"Dyslexia and the Reading Wars" by David Owen (published December 2025) provides a deep dive into the systemic failure to use proven methods for teaching reading, particularly for the 20% of children whose brains are wired differently.
While spoken language is a natural biological evolution, reading is an invention that the human brain must be "re-wired" to perform. This process requires a specific "dosage" of instruction that many schools have moved away from. Read the full article here!
This great article highlights how older students often face significant reading comprehension challenges due to difficulties with complex decoding, especially when encountering discipline-specific texts with intricate syntax and words from other languages. While early phonics might be mastered, advanced literacy skills are crucial for upper elementary and middle school. Current assessments frequently overlook these foundational decoding issues, leading to a "decoding threshold" that hinders comprehension. Schools must do a better jobj with screening assessments to identify students needing support in foundational literacy for our middle school and high school students!
Read the full article here: How Complex Decoding Challenges Can Block Comprehension for Older Readers
Patti Ghezzi covered education for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1996 until 2006. In a guest column today, Ghezzi writes about the big story she says she missed while covering Georgia schools — the phonics story.
It’s been a busy few weeks with respect to discussion and debate about literacy in the public domain. I have been interviewed a number of times by print and electronic media and inevitably only segments and sound-bites of my comments are used, so there’s not much nuance in the discussion.
Ryan Lee-James is the Atlanta Speech School’s chief academic officer and director of the Rollins Center for Language & Literacy. Before joining the Atlanta Speech School, Lee-James trained and mentored graduate-level speech-language pathologists as a faculty member at Adelphi University in New York.
In this guest column, she addresses the barriers preventing children in Georgia from being diagnosed with dyslexia.
Parents walking their young children into school for the first time may get excited at the books lining classroom walls – but those collections of books aren’t necessarily a guarantee their kids are going to learn to read them.
According to cognitive scientist and reading expert Pamela Snow, parents may be surprised to learn that they are “buying a lottery ticket” when it comes to the kind of reading instruction their child will get at school.
Teacher question:
At my school, the district inservice has made a big deal out of Scarborough’s rope. Nevertheless, when it comes to daily instruction, we (the primary grade teachers) have been told that decoding is the most important thing and that we are to emphasize that. They’ve sent us to LETRS training, purchased instructional programs on phonics, and require testing students’ “nonsense word fluency” frequently. At what grade levels is it appropriate to teach the “language comprehension” portions of the rope?
Educators say unaddressed learning disabilities overwhelm and frustrate students, sometimes leading to behavioral problems. Studies have shown a disproportionate number of incarcerated people are likely dyslexic.
For many elementary school teachers, teaching students how to read is a central part of the job. But the majority of states don’t evaluate whether prospective teachers have the knowledge they’ll need to teach reading effectively before granting them certification, according to a new analysis from the National Council on Teacher Quality.
A federal court recently ruled that underfunded schools in Detroit violated students' right to a basic education. Advocates hope the case is the beginning of a trend.