Early Warning Signs of a Poor Reader

Q. In our district, the percentage of students who can't read at grade level is getting downright scary, and very expensive to try to fix. Yet we're a nice, middle-class district with a big budget. What can be done to prevent these reading problems from developing in the first place?

As a rule of thumb, 80 percent of the "learning disabled" students have trouble reading. There are other reasons, including speech and language problems, but the name of the game in preventing learning disabilities overall is preventing reading problems. Since most districts don't have phonics-only curricula in place, or intensive reading intervention programs in the early grades, reading problems are allowed to fester and become entrenched. A more aggressive, prevention-minded strategy should be in place.

According to reading expert Elaine McEwan and others, the research shows that the typical kindergarten or first grade classroom has five categories. Pay special attention to category 4:

1. Approximately 5% of the students will come to school reading, having essentially taught themselves to read.

2. Another 30% of the students will learn to read no matter how they are taught.

3. Another approximately 30% will learn to read only with hard work and some support. That support might be mom or dad working with the student every night, some type of tutoring, or effective phonics curriculum in the school.

4. Now we come to the 30% of students who will learn to read ONLY with systematic, intensive, explicit phonics, taught well. If these students are to read at grade level, they need to start in kindergarten, and by first grade need to have an hour a day of an intensive reading program. Most of these students can be at grade level reading by second or third grade if a prevention model is in place, and DIBELS (reading test) scores are used to catch these students the minute they start falling behind.

5. Finally, we have the 5% of students who are truly dyslexic and need to receive LD services throughout the grades.

In high-poverty districts there are slightly larger percentages in the lower categories, but the configuration remains essentially the same.

Children who are likely to fall into category 4 don't easily acquire phonemic awareness skills, have poor memory retrieval as evidenced by slow letter-naming, or have difficulty making the leap to the alphabetic principle. They don't automatically decode the words they are slowing blending.

This is where the kids who will go on to be labeled "learning disabled" come from. They simply haven't received the necessary curriculum. Most districts don't identify the students as needing reading support until third grade or later; by then, it will take four times the effort to remediate their reading problems. And even if remediation is in place, evidence is showing more and more that the most popular ones, including Reading Recovery, can create more problems, probably because they substitute "guessing strategies" for the plain old phonics the kids never got.

Homework: See Elaine McEwan's book and online seminar, "Catching the Kids Who Fall Through the Cracks," onwww.elainemcewan.com