nothin Bill Fills Gaps For Dyslexic Kids | New Haven Independent

Bill Fills Gaps For Dyslexic Kids

Madeline Gersch, 7, with mom, Sarah Levine.

Edgewood first-grader Madeline Gersch has to read a word roughly 50 times before she can recognize it on the page. This process takes longer when she guesses words instead of sounding them out.

Madeline has dyslexia. Her mother is a reading specialist in New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) and gets frustrated when she sees her daughter learning reading techniques that slow down her progress.

When I read with her at home, a lot of times she’ll look at the first letter and make up the word. I’m trying to break her of that. It goes against what she really needs,” said Madeline’s mother, Sarah Levine.

For example, Madeline might see the word dog” and say the word danger” instead, because the picture on the page depicts a dog in danger.

This is happening because New Haven teachers haven’t been fully trained in how to teach dyslexic kids to read, according to Levine.

A bill currently before the Connecticut General Assembly, H.B. 6517, aims to fix this problem statewide. It would incorporate more state oversight into teacher certification and training to ensure teachers can identify students with dyslexia and teach research-based reading techniques.

State-Level Solutions

We have a lot of robust laws within Connecticut, but we were still seeing a lot of the same struggles. Students are not being identified early and not receiving appropriate instruction,” said Decoding Dyslexia-CT founder Allison Quirion.

Decoding Dyslexia has helped push dyslexia-focused education reforms through the state legislature since 2014. Some laws have formalized dyslexia as a learning disability that schools should specifically identify, while others have beefed up literacy training in higher education programs.

Schools have identified far more students with dyslexia since these laws have passed. However, this is still a small fraction of the number of students with dyslexia likely living in Connecticut. The number of students identified with dyslexia is less than one percent of Connecticut students, while research suggests that roughly 10 percent to 20 percent of students have dyslexia.

In addition, the state has barely moved the needle on literacy gaps between students with and students without disabilities.

A state task force met between the fall of 2019 and winter of 2020 to identify what was going wrong. The task force members found that no one is responsible for making sure new teachers get the dyslexia-focused training that the new laws mandated. In addition, districts have no way to know whether their literacy classes meet state standards, since the state has not defined specific targets.

H.B. 6517 sets up an Office of Training Compliance within the Connecticut State Department of Education to provide this check on teacher training. Connecticut universities would have to prove that they have trained all new special education and reading remediation teachers in structured literacy — the kind of reading class Levine wants for her daughter.

Reading Wars

Both Quirion and Levine are staunch advocates of structured literacy,” a set of specific curricula that steadily work through the sounds different letters make.

Research shows that this approach is generally more effective for all kids—and the only option for some kids, like kids with dyslexia.

Many schools, including public schools in New Haven, use balanced literacy” curricula. This compromise in the so-called reading wars” is supposed to provide flexibility to individual teachers to use either the phonics-based, structured literacy or whole language approach, where students absorb how to read from books they are interested in.

For Madeline, any time spent in the whole language approach is just time wasted. Balanced literacy often retains strategies proven to be unhelpful, like teaching students to guess words based on pictures and context.

Madeline needs to practice reading the same sounds over and over again. While kids without dyslexia can remember how to read the word red” after seeing it one to five times, students with dyslexia need to sound it out 50 times. Guessing feels easier to Madeline and students in Levine’s reading classes, but it just prolongs the process of actually learning how to decode words.

When we read, the word set’ could be on same page six times. Every single time, she has to say, Ss. Eh. Tuh. Set.’ Her brain doesn’t remember it,” Levine said.

Levine saw Madeline falling so far behind grade level in her reading classes that she paid for Madeline to go to a private, structured literacy tutor. Since then, she’s seen Madeline’s literacy progress much more quickly.

Madeline loves her teachers at Edgewood School. Levine doesn’t blame them for using balanced literacy instruction when that is what they have been taught to do. She hopes that H.B. 6517 will help New Haven Public Schools consign balanced literacy to the past and enter a research-based, structured literacy future.

Downtown Perspective

From Typhanie Jackson’s perspective as head of New Haven’s special education services, H.B. 6517 looks helpful. Most of the changes pushed in the bill happen at the state or higher education level.

She would even like to see the structured literacy training requirements in the bill expanded to all new teachers — not just special education or reading remediation teachers.

What I see is that the strategies that work in structured literacy for special educators are helpful for all educators. Students receiving special education services spend a great deal of the day in other settings,” Jackson said.

Previous bills require districts to train all teachers and administrators in structured literacy. Under this bill, the Office of Training Compliance would help districts comply with this requirement by providing targets for what this professional development should teach.

Jackson’s main hesitation with H.B. 6517 is whether the state truly will be able to implement it, given state budget constraints. Local school districts like New Haven will need to spend about $5,000 a year to send out a parent survey required by the bill. The state needs to hire new staff at a cost of about $678,240 a year, plus inflation.

Acting Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker testified against H.B. 6517 on the grounds that the education department does not have the resources or capacity to take this new job on.

Allison Quirion said that the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee is working on this problem. She still expects the bill to pass, given its numerous co-sponsors from both political parties.

The Diagnosis Difference

Pre-Pandemic File Photo

Tamiko Jackson-McArthur: No complaints since diagnosis.

Like Sarah Levine, New Haven Board of Education member Tamiko Jackson-McArthur has a daughter with dyslexia. She noticed how much her daughter was struggling in second and third grade and asked her daughter’s school to identify whether she has a disability. After the diagnosis, she learned that several others in her family have dyslexia.

(Jackson-McArthur asked to keep her daughter’s name and grade anonymous for medical privacy reasons.)

Her daughter’s diagnosis made a huge difference for her daughter. Normal reading interventions weren’t working, but one-on-one sessions focused on letter combinations got her daughter over that hump.

Her daughter continues to have dyslexia accommodations, like listening to questions on an assignment instead of reading them. Since teachers identified the dyslexia, Jackson-McArthur has seen her daughter soar,” she said.

The system really has addressed dyslexia in a good way. I have no complaints,” Jackson-McArthur said.

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