Forrest ConsultingA high point of my time in public education was working in a technical high school, supporting a model high school special education reading class. Initially, my role was to talk to our students and ask them if they would be willing to learn early literacy skills at this late stage. Many of these students were reading many years below grade level but had arrived in high school with no reading services in their IEP. For many, the decisive selling point was that Reading would be a class without homework. If you are not a good reader, homework is hard. But, not surprisingly, many wanted to learn to be better readers so they would not be held back in reaching their secondary and post-secondary aspirations.
As my role evolved into providing assistive technology support for these students, I began to spend more time in our special education reading classroom. It was encouraging to see how many students were buying in and receiving specialized literacy instruction that they needed for perhaps the first time. Students sometimes asked, “why didn’t anyone ever teach me this?”
Reading a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times made me think of those students and wonder how things might have been different for them if they had received the literacy instruction they needed and were entitled to in elementary school. The article was part of the “What Is School For?” Op-Ed series in the New York Times. The article, written by Emily Hanford, is entitled School Is for Learning to Read. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/opinion/us-school-reading.html. In detailing the longstanding problem of ineffective and unscientific literacy instruction, the article helps to answer our students’ questions as to why, when it came to reading, “didn’t anyone ever teach me this?”
The first paragraph of Ms. Hanford’s article reads as follows. “The most important thing schools can do is teach children how to read. If you can read, you can learn anything. If you can’t, almost everything in school is difficult. Word problems. Test directions. Biology homework. Everything comes back to reading.”
The recent amendment to special education regulations, effective July 1, 2023, requiring districts to conduct literacy screening for students in grades K-3 twice yearly is a positive step. However, identifying readers needing additional reading support will yield limited results until all students have access to literacy instruction aligned with what science has taught us about teaching kids how to read.
Sometimes, educational priorities are clear. When it comes to public education, we should all be able to agree on the importance of students getting the literacy instruction they need when they need it.
