I’ve read a fair amount about the so-called Reading Wars over the years, but nothing as convincing as David Owen’s New Yorker article in the latest issue (archived). It starts:
In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include “the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data” and “Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity.” I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she’d finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment.
Caroline’s academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. “I can’t remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless,” she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to “the end of a row” she couldn’t remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia.
Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it’s more complicated than that. People with dyslexia have varying degrees of difficulty not only with reading and writing but also with pronouncing new words, recalling known words, recognizing rhymes, dividing words into syllables, and comprehending written material. Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese. It often occurs in combination with additional speech and language issues, and with anxiety, depression, attention disorders, and other so-called comorbidities, although dyslexia itself can have such profound psychological and emotional impacts that some of these conditions might be characterized more accurately as side effects.
Estimates of dyslexia’s incidence in the general population vary, from as high as twenty per cent—a figure cited by, among others, Sally Shaywitz, a co-founder of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity—to as low as zero, as suggested by Richard Allington, a retired professor of education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who in 2019 told participants at a literacy conference that legislators who supported remediation for students with reading disabilities should be shot. Nadine Gaab, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me that the best current estimates fall between five and ten per cent.
There are reasons for the inconsistency. The condition varies in type, severity, and presentation of symptoms, and early literacy skills have historically been hard to measure. Many children with dyslexia (and their parents) never learn they have it. Because a common strategy for avoiding the embarrassment of reading aloud is to act in a way that results in being sent to the principal’s office, dyslexic students are often treated primarily as discipline problems. At every grade level, they are more likely to be suspended, expelled, or placed in juvenile detention, especially if their families are economically disadvantaged. According to a 2011 study of four thousand high-school students by Donald J. Hernandez, then a sociology professor at Hunter College, more than sixty per cent of those who failed to graduate had been found to have reading deficits as early as third grade. More often than not, schools don’t intervene effectively, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes as a result of misguided pedagogy, sometimes for fear of incurring instructional or legal costs. […]
Shaywitz, in her book “Overcoming Dyslexia,” cites an account, published by a German doctor in 1676, of “an old man of 65 years” who lost the ability to read after suffering a stroke. “He did not know a single letter nor could he distinguish one from another,” the doctor wrote. This was perhaps the first published description of what’s known today as acquired dyslexia, caused by damage to the brain. Two centuries later, a doctor in England wrote a paper about a case of what he called “congenital word blindness.” It involved a fourteen-year-old boy who was unable to read despite years of instruction by teachers and tutors. He could recognize “and,” “the,” “of,” and a few other one-syllable words, and he knew the letters of the alphabet, but when the doctor dictated vocabulary to him he misspelled nearly everything, writing “sening” for “shilling” and “scojock” for “subject.” His disability stood out, the doctor wrote, because his schoolmaster had said that he would be “the smartest lad in the school if the instruction were entirely oral.”
Spoken language arose at least fifty thousand years ago, and the brain has evolved with it. As a consequence, most children learn to speak early and easily, without formal instruction. (Deaf children pick up signing readily, too.) Reading and writing are different. They were invented only about five thousand years ago, and natural selection has not configured the brain to facilitate them. “You can’t just lock a group of kindergartners in a library and expect them to emerge, a couple of weeks later, as readers,” Gaab told me. “It’s more like learning a musical instrument. You can listen to Mozart all your life, but if I put you in front of a piano and say, ‘Play Mozart,’ you will fail.”
To become literate, people have to repurpose parts of the brain that evolved to perform other tasks, such as object recognition and sound processing. “What we have to do, over the course of learning to read, is coördinate these areas to communicate with each other and build what we call a reading network,” Gaab said. The areas are connected by axon bundles, which she likened to highways. The French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, in his book “Reading in the Brain,” writes, “Scientists can track a printed word as it progresses from the retina through a chain of processing stages, each of which is marked by an elementary question: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?”
I could quote a lot more, but I’ll just urge you to read the whole thing; you may be as enraged as I was at the educators who refuse to believe that the methods they were taught have been shown not to work, and at the huge number of kids whose lives have been needlessly worsened. (To preempt an obvious and pointless derail: the wretched English spelling system is neither here nor there; to repeat a sentence from above: “Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese.”)
I always found Victor Mair’s blog posts about character amnesia enlightening.
Part of the problem is the popular and widespread use of the term “dyslexia” as a “learning disability” (which is popularly interpreted as a euphemism for “there appears to be something wrong with you”) instead of treating reading as a neurologically complex activity in which different levels of ability should be recognized as normal, with various pedagogical approaches to mitigate the neurodiversity of the general population. The “dyslexia” categorization creates an entirely unnecessary emotional burden on the student, for what should be framed as a pedagogical skills issue with the responsibility clearly on the teacher.
Very true.
There is rather substantial tension between a) the claim that dyslexia (whether treated as a single condition or a cluster/category of vaguely related things) is universal and observed in all societies where literacy is considered a desideratum; and b) the claim that dyslexia in the U.S. is best explained as a side effect of bad methods of teaching the median student to read that arose in the U.S. within the last two centuries and would thus magically vanish if only better pedagogy was used.
Separately, the New Yorker’s travel budgets for writers are apparently not what they once were. The “news peg” is that some school conveniently located in the South Bronx is finally trying what schools in more distant parts of the U.S. were already doing with success X years ago, plus bonus fieldwork in White Plains.
the claim that dyslexia in the U.S. is best explained as a side effect of bad methods of teaching the median student to read that arose in the U.S. within the last two centuries and would thus magically vanish if only better pedagogy was used.
Where on earth are you getting that? It’s the exact opposite of what the article is saying.
I read the pulp version last week and did enjoy it. I had a couple quibbles.
>in 2022 (American Public Media correspondent Emily Hanford) produced an immensely influential podcast series, “Sold a Story,” about reading instruction in American schools.
Perhaps, but I’d heard about the Mississippi Miracle before COVID.
The article later mentions that “Since 2020, more than forty states have passed laws that push schools to emphasize the science of reading.”
Um, sorta… Here’s the Ed Week article where the stat comes from. The article is dated July 20, 2022. Sold a Story came out later that year.
So 40 states had already acted before the “immensely influential” podcast was even aired. The Ed Week article dates impact of the Mississippi Miracle’s to 2019, when 49 of 50 states saw a decline in reading scores, and only Mississippi managed to swim against the tide.
Maybe what the New Yorker means is that it took Hanford’s APM piece to influence New York City, whose still merely incipient program in the science of reading features heavily in the story.
The article focuses on a handful of special schools for kids with reading difficulties in NYC. And the results are inspiring. I’m not sure why New York needs to pull so many kids out of their normal schools. Maybe because they’re still having difficulties transitioning to the phonics method citywide, so they still have a lot of kids left behind?
One issue with approaching the issue through the special schools is that it left a lot of what I’d like to hear about finessed by the word “even” in this sentence:
>these methods (phonics) provide the best framework to teach even non-dyslexic people to read.
I understand and believe that at core, but I’d like to hear more about exactly what is the same and what is different. This is about all we get:
>Students follow a sequence of increasingly complex steps involving things like letter-sound relationships and syllabication, with lots of repetition. (A literacy expert told me, “A typical learner needs three to five repetitions. A struggling reader might need ten to twenty repetitions. A dyslexic reader might need two hundred repetitions.”)
There’s some description of instruction at Windward, the private school that the author’s niece attended after her dyslexia was diagnosed, but these aren’t the phonics methods our kids’ teachers used. They do seem focused on going slowly, on getting the “200 repetitions” before moving on, naturally. But I’d like to hear a little more about what is working in mainstream classrooms.
Was the difference between my older daughter, who glided effortlessly into reading before kindergarten, and my younger daughter, who was dragged into it by her kindergarten teacher, that we had grown bored with the A is for Aardvark, B is for Butterfly book by the time we were reading to her, so she didn’t get the same repetitions of the letter-sound relationships?
I think J.W.’s impression is related to the finesse trick I mentioned. While I don’t see the “claim” he mentions, the article does seem to treat dyslexia as a somewhat more entrenched difficulty with reading – an exaggerated version of what the “struggling reader” faces, to be overcome by “these methods” since the issues are similar. “Hey, it’s just a matter of getting them more reps, 200 reps. Work that muscle more and you’ll be strong too.”
That’s one reason I wanted to see them define the distinctions more clearly.
I hereby volunteer to make sure Allington gets …. Or better yet: compel him to give one-on-one remedial reading instruction to Donald Trump, until Trump gets to the reading level of a thirteen-year-old (as judged by Commonwealth English grading).
I can tell an experience of a sibling very similar to this. Except back then, dyslexia wasn’t known of as a specific learning impediment; there was no way to get a formal diagnosis recognised by the Schooling system; it was only my mother’s doggedness that got the school to make any efforts at all.
“Hey, it’s just a matter of getting them more reps, 200 reps. Work that muscle more and you’ll be strong too.”
With my sib, what worked was to cover one eye so that the other dominated in scanning the page. (The difficulty was a lack of either brain hemisphere being dominant/an excess of ambidextrousness.)
I’d say the existence of dyslexia in Chinese speakers does nothing to refute the claim that the wretched English spelling system is to blame for dyslexia. For that I’d look at a language with an easy writing system, such as Finnish.
I do find the article rather too full of anecdata — I suppose it’s trying to provide ‘colour’.
Well, did all of Caroline’s uncles and aunts and both parents struggle? Why single out one uncle as somehow exerting greater genetic influence? Was that uncle in sole charge of Caroline’s upbringing?
Presumably all my siblings have the same family history. We all learnt to read with no apparent effort before even getting to school, except one. In part this contributed to the late detection: ‘Janet and John’ and ‘Listen with Mother’ worked for most of us, why suspect it wouldn’t work for all? If ambidextrousness is the symptomatic inherited trait, my father must be fingered, but I’m also not particularly strongly right-handed.
> Well, did all of Caroline’s uncles and aunts and both parents struggle? Why single out one uncle as somehow exerting greater genetic influence? Was that uncle in sole charge of Caroline’s upbringing?
If you have an uncle with heart disease, you get tested for heart disease, even if neither of your parents have heart disease themselves.
Do you know how many families have no aunts and uncles with dyslexia? Quite a few! And guess what? They also don’t have as many dyslexics among the parents.
And I’ve been told that if a baby boy bleeds to death after circumcision, his cousins and nephews (and brothers) won’t undergo the procedure. Same principle without knowing about genetics, but the testing regime is a bit intrusive.
Except back then, dyslexia wasn’t known of as a specific learning impediment; there was no way to get a formal diagnosis recognised by the Schooling system; it was only my mother’s doggedness that got the school to make any efforts at all.
That’s basically my younger brother’s story; my mum pestered the elementary school and got herself elected on the parents’ council to make the teachers accommodate his dyslexia. At that point (mid-70s), the official education system in Lower Saxony already foresaw some accommodations, but that hadn’t trickled down yet to small schools in the countryside like the one we went to.
(And the variation between abilities also rings a bell; I was always good at learning, especially the language- and reading-related aspects, while my brother was always better at physical activities.)
Unfortunately, teachers are not able to utilise any form of time dilation to achieve 200 repetitions instead of five or twenty repetititions in the same time. This surprisingly results in the failure of 100 percent (instead of 5 percent or whatever) of pupils to achieve their learning targets. The obvious and certain to be applied solution is to reduce learning targets.
I have a friend who is dyslexic. She is also a mechanical genius. She has worked as a machinist, does architectural design and repairs violins. She is also an excellent performer on the violin and viola.
Funnily enough, although she has problems reading text, she has no problem reading music. She is very much in demand by local orchestras for her skill as a section leader to deal with new repertoire.
It seems to me that somewhere in there, there exists some information worth studying. Text and written music are both abstract representation systems that map to some processing by the brain that ultimately comes out as a physical action (speech and playing music). Why should someone have a problem with one and not the other?
(You might say that reading doesn’t have to result in speech, but equally a musician can look at written music and hear it in their head.)
It may be that music is partly processed by a different part of the brain, but I don’t know enough about the subject to say more.
Paddy, I’m not sure whether that is meant as a joke or a description of the Irish school system. American schools actually do make time for remediation but prior to this they hadn’t done it particularly well.
I had a friend at Oxford who was brilliant, but who couldn’t spell to save his life. He has become a very successful academic historian. I imagine his books are thoroughly edited by someone who can spell.
… although she has problems reading text, she has no problem reading music.
… Text and written music are both abstract representation systems …
The difference is ‘the arbatriness of the sign”. Musical notes appear up and down on the stave corresponding to up and down the scale. You do have to learn the arbitrary shapes denoting the length of the note (minim, crotchet, quaver, …) — but that’s far fewer than in an alphabet. And the sign always means the same thing.
A musical line has a flow or ‘logic’. (Or is she into mid-C20th stuff?)
@ryan
Ok, you were surprised by “special schools”. I suppose you meant this (and presumably the 200 repetititons) should be part of remedial teaching within the school, not part of the default lesson. In Irish schools, I believe there is no tracking or “streaming” by ability, and I believe schools have variable resources for remedial teaching, and other demands on those resources (e.g., autistic and ADHD pupils).
I do find the article rather too full of anecdata
For god’s sake, it’s a New Yorker article, not a scientific paper. I’m sure there are a bunch of respectable papers that present more information with more data and fewer anecdotes, but nobody but a few scientists reads them. For better or worse, most people, including me, want some human interest mixed in with the data.
@Lars Mathiesen: The normal rule regarding circumcision is that if a boy has a maternal uncle who bled to death, they should not be circumcised. The reason was that orthodox Jews had figured out that a maternal uncle was the closest relative whose medical history was relevant. Since hemophilia is sex linked, a boy cannot inherit it from his father.
It is instructive to compare the terms dyslexia and alexia. Dyslexia (dys-lexia) technically refers to reading disability from birth, while alexia (a-lexia) refers to loss of reading abilities that occur post-insult, i.e., after brain damage following e.g., trauma or stroke. The sight reading (whole language) vs. phonics dichotomy is real, but rarely manifests in pure form – usually there is overlap. And the dichotomy does indeed exist in Chinese, with one difference from English being that in English, the deficit is more strongly correlated with *phonological awareness*, while in Chinese it is more strongly correlated with *morphological awareness*. At any rate, my view is that failure to properly deal with the sight/phonics dichotomy is unrelated to the prevalence of reading deficit in English.
Dyslexia is reportedly a thing in Finland. Here’s a fairly ESLish summary of a recent doctoral dissertation that apparently alleges that the vaunted Finnish education system isn’t handling it very well.
https://www.hfh.ch/news/how-students-with-dyslexia-are-managing-at-finnish-gymnasium
Paddy, I wasn’t sure but the numbers made me think that the special schools were handling a fair number of kids who weren’t diagnosed with dyslexia, but had had trouble learning to read.
Generally my sense is that in American public schools, applying for and getting an IEP, an Individualized Education Program as I think was mentioned in the article, is actually common, and opens the door for remedial services and special attention in the “neighborhood school”.
Dyslexia is reportedly a thing in Finland.
Yes, my link was to an earlier study of dyslexia in Finland. That strikes me as much better evidence than dyslexia in China against the view that dyslexia in English results from our writing system.
Text and written music are both abstract representation systems
Written music seems far less abstract to me. Written music, at least for someone playing an instrument, maps directly to physical space in a way that letters do not. A quarter note on the 4th line of the stave in bass clef is an “f” that corresponds to three and only three possible positions on a contrabass. Or one single key on a piano. It doesn’t change meaning depending on the notes around it the way the letter “f” might have a different value in different combinations with other letters ( or be redundant as in the word “different”).
I appreciate maidhc’s introduction of music reading. Thanks.
I less appreciate some other comments, but am reminded of the saying, “half of advertising is useless, but we don’t know which half.”
Good post subject, Hat.
I hope to have New Yorker access again. (Long boring story.)
Happy new year.
Written music is interesting because it’s a fairly unambiguous set of directions, except no wait it’s actually a bunch of different sets which will be interpreted differently by different readers. Vanya explained how a pianist and contrabassist will do different things with their fingers in response to the same thing written on the page. I learned to read music as a boy in the context of learning to play (never actually that well …) the alto saxophone, which meant that the notes on the page for me correspond to very specific configurations of fingers-on-keys rather different from what a pianist or contrabassist would be doing with their fingers. Nor is there an abstraction behind this as if these were all different ways of eliciting the same pitch, because saxophones (among others) are so-called transposing instruments, so the “middle C” indication on the page would lead me to produce a different pitch than a pianist (or for that matter, a tenor saxophonist) would in response to the same written indication.
@Lars Mathiesen “I’ve been told that if a baby boy bleeds to death after circumcision, his cousins and nephews (and brothers) won’t undergo the procedure.”
Was that guideline conveyed to you as being a practice based on medical science or on a Jewish or an Islamic custom or law?
No, he can read. It’s just that he gets bored if he doesn’t see “TRUMP” every few lines (quotation marks apparently included). Likewise, he can listen, but literally falls asleep if he doesn’t hear “TRUMP” every minute or so.