The Myth of Learning Disabilities

If a certain girl dear to me had been in public school, and if we had been without the resources to get her remediated, she would have been in "special ed". This is a child two standard deviations above the norm as measured by the Stanford-Binet test.  This is a child who loves learning.  This is a child who is intellectually ambitious, and knows how to manage her limitations.   This is a child who is thriving in an academically challenging college preparatory school. 

I think of the children just like her intellectually -- her shadow twins, if you will--who did not have effective remediation and teaching.  These children's futures have been blighted--they have been crippled by inadequate teaching and remediation.  (See Children of the Code).

Jim Williams writes an indictment of "special education" in The Education Gadfly- March 16, 2006.

The co-occurrence of serious reading difficulties with LD classification raises a fundamental question: What is the root cause of these students’ difficulties? In a very real way, classifying as LD a struggling reader who has fallen behind in academic performance (using the discrepancy model described earlier) is little more than an institutionalized way to escape the fundamental question: Is the student legitimately handicapped, or just incapable of reading well? In addition, because special education places no meaningful emphasis on remediation, but rather on “accommodation” to help students progress to subsequent grades, a high proportion of LD students never acquires effective reading skills.

Interventions for struggling readers that produce significant and comparable performance improvement results for both “disabled” students (classified as LD) and general education students are readily available. A growing body of research on these interventions clearly locates the cause of reading difficulties (and consequent academic underperformance) in the child’s educational experiences, and not in something deficient in the child. In other words, the child’s capacity to learn to read is not the problem.

Comments

[Kateaches]

I see so many kids struggle with reading in my heterogeneously-grouped eighth grade classes. What can I do to help them?????????????????

[Liz]

Kat is a teacher of English in the middle grades. Her blog is A Teacher's Outlook on Education

Kat's cri de coeur:

Ah, so why not just differentiate? Well, from my experience, the people that cry "differentiate" the loudest are either administrators, superintendents, educational theorists, or special education personnel that do not interact in a classroom. Virtually all students are going to make an effort if the principal is doing the teaching for a day, and the principal will then crow about how successful differentiation is if you are good enough to do it. Differentiation is exhausting!

In my opinion, differentiated instruction does a grave disservice to both the highest and the lowest of our students. Some muddled middle group might get what they need, but the vast majority of the students are getting the proverbial shaft.

If my children could not read at grade level, I would want them getting direct suppport at their level. I would want them with their academic peers. If you cannot read "See Spot Run", exposing you to "Romeo and Juliet" is not the best use of your time. Surely it is more important that a child learns to read at their level and makes leaps and bounds of growth than feeling like a complete idiot in a class full of kids that know what's going on. I know. I was there.

[Lisa]

There are several issues here:
-The late age at which reading problems are diagnosed. Why aren't reading issues caught sooner? Rather than blaming any one method of instruction, it seems clear that a child whose teacher observes him closely and knows what to look for would catch his reading issues, whereas a child lost in the shuffle or with a teacher untrained in how to spot vulnerabilities in reading would not. I have even met kids with severe language processing impairments whose problems were never flagged for intervention, or whose parents never followed up on the issue, allowing the school to drop the matter.

-The difficulty of catching a child up once s/he has been identified as being behind in reading. Here is a child who is learning to read, while other children are reading to learn. So the child needs reading remediation, but accommodation in subjects that s/he could otherwise do well in, if it weren't for the reading issues (including word problems in math and textbooks in science). This is assuming that there aren't any other processing issues or vulnerabilities.

-Which leads me to the source of my own experience. My students with LD have far more going on than just a delay in learning to read. They also have significantly delayed vocabulary acquisition, slow processing speed, working memory impairment, and attentional vulnerabilities. A few students even read "at grade level" but would not be able to function in a mainstream English class due to the speed and complexity of discussion and the writing requirements. Then there are the small minority of students who don't progress in reading remediation, despite the use of multisensory programs and small group instruction, which some people seem to think is the magic bullet. It isn't. Processing words phonetically requires several layers of analysis and a heavy demand on working memory, which some students find extremely laborious and difficult.

I believe we should stop equating LD with "dyslexia" since the categories overlap, but are certainly not one and the same.