If you haven't checked out the Melissa & Lori Love Literacy podcast, I encourage you to add it to your rotation if you want to know more about how kids learn to read and how they should be taught how to read.
But right now, I'm focused on the latest episode! Holly Lane is such a wonderful advocate for good reading instruction and good science! Not only that, she is able to break things down in such a way that anyone can understand it - and we know that this is a problem in the world of research-to-practice.
I especially love how she breaks down the term evidence-based. So many people don't understand that just because something is evidence-based, doesn't mean that it's good! Often, the term evidence-based refers to how good the research design was, NOT how good the program is. Holly explains it better than I ever could, so I encourage you to listen where ever you get your podcasts or at this link to Episode 159: Back to School: Science of Reading or Snake Oil with Holly Lane.
So, It's been a while since I wrote anything for this blog. For several months there I was very busy. I joined Stand For Children as an advocate for the new literacy bill that was being written, I was writing things to the legislature to get the literacy bill passed, and we did.
What I Wrote
The First One
I wrote and shared this in several meetings with legislators in the ramp-up to the bill going to the Education Committee. And I submitted it as testimony. I intended to speak at the first hearing, but they decided not to have public comment.
Hello, thank you for your time.
My name is Anna Ingram and I am a Eugene 4J parent, but I am also part of the dissemination team for the National Center on Improving Literacy at the U of O.
My son’s reading disability story is long, but I’ll try to be brief.
I was concerned about my son’s reading instruction starting in Kindergarten because his teacher told us that the class would study letters as they came up organically.
When he was struggling in first grade his teacher gave me a list of 200 common words that she wanted him to memorize. I knew this wasn’t how kids learn to read, but we tried it anyway. The school did NOT provide him with extra help. They told us that he would catch up, he was fine, and one day it would just click.
When I told his second-grade teacher that I was concerned about his reading, she said he was doing fine and would catch up. Since the school wasn’t concerned we decided to have him assessed privately for a disability.
My son was diagnosed with suspected dyslexia. He started the 3rd grade reading 18 words a minute with 80 being the goal. He didn’t understand that you write letters from left to right on the same line to form words. He was in the THIRD grade. Recommended tips for reading unknown words? look at the picture, guess from the first letter, or figure it out based on context. These practices are known to confuse kids and make learning to read harder.Actually sounding out the letters in the word was not recommended.
We finally got IEP Services but he still did not receive evidence-based instruction. He's learned to read because I shell out thousands of dollars a year to have him tutored with explicit, systematic instruction.
I’ve worked with reading researchers at the U of O for almost 20 years. I KNOW what good instruction looks like but I couldn’t get my son the support he needed. What happens to families who can’t pay for private evaluations or tutors or who don’t have time to advocate - because it’s nearly a full-time job?
This is a question of equity. Students with invisible disabilities should be part of the equity conversation.
There has to be systematic statewide change because my son’s story is NOT unique.
While I don’t believe that this bill will fix all of our problems, It is a place to start. It has many of the pieces that have been successful in other states. We need to pass this bill and make sure districts are on board so we can give all kids the chance that my son never had.
The Second One
After they wrote some amendments to the bill, they did end up having public comment and I signed up to do that. The committee went way over time and cut all public comments down to 1 minute. I did the best I could in the moment but did become emotional. You can watch it or read it.
My name is Anna Ingram. Thank you for allowing me to speak today. I am the parent of a child with a reading disability, but I have also worked with reading researchers from the UofO for nearly 20 years.
I support this bill because I believe all children have the right to learn to read. For most children, that means explicit, systematic, instruction.
It took 2 full years of complete reading failure and an evaluation for reading disabilities to get my son help at school. He received so little instruction in kindergarten that we didn’t know he was a struggling reader until first grade. And yet, with a poor curriculum and lack of evidence-based instruction, my son continued to fail while getting no support at school.
My son was diagnosed with suspected dyslexia and anxiety related to reading the summer before 3rd grade, but it took the first 3 months of that year to get him any services. I thought that once he was identified with a disability that everything would get better. It did not.
I try very hard not tothink about the what if’s in my son’s life. What if I had pushed harder to get help sooner? What if he had received evidence-based instruction? Mostly I ask why he wasn’t given that chance to succeed in the earliest grades.
He has a reading disability, but he is also a curriculum casualty of our faulty system.
The legacy of poor reading curriculums and instruction for my son are
The years it took to reduce his fear and trauma about reading.
The years of lost electives so he can have a class for extended work time.
The accommodations in his IEP that are rarely met.
The thousands of dollars and time spent on tutoring in explicit, systematic reading instruction for the last 8 years.
And the extra time and effort he has to put into reading and writing compared to his peers.
My family has the time and resources to help my son succeed, But there are so many families who can’t pay for private evaluations or tutors, and who don’t have the time to advocate. There has to be systematic statewide change because my son’s story is NOT unique.
This bill is a first step to giving kids the chance that my son never had.
And Then
In addition to all that, I was also attending meetings with 4j leadership. As part of that, I asked my son some questions about his experiences. This is what he wanted to say:
Or, I didn't mean it to be. I just have been thinking a lot about this quote:
"Special education students are often general education students first."
I have no idea who said that first, or even if it's a direct quote from anyone. What I do know is that when I see people argue against evidence-based, systematic reading instruction - and they do argue against it - often one of their talking points is that THOSE are the only students who need the heavy phonics drills and constant practice. Now, not addressing the "otherness" that people use for students who struggle and students who have disabilities...okay, I will address that briefly:
Sorry, I have to sidebar for this: You know people who believe in nurturing young readers with reading nooks and picture books to make happy learners are often the same people who do not beleive in the science of reading? They believe that you can make life-long lovers of reading if you just give them a comfy place to sit and interesting books to "read" (It's not really reading). These are also the same people who are just not concerned about the OTHER 20% (more like 40%), because they have a disability or a reading difficulty. They will say that THOSE kids are getting special education and so general education teachers don't need to be concerned about that.
I'm making sweeping generalizations here and I don't mean to sound anti-teacher. Teachers are only as good as what they know, and many are not taught in their teacher preparation programs how children actually learn to read. And school districts have NOT picked up the slack for this lack of education and understanding. Also, this has been going on in Teacher-Prep programs for decades, so it's self-purpetuating now. UGH.
And don't even get me started on using poor instructional practices in gen-ed and then expecting SPED to fix it!
But here's the key:
There are rarely students who come into school (kindergarten) with an IEP for a learning disability. (Some kids are going to come into school with an IEP - it's called something else in pre-k - already in place, generally, that's going to be students who are maybe in life skills classrooms or who have a visible disability. I can't speak to that experience because I'm just not familiar enough with it, so in this context, we are really talking about learning disabilities in reading, and in NO WAY do I want to diminish the struggles of the kids with other disabilities because when it comes down to the systems that hurt our kids, those systems are the same. That may be a conversation for another day.) And, there isn't really any reason that a student should come into K with an identified reading disability. So, that student is in the general education classroom. That student will stay in the general education classroom. If that student has no real behavioral concerns, they will simply slip through the cracks while they sit in the corner and look at the pictures in books while the teacher tells the parent that they will just get it one day.
UNLESS...unless all the students in the general education classroom are given evidence-based, cumulative, systematic instruction (or structured literacy, whatever you want to call it), AND that teacher has been trained in how children learn to read based on years of evidence from brain science and education research (among other things), AND that teacher continues to get high-quality professional development and coaching about and in the science of reading. AND that teacher has an administration in her building who ALSO understands how kids learn to read and supports her in her endeavor to get all her students reading.
THAT teacher, will see a student who continues to struggle even with high-quality instruction and can say, that child needs more help, let's put him in a smaller group, let's get him some additional instruction, let's give him more opportunities to respond. AND, if that doesn't work, she can say, let's talk about referring this child for an evaluation for special education. And let's actually have that referral in place by the beginning of first grade...and while we are at it, let's not wait! Let's go ahead and put that child in a one-on-one situation with a teacher, or a small group that is really going slow because they haven't reached mastery yet. Let's do that BEFORE the IEP is done!
This doesn't have to be so difficult!
I don't mean that this doesn't have to be difficult for that teacher or that student. This stuff IS difficult. It's hard to be a teacher and it's hard to be a student with a disability, but when you have teachers who are not trained appropriately, who are inadvertently doing more harm to students by using outdated methods to "teach" reading, that only makes it exponentially harder for everyone involved.
So it begs the question - WHY ARE WE STILL DOING IT THIS WAY?
There are so many free resources out there it's ridiculous. I was just looking at the OregonRTIi website and they have SO many great FREE resources!
Sidebar: don't get me started with the people who say RTI is a wait to fail model. It's NOT. It gets implemented that way in a lot of places, and they are doing it WRONG! Also feel free to check out MTSS which is very similar and doesn't have the baggage that RTI has (even though they are really similar). Again, I am specifically talking about RTI as a response to poor reading outcomes, not anything else that districts may be using Response to Intervention for. I'm looking at this strictly through the lense of how a response should happen if a child is struggling to read.
Resources
Professional Development does not have to be super expensive! There are loads of resources out there that are free or inexpensive.
Oregon RTIi
Video Recordings and Modules - So many great recordings from really knowledgeable presenters. Scroll down to the videos, but also don't miss the modules at the top!
The Science of Reading Professional Development Modules - Do you need to deliver some PD in your school or district? Don't know where to start with the Science of Reading? Oregon RTIi has already done the heavy lifting for you! From the website: "These slide decks are intended as a resource for school leaders who provide professional development for staff in the area of literacy."
I just listened to this today and I was so inspired by the people out there trying to solve this problem and coming at it from so many different lenses. Really great stuff here.
Okay, maybe that's a little extreme, but I didn't set out to do any of this. I mean, I graduated with a Creative Writing degree. It wasn't until I was a senior at West Virginia that I realized I should have done something a little more marketable - like marketing! I'm also a product of my generation, right? If the internet and website development had been a thing when I was in high school, my whole trajectory may have been different.
But it turns out that what I really wanted was balance (not balanced literacy, ACTUAL balance). I wanted to have a job that was just a job, make enough money to be comfortable, and be able to leave the job on Friday and not think about it for the weekend. It turns out that office jobs are sort of right up my alley. I worked in a job that I didn't really like for a number of years, but I enjoyed my coworkers so it was bearable. I was downsized in 2003 and I took the Oregon Reading First job because
I wanted some stability (I knew there was funding for at least 5 years), and
I had been planning my wedding and discovered that I had a bit of a knack for event planning.
I didn't know ANYTHING about reading, teaching reading, or reading research. I was just looking for a job.
Fortunately or unfortunately, my job wasn't the kind of thing that you left at the office. I traveled, I got calls after hours, and I worked lots of overtime. But as the years passed, I became invested. I listened to what the researchers and coaches were saying, I started to understand the data that they were looking at and I appreciated the passion that everyone had for helping kids learn to read.
Then, I moved on to the Reading Clinic where I spent a lot of time talking to parents - Parents who didn't know how to help their kids, parents who were desperate for help, and parents who needed a sympathetic ear. And as the years progressed and I spent more and more time reading reports and talking to our tutors and our grad students, I became more knowledgeable and more invested.
And then suddenly I was the one who didn't know how to help my son, I was a desperate parent, and I needed a sympathetic ear.
Why Am I Even Talking About This?
Because those of us who have been in the fight for years are battle weary. We're cynical and maybe just a little bitter. Some days the rage keeps us going. Some days, we feel righteous power...and some days we don't.
All I'm saying here is that sometimes we don't ask to be in the position we are in. And some days that position is more difficult than others.
This past week I found myself really feeling pulled in too many directions and it turns out that a lot of self-doubt crops up when I get pulled in too many directions...and maybe I just want to go watch my son play some basketball and have a little party and not think about the state of literacy in our country for a minute. We all have to take some time to recharge occasionally.
Advocacy is downright draining especially when there are emotions involved.😊
Not to worry, I'm already back at it. I am STILL an #accidentalliteracyadvocate
Editor Note: I started this back in December but never finished, so I'm finishing it now.
I'm Exhausted.
I know that I'm not alone and that my son has people who care about him and want him to do well, but it is really f-ing exhausting to keep hitting my head against the same wall. I've emailed my son's SPED teacher at least once a week asking questions, requesting help, and suggesting what needs to happen and I just don't understand why everything takes so much time!
You know what else I don't understand? This feeling that he needs to stand on his own two feet immediately. Like, why isn't he just advocating for himself? Well, gee, I don't know, maybe it's because he keeps hearing about "fairness" as in - it wouldn't be fair if you took the test in another room or for a second time, even though that's in his IEP. Maybe it's because he had a teacher in the 8th grade who told him that IEPs shouldn't be a thing and that he was just asking for special treatment.
Sidebar: I don't actually know what was said in that 8th-grade meeting with his teacher, I just know that he went in and advocated for himself and he came out screaming that he would never speak to that man again. The information about special treatment is what we were able to pull out of him.
Everyone is talking about the pandemic and the learning loss and the social-emotional impact on all students, so why are they not treating him like he's had learning loss and social-emotional impact from the pandemic? He isn't advocating for himself. Don't just say, you should advocate for yourself 16 year old who basically didn't have an 8th-grade year! Maybe start by reaching out to him. Build a relationship so he can have some trust in you! Say, "We want to teach you how to advocate for yourself. Here are some tools, and we will try to do this in a systematic way so that it's easier for you." Here is how to write an f-ing email!! Yeah, that's right, my kid will not read or write emails, so will someone at school please teach him some tools to do that?! Because me telling him and offering help is not WORKING!
In case you can't tell, December was HARD y'all. My son got a D+ in history (which he loves! He loves history! I'm not so sure about this particular class, but he does love history.) He got that D because he didn't complete a huge assignment in time and it was locked. He was told he could email it to the teacher before the term was over. So, he recorded an audio file with his thoughts on the assignment (which he has been allowed to do, but it hasn't really been defined specifically), but he had trouble attaching it to the email and then he tried linking it and whatever, the permissions were off and she couldn't listen to it. But she didn't let him know that until AFTER the term was over. She sent him a Google notification that she needed access after the last day of the term - but as I stated above with multiple exclamation points - HE DOESN'T READ HIS EMAIL!! So, she just didn't grade the assignment and gave him a D+. Now, I didn't figure this out until like 5 days later. Did she email me to tell me that this happened? Did she contact the SPED case manager to ask about this? Did she even mention this to my son when she saw him at the start of the new term? No...that would be a hard NO.
Fast Forward to this week, post break. We had an IEP meeting that felt, if not productive, at least validating. And we dropped Spanish and picked up American Sign Langauge (which they did in 1 day!). This is a load off our minds because I think Spanish was going to be a very heavy lift. So, that's where we are. We're still fighting, we're still working toward the teachers bridging that gap for him. Reaching out to him first so he maybe feels like someone cares.
Circling back to the title of this post - I'm with you, SPED Moms (and dads too, but in my experience, the dads don't feel it quite so viscerally), I'm here in solidarity with all of you. This is hard stuff. Lack of staff and lack of understanding in schools doesn't help. So - keep on keepin' on and know that you are not alone. 💪
So, I'm moving this blog to a website to make it a bit more dynamic and also more user-friendly.
This blog will still be up and running, but the web addresses will change slightly. Going to dyslexiaeugene.com will still get you to the right place, it just won't be THIS place.
I'm going to make the leap in a few days so hopefully, it goes smoothly!
If you haven't heard of Emily Hanford then you haven't been around the reading instruction/dyslexia world long enough. Emily Hanford is one of the reasons that the Science of Reading is such a big conversation right now. And...she's a fabulous journalist and weaver of stories. Not fictional stories, but the real horrifying truths about reading in the US.
You may have seen on my Educate Yourself page, the link to APM Reports. Originally, that was a link to the series Hard To Read and now it is also a link to Sold a Story. In fact, you can listen to a whole series of stories by Emily Hanford that will be enlightening, disturbing, and anger-inducing - whatever your emotion is, it will be provoked by these stories.
If you've been following Sold a Story, you may know where this is going.
I was 28 years old. I had a bachelor's degree in creative writing. I was about to get married. I was planning to start a family (as soon as my soon-to-be husband was out of the National Guard). And I knew absolutely NOTHING about teaching reading, how kids learned to read, or that there were different camps of belief in how to go about that teaching. It would be much later that I would connect my own slow, laborious reading with dyslexia.
It turned out that I didn't need to know any of those things to do my job. But as it happened, my job was really pretty much done once people were settled in their seats and listening to presenters. That meant I could sit down and listen if I wanted to as well. And I absorbed information as the years passed - listening to people like Anita Archer and Jan Hasbrouk talk about good instruction and assessment.
Sidebar: if you haven't ever heard Anita Archer speak, I encourage you to find some of her presentations online. She's wonderful. Here's a quick video that you can watch.
A shift, but still in the reading world
As Reading First (RF) started to implode nationally, I was on to thinking about having another baby, our first being born in 2006. The funding for RF was going to end and I was going to have to find another position. But, because I knew I was planning to get pregnant again, I didn't think I wanted to change departments. The director of ORFC was also changing positions. She was starting a little free reading clinic right there in our department and she needed an assistant. She told me that the job was mine. That it would not be challenging and I might even find it boring, but I could keep my .8 FTE Schedule. Since the first task was to build a website for the new clinic, I decided I was in.
So there I was, in 2008, helping to start a reading clinic that provided reading instruction one-on-one to students in Kindergarten through 5th grade. We did a soft launch with flyers in schools. We had more than 100 kids on our waitlist before we even got started. I think we started by serving 16 kids...I can't remember, but once we got going, we served 30 kids every term.
Originally the idea for this clinic was to bring kids up to grade level and send them on their way. We discovered in that first year that proving good instruction for 45 minutes a day, twice a week wasn't going to do it and we continued to have a growing waitlist even though we didn't advertise. So, we put a cap on it and served kids for up to 5 terms.
Maybe this should have been a glaring red flag to me that reading instruction was broken in our area, but remember, my only experiences with reading instruction was LITERALLY with the people who wrote the Direct Instruction programs that are talked about in Sold a Story.
I said nothing
By the time my oldest son was in kindergarten, I had a pretty good grasp on what good reading instruction looked like. He participated in the summer kindergarten readiness camp that our Reading Clinic put on and he was in one of the highest groups for the pre-k kiddos. Now I know that he was just really good at sounds in isolation, but that word level reading is very difficult for him.
So, when I went to curriculum night at his elementary school and the kinder teacher said, "I have a reading curriculum, but I don't use it. We learn letters organically." I was VERY suspect, but I remember looking around the room and watching all these moms just nod their heads and I was like...oooookaaaaayyyy? So, I said nothing. I continued to say nothing as my son spent kindergarten making belts and stitching bags. I think his sole reading experience in K was story time. At home, we read CONSTANTLY. He loved dinosaurs and lizards, alligators, snakes, and crocodiles. We would read him literal textbooks about lizards in the Northwest. But as kindergarten was coming to a close, we decided that we probably needed to do some reading instruction at home.
By this time, the reading clinic had shifted. We were hemoraging money because we were a free clinic, so as our funding dried up, so did our options. We moved the clinic out to the Bethel School District. Bethel supported this by providing food for the kids who stayed after school and bussing them home when tutoring was over. But what this meant for me, was that my son didn't have access to our wonderful Reading Clinic.
So, we did Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons which was recommended to me by my boss. And, because we understood the score at this point, we also did this with our 4 year old who was interested in anything that his brother got to do.
I had visions of a miraculous change in understanding how to read. Like some lightbulb would go off in his head, which is what they say in school you know, but obviously that didn't happen. This really brings us up to the rest of this story, which you can find in the Our Story section of this website.
In the trenches since the beginning
What I'm getting at, in my very longwinded way, is that I've LITERALLY been in the Reading Wars almost since they STARTED! And I didn't even start out with a kid who had dyslexia!
A funny little anicdote - several years ago as part of the National Center on Improving Litearcy, we went to Washington DC and had a Dyslexia Techncial Work Group gathering with some very big names in dyselxia and reading instruction (Jack Fletcher, Nadine Gaab, John Gabrieli to name-drop a few) and on the first day, I can't remember what the group was talking about but I expressed my opinion using my own experience with my son. Later, Dr. Gabrieli and I were chatting and he asked if I sought out the National Center or if it was just serendipitous that I happened to end up working to help give students better access to appropriate reading instruction. I told him it was a complete accident. #acidentalliteracyadvocate.