A Tale of Two Posts and One Overdue Shift in Dyslexia Discourse
In the echo chamber of education LinkedIn—where platitudes like “building each other up” often drown out the gritty work of actual reform—I stumbled on a post that cut through the noise. Sheron Fraser-Burgess, PhD, an ethicist steering data/AI governance and FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Ethics), dropped this gem:
“Every school year can be better than the last when educators and leaders build each other up. When teachers recognize and celebrate strengths—in themselves and in others—they strengthen collaboration, deepen trust, and improve outcomes for students, regardless of neurodiversity and needs. That’s what this work is about: collaboration, encouragement, and creating schools where every student and every teacher thrives.”
Amen to that. But as a one-on-one tutor in Sabah who’s spent over a decade untangling kids’ reading knots—not in some ivory tower lab, but in living rooms and kitchens—I couldn’t resist calling out the elephant: How do we “build up” when dissent gets blocked?
I replied with Part 2 of my blog series on the so-called educators who’ve blocked me. Why? Because my discoveries—dyslexia “symptoms” as teachable flaws, not fixed brain glitches—threaten the multimillion-dollar phonics empire.
Sheron’s response? Gold. No defensiveness, just nuance:
“Luqman Michel, I am not sure whether the issue you are confronting is an ethical one. Perhaps the field is relying on a different fact pattern than you are? If you are proposing an evidence-based approach and they reject best-practice, based on this evidence, then it is possible that there is some form of intellectual dishonesty at work. All of these claims could be in contention…”
That’s the dialogue we crave: acknowledging “fact patterns” as fluid, not fossilized. It’s a far cry from the blocks I’ve collected like badges of honor—from influencers peddling “impaired phonological processors” as dyslexia gospel.
And it echoes a quieter revolution brewing elsewhere.
Enter Timothy Shanahan
Flash back to December 16, 2015. Shanahan, a reading research titan and ex–Reading First director, posted “Decoding Dyslexia: A Rose By Any Other Name” on his blog. It was peak phonological dogma: dyslexia as a “neurologically based disorder” where kids’ brains “fail to process information properly,” inferred from reading struggles alone.
He leaned hard on the evidence of the day:
“There are scads of studies revealing that dyslexia is phonological in nature… NICHD research suggests that when elementary kids have reading problems, they tend to be problems with phonological awareness and decoding about 86% of the time.”
86%? That’s the kind of stat that justifies Orton-Gillingham multisensory marathons and successive-blending sorcery—tools I’ve seen waste kids’ weeks when a simple, clean phoneme echo does the trick in days.
I commented back then, challenging the PAD (phonological awareness deficit) narrative I’d been questioning since 2010. Crickets. Brushed off as a lone blogger, not a credentialed insider.
Fast-forward: A Quiet Pivot
On September 13, 2017, Shanahan reissued the post with a “Blast from the Past” preface—and a subtle shift:
“The only thing I would change in it now is the estimate of the phonological/phonemic awareness role in reading problems… More recent data in relatively large studies suggest a somewhat lower incidence of these problems at least with some populations…”
No full mea culpa, but a crack in the facade. That 86%? Dialed back. Thanks to “newer data” showing PAD’s reach isn’t universal.
For ground-pounders like me, it’s validation. I’ve long argued that symptoms often stem from instructional muck—over blended phonics, sight-word myths—not innate doom. In my Sabah sessions, kids decode fluidly without gimmicks. Proof that “dyslexia” often thrives on bad teaching.
Why These Posts Matter Together
Because Sheron’s ethical nudge meets Shanahan’s subtle shift at a perfect inflection point. Both expose the field’s fact-pattern fragility. When “best practice” ignores replicable outliers, it veers into the intellectual dishonesty Sheron flags.
This isn’t about torching phonology—it’s about auditing it. Especially when blocks silence tutors spotting patterns the pros missed.
Sheron nails the “what”: schools where neurodiverse kids and dissenting teachers thrive. Shanahan’s arc hints at the “how”: evolve with evidence, even if it nicks your legacy. My Sabah stories supply the “why”: one kid at a time, unlocking readers without the empire’s baggage.
Let’s build that up.
Educators, ethicists, parents: What’s your fact pattern on PAD’s primacy? Drop a comment—no blocks here.
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