Decoding Dyslexia-AK

Lately I’ve seen more claims that students can access specially designed instruction through Tier 3 or MTSS. That sounds good in theory, but it is not how IDEA works.

Specially Designed Instruction (SDI) is one of the defining features of special education. It is individualized instruction designed to address a student’s disability-related needs and is provided through an IEP after a child has been evaluated and found eligible under IDEA.

Before a child is evaluated, how can a team determine what disability-related needs require specially designed instruction? And if SDI is being provided to students outside of special education, who is ensuring it is individualized, monitored, documented, and delivered with fidelity?

Schools are free to provide strong interventions to any student who needs them. They should. But interventions and specially designed instruction are not the same thing.

Words matter. Definitions matter. And legal protections matter.

Students with disabilities already face significant barriers to accessing the services they are entitled to receive. We should be strengthening those protections, not blurring the lines around them.

Taxpayers fund public schools. Parents have a right to expect those schools to provide the education the law requires.

When a school fails to do that, the answer should not be “leave.”

The IDEA was enacted to open school doors to children with disabilities, not to push families back out of them.

Children with dyslexia can absolutely learn to read. That is not the question. The question is whether schools will stop acting like reading failure is inevitable and start using interventions that actually work.

Children do not become adults with low literacy by accident. They get there because schools fail to teach them to read.

They get there when schools ignore obvious signs of struggle, delay evaluations, refuse effective intervention, and normalize years of reading failure as if it is just part of childhood.

And then those children become adults expected to read job applications, medical forms, court notices, leases, ballots, and their own child’s IEP with skills schools should have taught them years earlier.

We are living with the adult consequences of educational malpractice.

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

The Endrew F. case was very important.
Simply, students in special ed should achieve AT LEAST 1.5 years growth or they are progressing enough and won’t attain grade level.

If your child isn’t making significant gains with IEP intervention, please request different remediation instruction.

In 2017, the Supreme Court rejected the “more than de minimis” standard and held that children with disabilities are entitled to educational programs designed to enable appropriately ambitious progress.

Nearly a decade later, an uncomfortable question remains:

Have we actually raised the bar?

Or have we simply become more comfortable describing minimal progress as ambitious?

When a child remains years behind in reading, falls further behind peers, or spends years in specialized instruction without meaningfully closing the gap, is that appropriately ambitious?

Have we set the bar so low for children with disabilities that almost any progress can be called ambitious?

hmmm…, something to think about.

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Thank you, Claudine Agee!