No, You Can't Prevent Reading Difficulties

Eradicating public health language from the dyslexia conversation

Please, please, stop talking about preventing reading difficulties!

Seems every time I turn around some reading researcher or MTSS expert or literary advocate is talking about all the things we can do to prevent reading struggles.

· Early screening

· Effective instruction

· Rich oral language environments

· Effective tiered support systems

And on and on and on. I have even heard experts use the language of public health to talk about reading. Effective Tier 1, they say, is “primary prevention” aimed at reducing the average risk of the whole population, like a vaccine against reading struggle, as if reading struggle is a disease and the ultimate good would be to prevent it altogether.

I get it. It seems a noble mission. Tons of kids are unnecessarily struggling with reading and these folks would like to prevent that.

But, here’s the thing. For dyslexic children, reading struggle is not a disease, it is not a defect, it is not something gone wrong. It is the inevitable result of a perfectly healthy, normal, genetic brain difference.

This is a subtle distinction. When these experts say they want to “prevent” reading failure, or reading struggle, or reading difficulties, what they mean to say (because I am interpreting them generously) is that they 1) wish to avoid the “downward spiral” that has plagued students who cannot read by the end of first grade, or 2) that they want to avoid ineffective reading instruction that leaves us with too many kids who have never been effectively taught to read, or 3) that they want all kids to have the enriched oral language environment all brains need to smooth reading acquisition.

But this is not preventing reading struggle. It is preventing rigid institutional schooling, poor and ineffective teaching, and impoverished early childhood environments. By saying they want to prevent reading difficulty they take the lens off themselves and place it onto our dyslexic kids and parents.

One thing parents of dyslexic kids know is you can have all the things that “prevent” reading struggle and your dyslexic child will still find reading difficult.

You can have a beautifully enriched early childhood environment with literate parents and books and nursery rhymes and music and ample free play outside in nature and your child will still inexplicably struggle with learning to read and write and spell.

You can have excellent effective reading instruction and your child will still struggle, and probably fail, to keep up with their peers.

You can have excellent remediation and learning to read and write will still be hard!

That is because what it means to be dyslexic is your brain is wired differently, from the start, in a way that makes reading acquisition more of a challenge. The language of prevention makes us look away from what is necessary to ease the academic life of dyslexic students. It reeks of blame. If Tier 1 is a vaccine, then dyslexia is the disease, to be eradicated, not a difference to be embraced. Language matters — a point I find it ironic to have to make to the literacy world.

If these experts really want to put their energy into preventing something, then I have some suggestions:

· They can work on preventing ineffective reading instruction.

· They can work on preventing colleges of education from graduating teachers, year after year, who have never been taught how to teach reading.

· They can work on breaking down the academic silos that have allowed reading researchers to ignore colleges of education at their own institutions for decades. The teacher education problem is a failure of psychology and cognitive science departments as much as it is a failure of colleges of education.

· They can work on rethinking the overly rigid school structure that damns kids who are not reading well by third grade to unnecessary academic failure.

· They can work on countering the misunderstandings, misinformation, stereotypes and bias about dyslexia that lead to inadequate support and accommodation.

· They can work to prevent the shame students feel by being labeled disabled or deficient, and they can think carefully about the language they use.

· They can work on preventing the hubris of research that ignores the lived experience of dyslexic students and parents.

What they cannot prevent is reading struggle. Dyslexic students will find reading challenging. They will take longer and have to work harder to learn to read. They will struggle with writing. They will expend more energy on academic tasks generally than their neurotypical peers. This is what it means to be dyslexic. The language of prevention belittles and erases the experience of dyslexic students.

Go ahead and prevent all the things that make the school experience so damned miserable for these kids, but recognize that their brains are wired differently, that there was nothing they or their parents could have or should have done to make them not dyslexic, that they don’t need to be not dyslexic, that learning to read and write will be hard no matter how wonderful your instruction, that the struggle to read and write does not begin to capture the whole of dyslexia.

Pull up a chair and read those nursery rhymes you keep telling us all to read to our kids to prevent reading struggle. Start with one of my children’s favorites, The Ugly Duckling. Its lessons are ancient and foundational.

Stop trying to prevent us. We are here, a vital part of the great diversity of humanity. We are not going anywhere.