A primer on compensation, effective reading instruction, and our bloody legislative battles.
In consideration of the fourth of the Big Five life happiness factors, learning, I would like to tell you about my work on behalf of people who struggle with learning. Specifically, what follows is an insider’s perspective on: 1) how highly successful learning-disabled people compensate for their disabilities, 2) proven methods to develop reading skills, 3) fighting for your child’s rights following dramatic changes in the reading education system, and 4) advocacy issues, such as how to win the battle for extra time on reading-intensive college entrance examinations. I plan to write blogs about these and related topics over the course of coming months. Now, let me set the stage.
Compensation
When people talk about a child having a learning disability, they mainly talk about what is wrong with her—the “dis” rather than the “ability.” While it is undoubtedly true that learning-disabled people have tough challenges to overcome, it is equally true that a great many do overcome them and go on to lead very successful lives. These people have essential lessons to teach all learning-disabled children about compensation.
My journey studying and helping children accomplish LD compensation has been a long one. It started with my doctoral dissertation research on compensation and has gained momentum through my 25 years working as a psychologist. My journey has been a personal one, as I am dyslexic. I have also met some remarkable compensators along the way, including the renowned author, John Irving.
Disability compensation is the process of becoming a self-advocate. Successful learning-disabled people have learned to orchestrate their lives in the most efficient means possible.
They have learned essential lessons about their own brains—what comes easily, what is hard, and what’s the best way to bridge the gap. In other words, they have learned strategies to minimize their weaknesses and capitalize on their strengths. As they age, they learn how to make the education system work for them, rather than against them. Finally, they build supportive relationships with teachers, parents, and, with the passing of years, their spouses.
While individuals vary greatly in how they achieve this balance in their lives, all successful learning-disabled people adopt this model of compensation in some form. Teaching your learning-disabled child such compensation skills can be one of the greatest gifts you can give her as a parent. It is a gift that can’t be given by parents alone, however. You will need to assemble a group of terrific teachers, and possibly add a psychologist for good measure.
To advocate for yourself, you need to know the rules of the game. You need to know both formal rules, such as some of the rubrics that apply to education, and informal rules, such as the people skills that help a person to recruit support. Children obviously aren’t going to learn these things right away, but they do need to learn them over time.
I often joke with parents and dyslexic adolescents about these issues: “Your mom is really good at watching out for you; do you want to take her to college with you?” Thankfully, the consensus response is “No, I want to go solo.”
It is a sad truth, however, that many children with learning disabilities don’t ever learn how to compensate. They feel trapped in unfulfilling lives. They are like the stuck mountain climber who can see that the view would be so much better if he could only climb higher. Trouble with executive skills often are core features of a child’s handicap; namely, being planful, organized, and managing the big emotions that accompany school struggles. The stuck feeling itself is a big part of the problem.
Making matters worse, a great many special education programs fail to effectively teach both compensation and reading. Without establishing these two abilities, compensation and reading skills, students may possess the desire to climb the mountain but not the means to
get there. There are scores of reasons for this failure. One explanation may be that there is a vast gulf between the best and worst special education programs in America today. The best special education programs uplift the lives and opportunities of learning-disabled children. The worst programs constitute nothing less than educational malpractice.
Why don’t all special education programs teach compensation skills? In part it is because promoting compensation is damnably complex. We need to ask ourselves how to best grapple with each child’s complexity, however, rather than trying to slide them neatly (and often inappropriately) into diagnostic boxes. There is no cookie cutter approach to overcoming the all too common “perfect storm” of dyslexia, anxiety, and attentional challenges, for example. The challenge is ours to understand, meet, and help motivate each child where they are.
In later blogs, I will invite you to take a brief trip with me into the complexity of compensation. I will draw upon contributions from giants in the fields of developmental psychology, education, and neuropsychology to help build a useful compensation framework. I will also write about my interview with John Irving.
Battles over how to teach reading
As for the second vital question, why are many schools failing to teach reading effectively? Briefly, we dyslexics have been collateral damage in a 100-year battle between two approaches to teaching reading, the phonics and whole language methods. Unfortunately, the whole language approach—an approach that is suboptimal for all emerging readers, but is actually harmful for dyslexic readers—continues to hold sway in many school systems.
In my future posts, you will see that some of our biggest challenges, as dyslexics, have come from these debates about how to teach reading. For example, it is hard to receive a diagnosis of dyslexia because, incredibly, a powerful group of whole language reading teachers question the existence of dyslexia. They are even on record opposing our efforts to screen for dyslexia.
For those of you who can stomach politics, I will be writing about our efforts to enact laws to improve reading instruction, teacher training, and screen young students for reading problems. To be honest, when I served on a Wisconsin panel helping to write Common Core Standards, it was a big and mostly unsuccessful battle. Thankfully, we have also achieved notable victories, such as when the Wisconsin Reading Coalition championed higher standards to achieve licensure as a teacher. However, as you might expect where politics are concerned, even that victory was a one step forward, one step back proposition. For example, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction requested that the new teacher licensure test be waived for school districts that are having trouble recruiting teachers (the very places that most need highly qualified teachers).
These issues are especially vital now because there is a new theory of education, Response to Intervention (RtI), that teachers are hoping will lead to a standard of care for the field of education. The hope is to screen all children to see who might have reading difficulties, and give them the kind and level of care they need. If a little bit of extra help isn’t enough (Tier II), more focused and individualized help will be given (Tier III). Interventions should be specific to the nature of the reading problem—scientifically validated methods that are executed with fidelity by trained specialists. The goal is to accomplish this without putting children into special education.
RtI sounds reasonable and encouraging, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the results are decidedly mixed. Manty teachers woefully lack training in how to teach reading. Reading assessments are often inadequate. Curriculum publishers are scandalously printing “scientifically validated” on their old curricular guides. Children are often not being given the right kind of reading tutorial help. When they are doing a bit better, they are being too quickly “graduated” from the programs.
Thankfully, there is a science of good reading instruction. For example, starting with the Dean Foundation in 2010, and now known as Arnold Reading Clinic, my colleague Al Arnold and his teachers have taught more than 1,000 children to read. His model builds upon seminal instructional paradigms, such as the Orton Method to improve decoding and Maryanne Wolf’s system to improve reading automaticity. Al generously calls me the co-founder of our reading clinic, but the truth is that all the credit for the success of the program goes to him and his dedicated team of tutors. As an aside, I do not receive any monetary compensation for my role in the clinic.
I also had the good fortune to learn directly from one of the giants in the field of reading research, Professor Jeanne Chall. I would like to share what she taught me in my year teaching at the Harvard Reading Lab.
Seeing past the controversy
While some of the information I am sharing may shock people, I want to make it very clear that it is not my intention to be writing a script for a Michael Moore movie. I have enormous respect for teachers. Their calling is synonymous with caring and hard work. No one would go into teaching without having a paramount interest in the welfare and development of young people. Still, there is educational malpractice occurring across the country, and the bad examples need to be called out for what they are.
Learning-disabled children have a mountain to climb. As the title of my website “Climbing the Mountain Sideways” suggests, the compensator’s route up the mountain will be different
from others'. It will involve overcoming developmental challenges and points of crisis common to the life of a learning-disabled person. Getting to the top is not just about striving for grades, a certain salary, or other proverbial “bonus points.” It is also about self-acceptance.
In light of the high stakes nature of educational accomplishment in our culture, failing to overcome a learning disability puts a person in real jeopardy. Especially at the beginning, your child won’t succeed if she climbs alone. She will need a rock-solid reading teacher. She will need your help to find the right path and anticipate major obstacles. However, while she needs assistance, the whole enterprise is doomed to failure if she comes to rely on other people too much. She will need to become intimately familiar with her own strengths and weaknesses as a learner. Don’t let her expect less than success.