That being said — I personally don’t have any problem with remediation trying a new approach if the one being used isn’t working. That just makes sense.

As we seesaw back and forth, all we are doing is redefining which group of kids needs remediation. Don’t know what the research says, but it has always made sense to me.

That is a good question — I do think that the whole language approach greatly contributed to her issues through the years. That was one of the reasons I researched reading curriculums before sending my sons to school and was so determined not to send them to a school that used whole language. However given the pattern of LD across my husband’s side of the family (including most likely my husband) — different generations, different school systems, different genders — I think a fairly good case for there also being a genetic component can be made.

(By the way my step-daughter did graduate from college, has been successful at her job and even reads for enjoyment now.)

Most teachers say they were never taught the alphabetic code in ed school and all their prof development courses push whole language or its rhetorical successor, “balanced literacy”. MacGuinness’ book explains why direct instruction of the phonetics works so well. She does a wonderful job of explaining all the different ways to use letters to represent the same sounds (quire vs choir) and how confusing it is for kids without instruction.

Her statement that “letters don’t have sounds, sounds have letters” is a pithy way to explain the true logic of the code.

A teacher who has read that book will always recognize the statement that “we don’t know what works best in teaching reading” is wrong and he or she will know why it is wrong.

You are both right and wrong. Discrepancy has been used to exclude kids from identification as having a reading disability. However, discrepancy between cognitive ability and achievement is an indicator of nothing at all. Since the late 1980s, research has shown consistently that: a) IQ is not a strong predictor of reading skills; b) there are no reading-related cognitive deficits between students with and without discrepancies; and c) students with discrepancies do not respond to treatment better (or faster) than students without discrepancies. These are robust findings that have appeared in the literature since the late 1980s and been replicated time and again over many years. Because of its continued use of discrepancy, the LD field has been called a pseudoscience by Stanovich (see 2005 paper in LD Quarterly) and others who have investigated this issue since 1990. (See also the reviews by Steubing, et al., 2002 in the American Educational Research Journal; F. Vellutino, et al, 2004 in the J. of Child Psychology and Psychiatry; and Vellutino, Scanlon, and Lyon, 2000).

Of course, one problem with the use of IQ-achievement discrepancy is that its use results in the identification of students as disabled who achieve in the average range who are not disabled. The classic example is the student with an IQ of 125 and a reading score of 100. The student has a discrepancy but is not disabled.

Regarding diagnosis of reading disabilities, diagnosticians familiar with the reading literature understand that reading disabilities are the result of phonological processing deficits. Measures of phonological processing (word decoding, pseudoword decoding, phonemic awareness) are used to diagnose the reading problems, not IQ-achievement discrepancy. Again, these findings have been replicated and have been described in the literature (e.g., see Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2001)

With regard to the assertion that LDs in reading are “teacher disabilities,” Velltino and his colleagues published a study in 1996 which showed that the majority of reading probelms in entry level students were caused by experiential and/or instructional deficits, and when given appropriate intervention, 67.1% of the poor readers in the study performed as well in reading as the normal readers (Scanlon, D., and Vellutino, F., 1996). The results of other studies have yielded similar results.

Most kids need to be taught the rules of what the symbols probably represent. It wasn’t intuitive throughout most of human history. Why should it have become accessible through exposure in the last few decades?