Capitol Hill Blue Forums Life and Moral Issues Education Dyslexic Kids

I heard an interesting piece on PBS radio today: 5% or so kids are dyslexic but public schools will never say your kid is dyslexic. If they did, they would be obligated by law to actually teach in a way that works for dyslexia. Instead they just label them as "poor learners", "lazy", "not living up to their potential". and so forth. They won't put most of them in Special Ed because the kids learn coping mechanisms like memorization, etc. and are not failing totally. But bright kids are still getting Ds.

Turns out, the "reading wars" goes all the way back to Horace Mann (died in 1859) who was an advocate of "whole word reading". This is where normal kids learn to recognize whole words and know them later when they see them. Trouble is, dyslexic kids can't store that kind of visual pattern, so they never learn to read that way.

But they CAN learn to sound out individual letters and letter groups, and assemble these into complex words. This is called phonics and America's education establishment is on old Horace's side of the war. Phonics is a dirty word and teachers get fired for using it!

Instead of testing and identifying the dyslexic kids and having a phonics-based Special Ed for them in First Grade, we make them suffer for the rest of their school days and for the rest of their lives unable to read. Outrageous!

My son was PROFOUNDLY dyslexic and, after the Mansfield TX public schools pretended to help him for over a year, made zero progress.
Then a friend gave us a bunch of colored transparent sheets and told us to have
him try each different color, and ONE of the colors would help "rewire" his brain
and help him read better.
Sure enough, the BLUE colored sheets placed over the page worked like a miracle, and within
four months he went from sub-1st grade reading level to ninth grade level just like that.
And he eventually didn't even need the colored sheets at all.

Later we saw ads for "Brain Balance", a program offered by a PRIVATE after school center
for kids with learning disabilities. For about ten thousand dollars, the Brain Balance
people would let your kids use colored reading glasses to fix their dyslexia!

A MIRACLE, and ONLY TEN GRAND!
You can even SEE "the magic glasses" in this infomercial at the 3:29 mark.



So we have now come full circle, where public school systems refuse to help kids who need it and private companies charge a fortune to do what public schools USED to do...HELP KIDS LEARN.

If you're wealthy enough, you can help your kids with learning disabilities. If you're not, you get to raise a failing child.
Tough beans.