COLUMBUS, Ohio – All Ohio students in grades kindergarten through third grade will be screened for the risk of dyslexia in the 2023-2024 school year, thanks to two bills passed by the General Assembly in recent years and a guidebook developed by a committee to ensure children get reading intervention and don’t fall behind academically.
In following school years, all kindergarteners must be screened annually, as well as students who transfer into a school district in the first through sixth grades. Additionally, students in first through sixth grades will be screened if a teacher or parent requests it.
It’s hard to pin down the percentage of people who are dyslexic, since the American education system has a spotty record of identifying these students and offering them extra help to learn to read. Estimates range from 5% to up to 20% of the population may be dyslexic.
In Ohio, school districts have been left to test – or not – kids for dyslexia individually. Some districts test young children frequently. Some districts offer no screenings at all, said Sen. Andrew Brenner, a Columbus-area Republican who chairs an education committee in the Ohio Senate.
Lawmakers wanted to establish statewide requirements because they believe that many children are struggling not just in reading, but in all subjects, since literacy is essential to all learning, Brenner said.
“We’ve got kids graduating from high school who have a fourth-grade reading level,” Brenner said. “When we’re talking about career and workforce, those kids need to have more than a fourth-grade reading level.”
After the initial screening, which is expected to be short, maybe five minutes tops, children who are flagged for possible dyslexia will be given reading intervention and additional screenings, said Mike McGovern, a Columbus-area parent who serves on the Ohio Dyslexia Committee with several educators and developed the Ohio Dyslexia Guidebook for schools to follow.
The guidelines are careful to not describe children who are flagged for intervention as having dyslexia.
“When we use the word ‘identified’ [as dyslexic] what that means is you’ve had a full evaluation by a person properly certified to do that type of assessment that determines that child has dyslexia,” he said. “We very specifically and carefully say, ‘Your child has been flagged as possibly having shown the signs of dyslexia.’ It is not meant to be an evaluation, a diagnosis. That’s not super important. What’s super important is, is this child going to struggle in reading based on this very short assessment?”
A child flagged in the screenings will receive reading intervention. With the intervention, many children will obtain additional skills to learn to read, and will become proficient readers without ever having to undergo a dyslexia assessment, diagnosis and participate in special education.
“It’s called wait to fail. That’s what we have all across the country, it’s not just an Ohio thing,” McGovern said. “Let’s wait until kids fail and then let’s do intervention, which takes way, way more energy, way more time. Neurologically, it’s more difficult to teach reading to a third grader than it is in kindergarten, first grade, due to neuroplasticity. It takes much longer, costs more than catching them at the proper time in kindergarten, and then giving them that instruction.
“So that’s the big goal of the guidebook. Not to give them the label of dyslexia,” McGovern said.
Dyslexia is not the reversal of letters, he said. People with dyslexia do not see backwards or have vision issues. It’s a neurological issue. Compared to non-dyslexia readers, those with dyslexia use a different part of their brain to manipulate sounds of words and see the shapes of letters, he said.
McGovern’s son Connor struggled with reading in school. Each year, he fell further behind his peers. He suffered emotionally and socially, and eventually received counseling for anxiety and depression, which are common for kids struggling to read, McGovern said.
Connor was diagnosed with dyslexia in the sixth grade.
McGovern and his wife enrolled him in Marburn Academy in New Albany, a private school for students who learn differently. McGovern estimates he and his wife spent $100,000 helping Connor learn to read, which should have occurred in public school. He knows most families don’t have these resources and wants to improve the education system for other kids. That’s how he got involved in dyslexia advocacy, he said.
Connor recently graduated from college and has begun a career, said McGovern, who is also president of the International Dyslexic Association of Central Ohio.
The new dyslexia support laws require teachers, except for specialists in areas such as music and physical education, to receive six to 18 hours of professional development in reading instruction and to gain an understanding of dyslexia.
By the beginning in the 2023-2024 school year, all kindergarten and first-grade teachers need to undergo the training. By the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, all second and third-grade teachers are to get the training. By the beginning of the 2025 and 2026 school year, all fourth through 12th grade reading intervention specialists will have to be trained, according to the Ohio Dyslexia Guidebook.
School districts can hire companies to provide training to their teachers, or teachers can receive it online through the Ohio Department of Education, McGovern said.
When students are flagged for extra reading help, the Ohio dyslexia support laws specify the intervention must fall under the “structured literacy” form of reading education. Structured literacy is also known as the “science of reading.”
In recent decades, American educators and some parents have engaged in what is known as the “reading wars” over which instruction method to offer students.
For years, the predominant method of reading instruction has been known as the “whole language” or “balanced literacy” method, in which students are instructed to look at pictures, story context and other strategies to figure out words in a sentence that they don’t know. Students learn to sound out letters, but sounding out is only used as a last resort under whole language instruction because the underlying theory of the method is that reading is natural for most children, similar to how learning to talk is innate.
But more recent education research has shown that this instruction isn’t effective for most children. School districts are returning to older ways of teaching, such as phonetics, as are some of the writers of curriculum that uses the whole language method.
Ohio lawmakers fell on the structured literacy side of the reading wars when they passed the new dyslexia support laws. The Ohio Dyslexia Guidebook says that students in reading intervention should be taught letter-sound combinations and their application when reading a word in print. They need to learn spelling concepts, taught from simple to complex. Reading intervention teachers should model using vocabulary in oral and written concepts. Kids need to read texts that include only those phonetic patterns that have been explicitly taught, among other requirements.
McGovern said that structured literacy will help students who have been flagged for having possible dyslexia.
“The Dyslexia Guidebook says absolutely use structured literacy for these kids who are flagged, but it goes one step further,” he said. “We say in the guidebook all kids need structured literacy. It’s backed by science. This is what works.”
However, schools do not need to switch reading curricula to structured literacy. They only need to use it in reading intervention with kids who are at risk for dyslexia.
“There’s a part of the guidebook that says if you have a very high percentage of kids getting flagged, above the norm of what you would expect, that is indicating your classroom instruction should be looked at,” he said.
Laura Hancock is a reporter in Columbus, covering policy and politics. Read more of here coverage here.