leaves school unable to read or write, then we [the educators] have failed them.”
I believe that to be true. While speaking is a natural brain-readiness function, reading is unnatural, and requires instruction. Not only the scientific reliability of that instruction but the delivery of the instruction plays into whether the child is able to learn to read or not. Comfort, pace, intensity, persistence, teaching to automaticity prior to moving on to new skills—all these are essential. Then there is the reality that between 10-15% of all children will have a language learning difficulty of some sort—not easily identified/teased out immediately, but more likely to respond to appropriate intervention earlier rather than later. There is a huge psychological component to learning to read, also; all children come to school wanting to learn. Why is it, then, that so many develop a sense of failure—and then naturally assume that the failure is all theirs?
Former President of the International Dyslexia Association Emerson Dickman has identified an approach he describes as “The Principle of the Three I’s”: “an informed curriculum taught by an informed educator, and implemented with the appropriate intensity.”
Such instruction is hard work. An enormous body of on-going research enables educators to know “what works” (the informed curriculum). Elementary educators and special educators “get it.” They know that the teaching must occur in a psychologically “safe” environment, with instruction that is sequential, multisensory, interactive, structured, daily, and student-involved. Children learn best when engaged, moving about, interacting with peers (read any/all of the books/research by Judy Willis, MD, MEd), with few external distractions. Worksheet after worksheet, lectures, textbook-driven classwork while children sit passively: we know this doesn’t prepare students for the 21st century, especially students with learning difficulties. While these realities continue to be true in middle and upper school, it becomes harder to deliver the instruction with sufficient intensity and consistency and appropriateness to large groups of students across the day.
This problem related to teaching reading is a huge contributor to the secondary drop-out rate, the lower percentage of students with learning difficulties graduating, the underemployment of students identified with learning problems, and the high rate of juvenile offenders with poor reading and academic skills. Yes, it’s all shocking.
We know what to do. And we MUST do it, day after day, for each child. This is why we have the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—to assure that we level the playing field for these students with exceptionalities before they’ve been damaged by the process of learning to read. As the opening quote says, it’s far more expensive in the long run if we don’t teach every child who’s capable to read, not only in monetary cost but in human cost.
