Introduction: Consequences of reading failure

Some states determine how many prison cells to build based on reading scores of students in middle school. Alan Wells, Director of the Basic Skills Agency said, “Our new research ‘Basic Skills and Crime’ makes it clear that there’s a significant connection between repeated offending and poor literacy skills. Children with poor reading and math skills are increasingly likely to become hardened criminals as society as society becomes more complex, according to research that sheds light on the link between education and criminality.” Research indicates that quality reading programs can reduce recidivism by 20%.

• 3 out of 5 people in an American prison can't read.
• 85 percent of juvenile offenders have problems reading.
• Approximately 50 percent of Americans read so poorly that they are unable to perform simple tasks such as balancing a checkbook and reading prescription drug labels.
• To determine how many prison beds will be needed in future years, some states actually base part of their projection on how well current elementary students are performing on reading tests.
  http://education-portal.com/articles/Illiteracy:_The_Downfall_of_American_Society.html

According to the Schott Report (2007) nearly half of Ohio’s Black male students read at less than the Basic level and virtually none reach the Advanced level. National test results (NAEP) indicate that overall only 36% of eighth grade students in Ohio read above a basic level.

• basic literacy levels: operate on a very rudimentary level in terms of terms of reading capabilities, being unable to draw simple conclusions from reading a column in a newspaper or reading a newspaper editorial that may be comparing candidates in a local election.
• below basic literacy levels: can’t carry out the everyday functions in American society such as reading a bus schedule to see how to get across town, an inability to use most of the self-service ATMs, or the inability to fill out the average job application to try to get a job.

"Approximately 70% of young African-American kids can't read. 70%! If you look at Hispanic kids, 65-70%! When we do our studies and identify kids at risk for reading failure, we know that the majority of those kids who are at risk and who will hit the wall as they learn to read are kids from poverty." - Dr. G. Reid Lyon, Branch Chief, National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (COTC interview) 3 out of 4 people on welfare can’t read. Between 46 to 515 of American adults have an income well below the individual threshold poverty level because of their inability to read. (note: NAEP results indicate that in Ohio almost 80% of young African-American kids can’t read. )

• basic literacy levels: operate on a very rudimentary level in terms of terms of reading capabilities, being unable to draw simple conclusions from reading a column in a newspaper or reading a newspaper editorial that may be comparing candidates in a local election.
• below basic literacy levels: can’t carry out the everyday functions in American society such as reading a bus schedule to see how to get across town, an inability to use most of the self-service ATMs, or the inability to fill out the average job application to try to get a job.

The cost to the nation of the consequence of reading failure is hundreds of billions of dollars each year. According to a Special Education Expenditure Project (SEEP) report issued by the American Institutes for Research, during the 1999-2000 school year, the 50 states and the District of Columbia spent approximately $50 billion on special education services, amountint to $8,080 per special education student. The total spending to provide a combination of regular and special education services to students with disabilities amounted to $77.3 billion, or an average of $12,474 per student. An additional one billion dollars was expended on students with disabilities for other special needs programs such as Title 1, English students with disabilities for other special needs programs such as Title 1, English language learners, or gifted and talented students, bringing the per student amount to $12,639. Based on these figures, the total expenditure to educate the average students with disabilities is an estimated 1.90 times that expended to educate the typical regular education students with no special needs. Excluding expenditures on school facililities, the ratio of current operating expenditures on the typical special education students is 2.08 times that expended on the typical regular education student with no special needs.

The financial cost to society to “label” a child as needing Special Education services are staggering, not to mention the cost to the students themselves for enduring the stigma of identification with a group of children “unlike the others” in mainstream education. Therefore, reducing the number of children ear-marked for a Special Education program provides a significant social and financial return of investment. Of particular interest is the report that, of all children identified as learning disabled by public schools, 70 – 80% are primarily impaired in reading; 90 percent of those children have difficulties with word recognition skills (Learner 1989). Reducing the percentage of students identified with learning disabilities would substantially reduce costs to school districts throughout the state.

Jenkins (2003) performed a multiple component analysis of PSM (problem solved model) and CBM (curriculum based measurement) system in Iowa as a pre-referral system for special education placements. After the 1st quarter of the school year, there was an 8:1 reduction in Special Education placements for black males. In Florida when early intensive intervention was implemented, special education referral rates have dropped approximately 40% in Reading First schools (Torgesen, 2007.) Reductions in the number of special education (Marston et al., 2003, Fulmer, & Harty, 2005; VanDerHeyden, Witt & Gilbertson, 2005: Tilly, 2003): Reductions in disproportional representation of minority groups in special education have been documented (Marston et al., 2003; VanDerHeyden et al., 2005).

"I think the main thing to emphasize for anyone who has worked with a child or with an adult who has a reading problem, either who is low literate or is just struggling with reading, is that it is very apparent that it is the lost human potential, the lost self-esteem...that is the most poignant. And, in the end it's the most significant, because the loss in self-esteem is what leads to a whole host of social pathologies that are very difficult to look in the face. Crime, substance abuse, and the school drop out rate, any of those things - they are very difficult to face. And there is a line to be drawn between low literacy skills and those social pathologies." - James Wendorf, Executive Director, National Center for Learning Disabilities (COTC interview)

• Employed respondents were less likely than those who were unemployed or out of the labor force to perform in the lowest levels on each literacy scale. Across the scales, between 31 and 38 percent of the employed survey participants in Ohio performed in Levels 1 and 2, in contrast to approximately 60 percent of unemployed participants and roughly two-thirds of those who were out of the labor force.
• Ohio respondents who reported being in professional, technical, or managerial positions in their current or most recent jobs had higher average literacy scores than those in other types of occupations, including sales or clerical, craft or service, or labor, assembly, fishing, or farming positions.
• On each literacy scale, adults who performed in the higher levels had worked more weeks in the past year, on average, than individuals in the lower levels. Among Ohio respondents, those in the three highest literacy levels reported working an average of 32 to 46 weeks in the past year, compared with only 13 to 15 weeks for those performing in Level 1.
• Across the sales, Ohio survey participants with proficiencies in Level 1 reported median weekly earnings of $197 to 205. In contrast, those in Level 3 earned about $314 to $332, while those in Level 5 earned between $560 and $594. Similarly, the median annual household income reported by survey participants in the highest proficiency levels was far higher than that of participants in the lowest levels.
• Approximately two-thirds of Ohio respondents designated as either poor or near poor demonstrated skills in Levels 1 and 2 on each literacy scale; in contrast, only 34 to 41 percent of the not poor performed in this level. As a result, the average literacy scores of poor and near poor respondents are considerably lower than the scores of adults who were not poor.
• Among Ohio survey participants, voting appears to be related to literacy proficiency. On all three scales, the average literacy proficiencies of respondents who said they had voted in a recent election were higher than those of nonvoters.

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede the growth of vocabulary and background knowledge.

Phase 1: Screening -- It is possible to identify potential reading problems in young children even before the problems turn into reading failure. All students enrolling in public schools in Ohio shall be screened for dyslexia and related disorders at appropriate times beginning in kindergarten and continuing through 4th grade in accordance with an assessment program approved by the State Board of Education. Following “best practices," testing in kindergarten should minimally include measures of phonological processing (blending and segmenting), rapid naming, and letter-sound identification. If a student is "at risk" for dyslexia in any one of these areas, preventive research-based intervention should begin immediately. Screening tests after the middle of first grade should include tests of early word recognition (including nonsense words), fluency reading connected text, decoding, and spelling.

Universal screening tests, such as Predictive Assessment of Reading (PAR); Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS); Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI); PALS, and AIMSweb screening assessments, developed by researchers for those purposes should be used with all children in a school, beginning in kindergarten, to locate those students who are “at risk” for reading difficulty. In addition to determining if dyslexia is suspected, information from these screening tests may be used to plan instruction and guide ongoing assessment.

Phase 2: Prevention and remediation -- All students in Ohio schools who qualify based on scoring “intensive” or "at risk" on any screening assessment, scoring one year below grade level in reading, or having been diagnosed with dyslexia(see Phase 3) will receive between 60 - 90 minutes a day of small-group explicit, systematic, multisensory, structured language approach. It is important for these individuals to be taught by a systematic and explicit method that involves several senses (hearing, seeing, touching) at the same time. (IDA's Fact Sheet: Dyslexia Basics) This instruction must be research-based reading and writing instruction taught by a teacher trained in this type of teaching. Three decades of high quality reading research studies documented in the National Reading Panel indicate that systematic, explicit reading instruction in the following areas produces significant benefits for children having difficulty learning to read.

• Phonemic awareness: the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words
• Phonics: an understanding of the alphabetic principle—the relationship between phonemes and graphemes.
• Fluency: the ability to read text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression.
  Vocabulary: The knowledge of the meanings and pronunciation of words that are used in oral and written language.
• Comprehension: The ability to make sense of text and to monitor for understanding
• Spelling: Although the National Reading Panel did not directly address systematic and explicit instruction in spelling, the authors explained that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction is not adequate to improve spelling skills in struggling readers above first grade when rule-based spelling and morphographic spelling skills are acquired. They suggest that remediation of spelling difficulties in poor readers may require special instruction targeted at spelling because “as readers move up in the grades, remembering the spellings of words is less a matter of applying letter-sound correspondences and more a matter of knowing more advanced spelling patterns and morphologically based regularizes which is not typically addressed in phonics instruction.” Spelling is usually the most severe weakness among students with dyslexia and the most difficult to remedy Spelling and reading build and rely on the same mental representation of a word. Knowing the spelling of a word makes the representation of it sturdy and accessible for fluent reading.” In fact, Ehri and Snowling found that the ability to read words automatically rests on the ability to map letters and letter combinations to sounds. Learning to spell requires instruction and gradual integration of information about print, speech sounds, and meaning — these, in turn, support memory for whole words, which is used in both spelling and reading. Research also bears out a strong relationship between spelling and writing: Writers who must think too hard about how to spell use up valuable cognitive resources needed for higher level aspects of composition. Even more than reading, writing is a mental juggling act that depends on automatic deployment of basic skills such as handwriting, spelling, grammar, and punctuation so that the writer can keep track of such concerns as topic, organization, word choice, and audience needs. Poor spellers may restrict what they write to words they can spell, with inevitable loss of verbal power, or they may lose track of their thoughts when they get stuck trying to spell a word. http://www.readingrockets.org/article/8845
• Current neurological research at Yale, Harvard, Wake Forest and other labs indicates that systematic, explicit phonics instruction changes the brain activity of individuals who have dyslexia to that more nearly resembling that of skilled readers. Explicit, systematic instruction in specific writing and writing-related skills are also indicated for students who are dyslexic.

Screening – Has the district/state selected a valid screening system?
Prevention and remediation - Do all students who required systematic, explicit, multisensory instruction in reading receive it?
Content monitoring- Is the reading program taught the way it was designed?
Delivery of instruction - Are effective teaching techniques and strategies to maximize student learning used when teaching the reading program?
Mastery learning – Do students master easier skills before moving on to more difficult ones?
Are the following teaching behaviors observed during reading instruction:

• Active engagement of students
• Links are consistenly made between the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile pathways in learning to read and spell (IDA's Fact Sheet: Multisensory Structured Language Teaching)
• Teacher demonstration, guide, and independent practice
• Clear academic and behavioral expectations with positive feedback
• Monitoring students’ understanding, corrective feedback and review
• Independent work that is connected to the program

The Ohio State Board of Education will need to demonstrate leadership and develop a cadre of educators with expertise in teaching systematic and explicit reading. A two-to-three year training program for training teachers, literacy coaches and principals in school districts should be established. Professional development of teachers needs to include basics of how to pronounce the letter-sounds, how to blend sounds into words, word-attack skills, systematic fluency training, integration of phonics-based spelling and writing within a structured phonics curriculum, selection of research based curriculum, how to administer the proposed screening assessments.

note:Most teachers throughout Ohio did not learn how to teach systematic, explicit phonics during their teacher ed training in most Ohio colleges or through workshop training at the state level even though a phonics course is mandated. Many education professors sabatoged the required phonics course by selecting sight-word based text books with “phonics” in the title. Bill Heward, OSU professor emeritus, presented in Boston four years ago about this deception. Ohio has been described as one of the two most anti-phonics states in the country by one of the leading reading researchers, and so in some ways teacher training in systematic and explicit phonics is starting from scratch. The COSERRCs provided a small amount of training in systematic and explicit phonics, but they’ve been disbanded and no longer provide that function. The Ohio State Board of Education expertise and staff development has promoted "balanced literacy"(a sight word approach, otherwise known as "whole language.")

If a child needs systematic, explicit reading instruction and the school does not have a teacher who is properly trained to deliver that instruction, the school will be required to pay for a tutor who is trained to deliver that instruction to "come to the school during the school day" to tutor the child. Remediation/intervention should be based on a systematic, explicit phonics curriculum that is highly structured and has a track record with students who have dyslexia (examples: Wilson, Orton-Gillingham, Corrective Reading, Reading Mastery, Language!, LindamoodBell). Teachers of these curricula should have received at a minimum ____ hours of training and 2 years of monthly coaching from a qualified coach. Instruction should be determined by the school team or the IEP, and should range from 60 - 90 minutes a day.

The Department of Education will make available as part of its responsibility for Education Standards and Practice the training concerning issues faced by students with dyslexia to school districts, administrative units, residential treatment facilities, correctional facilities and other local education agencies throughout the state. Training shall include but not be limited to the areas of awareness, assessment, identification, and evidence-based progress monitoring, and shall include scientifically based interventions to address the needs of students with dyslexia.

The Department of Education is encouraged to coordinate any training provided with current best practices and work occurring in teacher preparation programs at state institutions of higher education. Where appropriate, the Department is encouraged to provide training to school districts, administrative units, residential treatment facilities, correctional facilities, and local education agencies in a coordinated effort with teacher preparation programs at state institutions of higher education. The Department and state institutions of higher education are encouraged to work collaboratively to develop or affirm minimum standards for teacher preparation programs in the areas of literacy assessment and instructional skills, including dyslexia awareness, identification, and remediation for general and special education.

The Department of Education shall report to the State Board of Education and to the Education Committees of the House of Representatives and the Senate, or any successor committees, concerning the activities and status of any training made available pursuant to this section.

1) Colleges and universities would prepare teachers for teaching systematic, explicit reading instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, repeated reading to improve fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension and spelling strategies. Instruction in education colleges and universities would reflect the six major components of successful scientifically proven, comprehensive reading instruction--leadership development, diagnostic assessment, comprehensive curriculum, immediate intervention, on-going progress monitoring, and end-of-year student performance analysis. Education majors at all universities/colleges in Ohio would receive training about dyslexia as part of the reading curriculum. Professors of Education at all universities/colleges in Ohio should be educated about dyslexia and effective methods of teaching these students. Education of teachers, both basic and continuing, should include information regarding the symptoms and warning signs of dyslexia, the neurological basis of dyslexia, and the efficacy of research-based systematic and explicit based systems for remediation of dyslexia. The core curriculum for teacher preparation should include learning the sound structure of the English language, letter forming, standard English usage, teaching basic word-attack skills, teaching advanced word-reading skills, teaching explicit grammar, sentence and paragraph writing with practice teaching and certification. Every person in education will receive 30 hours of training in “the structure of the English language…the state will provide “state wide coaching”

1. Multisensory: A multisensory approach must involve all pathways to learning: auditory, visual, tactile, and most importantly, the kinesthetic pathway involving both the hand and the muscles of the mouth. Students have to be actively involved in their own learning.
2. Alphabetic-Phonetic: Many students need to understand the nature of our form of written language in order to learn it. They need to understand: 1) that a letter has both a name and a sound; 2) that a spoken word is made up of a sequence of individual sounds, and; 3) that letters that march visually, left to right across a page, match spoken/speech sounds from their mouths that sequence in time.
3. Synthetic-Analytic: In reading, decoding is synthetic. Letters are sounded and blended into words. Syllables are built around vowel patterns and blended into longer words. In spelling, words are analyzed by the information from a student’s ears and the feel of the mouth. Words are divided into a sequence of sounds, and the symbols representing those sounds are written. Many students need to learn how to go in both directions. Synthetic reading helps build logical spelling. Analytic spelling helps build automatic retrieval in reading.
4. Structured: For many students, the teaching of the English language has to be carefully structured and directly taught. A student is helped by learning logical language categories and being taught how to organize them.
5. Sequential: Many students have difficulty with sequencing. They need help to improve their auditory sequencing of spoken language sounds. They need to learn to read print from left to right. They need to learn language, going from simple to complex language patterns.
6. Cumulative: Each piece of new learning needs to be securely learned and connected to what is already known, so that it becomes a part of what is known and can be used. A teacher needs to teach a student where the new information fits with what has already been learned.
7. Repetitive: Merely understanding language logic is not sufficient for many students. They need to overlearn so that dealing with the written language becomes automatic. A teacher needs to cycle back often for review. The amount of repetition needed depends upon the severity of the student’s language-learning problem.
8. Cognitive: Multisensory, structure, language teaching is geared to training logical, independent thinking about language. It teaches students to use language as they think about language. Many students need to discover that they can use reasoning to build mastery. Also, they need to understand why they are having difficulty with written language, and why they need to learn in this particular way.
9. Diagnostic: A teacher must be able to observe a student’s confusions with letters, sound/symbol associations, sequencing, etc. and to understand what elements of the language need to be taught or reviewed to eliminate that student’s specific uncertainties.
10. Prescriptive: A teacher needs to know what teaching steps to prescribe for a student and how to implement those steps into an appropriate instructional plan to assure that the student makes progress.

Source: Believed to be from Margaret Rawson and Roger Saunders, pioneers in the field of dyslexia instruction.

2 ) Teaching certificates for the State of Ohio should include a requirement that all teachers of k-12 have coursework that includes information in #1.

3) Dyslexia specialist training within a reading endorsement (certification in reading specializing in dyslexia) to incorporate children who are struggling with the code but are not necessarily dyslexic) Make explicit connections here to RTI.

4) Procedure for monitoring fidelity of implementation.

Many states across the United States are involved in efforts to better serve dyslexic students so that they are identified and receive appropriate services before they fail. We have included links to a few of these state efforts here for your information.

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/curriculum/elar/2007EnglishHandbook.pdf
http://www.statesurge.com/bills/441064-hb-461-texas
http://bsnpta.org/geeklog/public_html//article.php?story=State_Dyslexia_Handbooks
http://smu.edu/education/teachereducation/learningtherapy/diagnosticcenter/

http://www.statesurge.com/category/8176-dyslexia-kansas
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/files/ColoHouseBill1223.pdf
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2008/02/dyslexia-in-uta.html

http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=6016&year=2009
http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/bill-passed-to-improve-dyslexia.html

We have included a sample letter here for your use when you contact your legislators about supporting dyslexia legislation in Ohio.
Click here for sample letter to state legislators

Please share this important information about basic dyslexia facts and supporting research with your legislators.
Click on the links below to download each document:
Basic Facts about Dyslexia
NIH Research Summary of Research Findings in Dyslexia
Basic Research Findings about Dyslexia

Dr. Sally Shaywitz,
The Audrey G. Ratner Professor of Learning Development at Yale University School of Medicine
Dr. Bennett Shaywitz,
Charles and Helen Schwab Professor in Dyslexia and Learning Development, Chief, Child Neurology, Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology, Yale University School of Medicine

• Create a level playing field between people with disabilities and those without disabilities, to the degree that reasonable accommodations can do so. (e.g., curbcut where a minor adjustment in pouring of concrete can permit wheelchair-bound to cross a street; fairly minor accommodations permit the blind and deaf to take standardized tests in ways that let them compete fairly with the non-disabled.)
• Disabilities may be obvious and mechanical – being in a wheelchair.
• Disability also may lie in way that a brain functions – as in the case of dyslexia – where part of the brain that is engaged in act of automatic reading functions differently than for non-dyslexics.

• ADA does not intend to alter admissions standards at Harvard or UCSD, or the GPA needed to graduate from high school.
• ADA does permit people of similar intelligence and potential to compete more fairly for achievement in education and the workplace, even if one is disabled.
• No logical reason ADA should not level the playing field for both those with mechanical disabilities and those whose brains function differently.
• ADA cannot, and is not intended, to alter standards for those with different brain functions.
• What ADA can and should do is to eliminate testing and other protocols that tend to report as less intelligent or less capable those who are in fact merely disabled but can perform tasks, focus, feel and reason at the same level as others who are not disabled in this way.
• Tests that specifically penalize dyslexics are like curbs that wheelchairs cannot get over; they are an unnecessary and inaccurate measure that blocks achievement and advancement of otherwise capable people.

• Tests that specifically penalize dyslexics can not only lead to inaccurate downgrading of the seeming intelligence of a person with this condition, but Such testing can cause others to overlook the particularly advanced and distinctive nature of the creative faculty in dyslexics.
• Science zeroing in on discovery that just as dyslexia impairs the speed of reading, it also expands the capabilities of other parts of the brain, releasing creativity that may be blocked in non-dyslexics.
• Just as someone wheelchair-bound develops a stronger upper body, a dyslexic may have more capability in certain tasks than a non-dyslexic.
• Standardized tests that fail to accommodate dyslexics and fail to report this distinction lead to a general societal failure to benefit from the talents and skills of all members of society and a tremendous loss of needed human capital.
• Legislative changes to ADA should reflect scientific advances of all kinds:
  Discovery of the special talents of the dyslexic
  Failure of standardized tests and certain testing protocols to report accurately the talents and achievements of the dyslexic
• Some accommodations under ADA may not be justified by reason of:
  costs – sadly not practical to have moving sidewalks instead of curbcuts on major streets.
  might create an unfair bias in favor of certain conditions – should not tell colleges to have lower admissions standards for people with disabilities.
• Issue is to measure abilities fairly and on a level playing field.
• Accommodation of extended time on standardized tests:
  allows abilities of the dyslexic to be judged fairly and accurately gives people who are dyslexic a fair chance to compete for success in education and in jobs with non-dyslexics
  extended time can be granted to non-dyslexics without changing results in a significant way. Time constraints are imposed for administrative convenience and are not a statistically meaningful way to evaluate intelligence or potential.

To create a level playing field in society so that qualified men and women who are dyslexic would not be denied access to jobs because they were prevented from demonstrating their abilities.

• Denying critical accommodation of extra-time on high stakes standardized tests – gatekeeper for college admission, for graduate and professional study, for certification
• Causing great suffering and loss to the individual, his/her family and to society.
• Cruel discrimination – those with most potential who have struggled throughout school, given up much of their childhood, worked the hardest to achieve academically and did so with provision of accommodations, are now being told because they have achieved academically they are not eligible for protection of the ADA, closing the door on years of effort and dedication and preventing access to higher education and future jobs.

• Dyslexics require extra-time in order to demonstrate their knowledge and to level the playing field.
• With great effort and effective reading instruction, dyslexics can learn to read words accurately.
• However, dyslexics remain, slow, non-automatic readers.
• In contrast, peers learn to read both accurately and automatically (rapidly).
• Slow, effortful reading persists and characterizes dyslexic readers at all ages.

• Dyslexics inherently extremely slow readers – universal, lifelong.
• With protection of ADA and extra-time:
  a dyslexic person is able to demonstrate his/her ability
  a dyslexic person's scores increase substantially
  (a non-dyslexic person’s scores increase minimally and non-significantly)
• Without protection of ADA and denied additional time:

  a dyslexic person performs below his/her ability test becomes a measure of a dyslexic person’s disability denial a barrier impeding access to jobs and careers

• Before
  1896– dyslexia first described by British physician, Pringle Morgan, dyslexia remained a hidden disability
• Today
  2007-fMRI à ability to peer inside brain as a person reads
• Brain imaging provides clear and compelling evidence:
  Dyslexia is real: brain systems for reading differ in typical and in dyslexic readers –> neural signature for dyslexia



• Neural system (word form area) for automatic, rapid reading impaired in dyslexia; other areas provide compensation for accuracy, but not for speed.



• Dyslexia persists into adult life - neural differences persist.
• Accommodations: extra time - essential for a person who is dyslexic to demonstrate his/her knowledge.
• Accommodations critical to assure fairness and equity.
• Standardized testing agencies deny dyslexic students extra time.
• Standardized tests gate-keeper to future: access to college, graduate and professional study, job certification all share dependence on performance of these high-stakes tests.
• Failure to provide extra-time to dyslexics is an act of discrimination.

• Ensure that dyslexia, slow, effortful reading, is explicitly included as an impairment in ADA restoration
• Ensure that provision of accommodations to people who are dyslexic is required under the ADA restoration
• Ensure that the hardest working students who have succeeded with accommodations and do well academically are not then penalized (judged non-disabled) and denied accommodations on high stakes standardized tests, in turn, preventing access to college, graduate and professional education and to job certification:
  In the Americans with Disabilities Restoration Act, in considering whether a dyslexic person is limited, or substantially limited, the person shall be evaluated as compared to his/her peers.
  The Americans with Disabilities Restoration Act recognizes a person may be a person with a disability entitled to the protection of the Act, although he/she has overall been successful in school.

A state wide effort is being formed to get a Dyslexia Law passed in Ohio. This is necessary so students are screened and taught properly if they are dyslexic or struggling in reading. Most legislators know NOTHING about dyslexia. How are they going to be educated about it? This is our biggest problem right now.

Please donate to the Ohio Dyslexia Initiative. Help us to educate Ohio legislators so that they support us in passing dyslexia legislation in the state of Ohio.

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