A child is sitting with a book open in front of them in a fourth-grade classroom in Ohio, Georgia, or Idaho. For the third time, they are having trouble with the same sentence. The teacher might not know why. There may or may not be a way for their school to find out. But states all over the country are slowly but surely putting together that system. This is happening faster than most people think. The real question is whether it stays together.
It went from 22 states to 42 states between 2013 and 2017 that had laws specifically designed to help find and help kids with dyslexia. In a short amount of time, that’s a big change. Martha Youman and Nancy Mather, two researchers, have been keeping a close eye on this growth. They’ve noticed that state laws now cover a wide range of issues, from early screening programs and teacher training to making accommodations for students with dyslexia and raising awareness about the disorder in schools as a whole. There are many ways that it feels like a long-overdue fix.
People who make policy have always seemed to have a poor understanding of dyslexia, even though science kept making things clearer. For many years, researchers have known that dyslexia is caused by a phonological-core deficit. This is a specific reading problem with words that has to do with how the brain handles language and sound, which is different from other reading problems. But for a long time, the word “dyslexia” didn’t show up very often in school policies, intervention plans, or programs for training teachers. The laws that are now catching up are not coming before the evidence. It’s coming up behind it.
Still, catching up is important. As new laws are passed, they are pushing schools toward what experts call “Structured Literacy.” This is a way of teaching reading that is clear, systematic, builds on itself, and is based on clear feedback between teacher and student. This isn’t a special program made just for kids who have trouble reading. There is evidence that it helps a lot more students, including a lot of people who have trouble reading for reasons that have never been officially named. It turns out that everyone benefits from good reading instruction. The school systems have been slow to organize around that finding, even though it’s not hard to understand.
Literacy experts are always worried about the difference between what the law says and what happens in the classroom. Implementation science is the study of how evidence-based practices are widely used. It shows something unsettling: laws that are meant to be helpful can fail quietly, without anyone calling them a failure. If a state requires everyone to be tested for dyslexia but doesn’t hold districts accountable, districts may move slowly, partially, or not at all. It’s possible for teachers to finish a required training module and not change the way they teach reading. It’s possible that some states have powerful legislative language that is mostly unused in policy documents.
Pay close attention to what’s going on in programs that prepare people to become teachers. Some people have said that some programs don’t teach future teachers structured, evidence-based reading lessons because there aren’t any rules that colleges of education have to follow. When they first start teaching, new teachers don’t know how to spot or help students who have trouble with phonological processing. That leads to a problem further down the line that identification law alone can’t fix.
There is also the question of what it means. As more states make the word “dyslexia” part of their laws, it could be used to describe a wide range of reading problems that need different ways of being taught. It’s not nitpicky to be clear here; it has direct effects on which students get which interventions and how well those interventions work.
There has been real progress that should be recognized. It took a lot of work from researchers, parents, advocates, and lawmakers to get this far. But there is a type of legislative victory that feels decisive but doesn’t get the hard work done. The facts about reading and dyslexia are easy to understand. The laws are starting to come to terms with it. That chapter hasn’t been written yet about whether schools change or not.
