We Know Better, It's Time to Do Better: Supporting Students with Dyslexia
- DocHolbrook
- Oct 5
- 5 min read
I spent much of my early teaching career working in a 3–5 building. That meant I was teaching 8- to 12-year-olds—children who should have been building confidence, mastering content, and seeing themselves as readers. But what I saw, day after day, was very different. The majority of the students I worked with had never learned how to read.
Instead, I saw the damage balanced literacy had done, not just academically but socially and emotionally. I saw students flip desks over rather than let their classmates know they couldn’t read a passage aloud. I saw the shame, the frustration, the quiet retreat of children who believed they were “dumb” when in fact they had simply never been given the right instruction.
One year I had a fourth-grade student who couldn’t read. I didn’t know how to help her. I remember sitting with her, heartbroken, realizing that all the strategies I’d been taught in college weren’t working. That moment changed the course of my career. It lit a fire in me that still burns today: children deserve teachers who know how to teach them to read.
My Own Story as a Learner
The truth is, my frustration with students not learning to read has always been tied to my own story. I went to school in the early 1990s, right in the height of the whole-word reading era. Recently, when my mom moved, she handed me a box of my old school things. Inside was my second-grade report card. Reading it now, as an educator, is painful. The comments weren’t just harsh—they revealed a lack of understanding about how children actually learn to read. My teacher expected me to “just know” things I had never been taught.
I still remember being kept in from recess to rewrite assignments because my spelling was poor. I remember erasing so much that I tore holes in the paper, only to be scolded again for ruining the page. That year nearly broke me. I hated school, and for the first time, I felt like maybe I wasn’t smart enough.
Even now, with a doctorate, I still have moments of insecurity about spelling. My spelling only really improved when I went through my Orton-Gillingham training—as an adult. I finally learned rules I should have been taught in second grade. And it changed everything.
Thirty Years Later, Still the Same Story
I was in elementary school over 30 years ago. And yet, when I walk into classrooms today, I still see children suffering in the exact same ways I did. Decades have passed, and an entire generation of students has been lost to methods that we now know don’t work. That’s thirty years of children leaving school without ever learning how to read—thirty years of doors closing before they ever had a chance to open.
What makes this especially painful is that we no longer live in the dark. We have more research than ever. We know how the brain learns to read. We know what dyslexia is and what it isn’t. We know that explicit, systematic instruction in phonics and phonological awareness is not optional—it’s essential. And yet, too many schools cling to outdated practices like balanced literacy, repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
It’s time. It’s time to stand up and say enough is enough. Our children have suffered long enough. This is no longer about personal preference or ideology. It’s not about clinging to old philosophies or the comfort of “the way we’ve always done it.”
I tell teachers all the time: you’ve done the best you could with the knowledge you had, for the students who were in front of you at the time. But now that we know better, we must teach better. To do anything less would be to knowingly allow another generation of children to suffer—and that’s something we can no longer accept.
How Schools Can Do Better for Students with Dyslexia
So how do we make sure no more students become instructional casualties? Here’s the path forward:
1. Early and Ongoing Assessment
Screen every child early—and don’t stop at second grade. Older students deserve assessments that dig into phonics, phonological awareness, fluency, and automaticity. Without these, gaps remain hidden.
2. Timed Assessments for Fluency
Accuracy isn’t enough. Students must be able to decode quickly and automatically. Oral reading fluency measures, nonsense word fluency, and maze assessments are essential for identifying whether students are truly on track.
3. Teacher Knowledge is the First Line of Defense
Teachers must know what dyslexia looks like and how to respond. That means training in phonics, phonemic awareness, structured literacy, and how to match instruction to the need. When teachers aren’t trained, kids fall through the cracks.
4. Rebuild MTSS with Reading Science at the Core
MTSS can’t be a flowchart on paper—it must be a system that works in practice:
Tier 1: Every student receives evidence-based reading instruction, with explicit, systematic phonics and phonological awareness.
Tier 2: Small-group instruction targeted to the specific deficit, progress monitored for adequate growth—not just minimal progress.
Tier 3: Intensive, evidence-based interventions for students with the most significant needs, delivered by trained professionals.
5. Normalize Dyslexia Conversations
Schools must stop avoiding the word. Dyslexia is not something to hide—it’s something to name, understand, and address. Parents and teachers alike deserve honesty and transparency.
Enough is Enough: A Call to Action
I’ve watched my own daughter struggle under balanced-literacy systems that didn’t give her what she needed, just as I once struggled under whole language when I was a child. I’ve seen her frustration and her tears, and I’ve watched far too many of my students carry the same burden. My story as a learner, a teacher, a parent, and now a district leader all point to the same truth: our current systems are not enough. Whole language failed kids of my generation, balanced literacy failed a generation after, and it continues to fail too many today. Think about that—over 30 years of children passing through schools without ever truly learning how to read.
And this failure isn’t just about test scores—it’s about dignity, confidence, and opportunity. It’s about the child who never raises a hand because the words won’t come, the child who acts out because it’s easier to be labeled “behavioral” than to admit they can’t read, and the parents—like mine, like me—who trusted schools only to discover how much was missing.
It doesn’t have to be this way. With evidence-based instruction, strong MTSS frameworks, trained teachers, and honest conversations, we can give every child—including those with dyslexia—the chance to succeed. But the time for waiting is over. We cannot afford another 30 years of failure.
The question for every leader, every teacher, every district is this: how many more children will we let slip through before we act? We know better now—it’s time to do better.
See you next Sunday!
References
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International Dyslexia Association. (2002). Definition of dyslexia. Retrieved from https://dyslexiaida.org
Lyon, G. R., Shaywitz, S. E., & Shaywitz, B. A. (2003). A definition of dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 53(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-003-0001-9
Moats, L. C. (2020). Teaching reading is rocket science, 2020: What expert teachers of reading should know and be able to do. American Federation of Teachers.
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Shaywitz, S. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading problems at any level. Alfred A. Knopf.
Torgesen, J. K. (2004). Lessons learned from research on interventions for students who have difficulty learning to read. In P. McCardle & V. Chhabra (Eds.), The voice of evidence in reading research (pp. 355–382). Brookes.
Vaughn, S., & Fletcher, J. M. (2021). Identifying and teaching students with significant reading problems. American Educator, 45(2), 4–11.
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