That’s Verifiably Not True”: A Deleted Comment on Struggling Readers Who Are Not Dyslexic

 

Here is a post on Facebook that I commented on and I received a message from Admin saying that my comment has been removed as it is not verifiable. Please scroll down to see my notes.

The Dyslexia Parent Circle — Your Dyslexia Expert

Here is the post and comments. 

 

Admin

What’s something your child did this summer that made you proud?

It doesn’t have to be about reading. Summer is for living, and our kids are so much more than their struggles.

Tell us something great. We could all use a good story heading into the school year.

Elizabeth Davis

She actually started reading a little bit. She is 10 years old will be 11 in November and this has been a struggle ever since school age. She was not able to learn to read.

Your Dyslexia Expert

Woohoo! That’s a big win. If you want more help with teaching her how to read that’s what I do for a living. Let me know if you want to talk more or check out my site at yourdyslexiaexpert.com. I’m also happy to provide information on how to find other professionals.

Luqman Michel

Elizabeth Davis, does she have any acuity problems- hearing, eyesight etc.

If not, most probably she is a shut down kid.

Elizabeth Davis

Eyesight she has to wear glasses. The glasses are new

Luqman Michel

Elizabeth Davis her problem could be the same as the over 80 kids I taught. She has most probably been taught letter sounds wrongly and is a shut down kid.

Elizabeth Davis

I do know that I was teaching her wrong to start with because I got her a Tutor that has dyslexia training years ago, and she was awesome with her, but she lived out of town and she was not willing to do it over the Internet so it got so hard for us to keep it up. We were not able to get there most of the time and it was just hard but she was so awesome with her and she taught me that we were actually learning some of the letter sounds wrong. She said some kids can still learn it that way, but some kids cannot. This was before we knew she had dyslexia, but the Tutor was teaching her that way anyways because she said that way she could learn it either way.

Luqman Michel

I believe this is her problem. Please find out from admin if you could talk to me on WhatsApp. I can help you.

Your Dyslexia Expert

That’s verifiably not true

Luqman Michel

Your Dyslexia Expert, please tell us why this is not a verifiable truth. Elizabeth Davis herself has acknowledged that she had taught her daughter wrong to start with.

My note now:

About 70% of children become confused when letters are taught with extraneous sounds — for example, buh‑ah-tuh for bat. Many eventually figure reading out between grades 4 and 6. However, around 20% shut down entirely and risk leaving school without learning to read. These children are often misclassified as dyslexic, when in fact they simply need clear, direct instruction.

Let’s look at my note above with what experts have said:

In interviews and writings, Nancy Hennessy (Nancy Hennessy, M.Ed. Former president of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) draws a clear line between true dyslexia and the much larger group of struggling readers:

“Even if we settle on a middle number, let us say 10%; that still leaves a lot of children who are not dyslexic, whose brains are not wired any different way, who have reading difficulty. We are not supporting the learning of our teachers in order for them to do what we are talking about. We still don’t have the capacity nor the will to change what it is that we are doing with reading early on and so consequently unless we make those significant changes we are not only going to lose the dyslexics but I am also concerned about these other children; these other struggling readers.”

Hennessy’s point is not unique. For decades, researchers and later journalists have argued the same three things: dyslexia is real but smaller than the pool of struggling readers; many of those children do not have a differently wired brain; and the larger failure is early instruction plus teacher preparation, not a mass epidemic of hidden disability.

The closest match is G. Reid Lyon, who popularized the phrase “instructional casualties.” In his Children of the Code interviews and congressional testimony he said, in substance, that of the children who hit the wall in reading, the great majority have never been taught the code well; only a small remainder look like true dyslexia once instruction is adequate. He also said effective early teaching can bring 90–95 percent of poor readers to average levels.

Louisa Moats has said the same thing. In Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science, she wrote that most reading failure is unnecessary, that classroom teaching can prevent difficulty in all but a small percentage of children with serious disorders, and that the bottleneck is what teachers were never taught. That is Hennessy’s “we are not supporting the learning of our teachers” in another register.

Sharon Vaughn and Jack Fletcher have repeated the distinction for years: there is dyslexia, but the vast majority of low reading achievement is preventable. With organized systems of explicit instruction, they estimate close to 95 percent of students can become reasonably successful readers; the remaining few who still fail after good core teaching plus intervention are the ones more likely to have a persistent disability. Fletcher has also said you cannot remediate your way to literacy—you have to change general-education teaching first.

That last point is the same as Hennessy’s warning: if you only build services for identified dyslexics, you still lose the larger group of struggling readers. The argument is that weak instruction manufactures struggling readers who are not neurologically distinct.

Nancy Young’s Ladder of Reading: only about 10–15 percent need intensive, specialized teaching; a much larger group needs explicit code instruction but is not dyslexic. That is the same “middle number of 10 percent” move Hennessy makes.

Jennifer Buckingham and others in Australia use Lyon’s term directly: schools still produce too many instructional casualties—children who could have learned to read if Foundation–Year 2 teaching had been different.

 

Classroom and parent advocates in the science-of-reading wave (for example in Time and the NYT literacy reporting) keep saying structured, explicit teaching is not only for dyslexic children. If you wait for a diagnosis, you miss the children whose brains are typical and whose instruction was not.

What they share with Hennessy is a two-population claim:

A smaller group with a genuine, persistent word-reading disability.

A larger group whose difficulty is created or left unfixed by early teaching and by the fact that teachers were not trained to do the work.

 

The disagreement in the field is not usually whether that second group exists. It is how large it is, how much explicit teaching typical children need, and whether systems have the will to change kindergarten and first-grade practice rather than expand dyslexia identification after the damage is done. Hennessy was saying that in the mid-2000s. Lyon, Moats, Fletcher, and Vaughn were saying it before and after. Hanford made it public.