Reading Levels Please Help!

Thanks for your inquiry.

You are correct. Reading ability is important. I do not have the knowledge to cite research to answer your questions—just an anecdote.

Some years ago there was a frequent TV commercial about a buffered aspirin product. The bottom line was: “Don’t turn a headache into an upset stomach.” Oh sure! You cure the headache and substitute it for a stomach ache. Not helpful.

Your child has a “headache” (a reading problem). Those who want to force your child to read above the child’s comfort or instructional level risk creating a serious emotional problem. That is the thing you, as a parent, want to prevent. Fight the good fight for the mental health of your child.

An 88 IQ is in the Borderline or Dull Normal Range. I wish it were higher, but I was able to teach a cooperative girl with a 55 IQ to read well enough to comprehend simple text in a daily newspaper. In all honesty, I cannot say I taught her to read everything.

There are some compassionate, knowledgeable readers at this site. I hope someone will take note of your post and supply you with the research you requested.

For information, go to the LD In Depth page on this site — just click the button at the top. I am sorry I can’t refer you to any specific articles but the info you ned should be in there. I always refer people to the National Reading Panel Teaching Children to Read.

As far as “needing the vocabulary”, there are two separate issues here:

Many people here on this site recommend reading to kids and giving them books on tape and voice synthesis systems so that they develop vocabulary and concepts even if their reading skills are lagging behind their peers. I personally have mixed feelings about this — while oral info is very important, it is also easy to use all these things as a crutch and make excuses that you “can’t” learn to read, so a fine line has to be drawn to keep developing those independent reading skills even if it is work and takes time.

On the other hand, if the teacher is just handing her the books and expecting her to read what she clearly cannot, well how is she learning vocabulary or anything else?? You and I can’t learn vocabulary by reading Chinese because we don’t recognize those characters, can we?

**If** the second is the case and the teacher is just expecting her to absorb reading out of the walls, I would get her out of that class, immediately, like today. That kind of teacher cannot be re-educated overnight and the stress is going to give your child a lot more problems than not reading.

Right now her teachers are reading everything to her. Her teacher agrees with me that she should be on a lower reading level, but the Special Ed Supervisor is fighting me because she is keeping up with the other kids in her class. Her comprehension level is very high. She has learned many things to compensate for not being able to read like memorizing everything she can, she can read lips and body language. She participates in class and until you give her something to read you would never know there was a problem. I had another meeting with the supervisor yesterday and she will not agree to lower her level because she is so stuck on the vocabulary and comprehension being on level. She has even on 3 occasions given me statistics on how many people in America cannot read. If she says that to me one more time, I think I’m gonna loose it! I have a long battle ahead of me but I refuse to give up. All of the research I have done shows that everyone can learn to read if taught properly. I will not let this lady make a statistic out of my child. Thank you for any guidance you can give me!

Oh, dear. I had one student that I mention here often, much like your child. He reached Grade 4 getting A’s and B’s because he had a fantastic vocabulary, high intelligence, and great ability to “read” people. Couldn’t read a single word in a book and started failing in Grade 4 where the skill is expected. (His school hadn’t even noticed, even worse than yours …)
I had to re-start teaching him on pre-primer twenty-word vocabulary level. Yes, he DID learn to read, caught up with grade level in reading in one year and the next year pulled ahead in reading and caught up in writing and math.

You are never going to get through to that teacher, not in the next five years. Maybe a decade, but that’s too late for your child. People who already know that a child is going to fail, unteachable, are NOT the people to ask to teach that child.
The vocabulary and comprehension and all are good things, but somehow *also* the time has to be found to teach your child to actually read (and write).
There are several options for finding that time. Maybe there is a special ed teacher or aide in the school who actually knows how to teach reading — and quite often there isn’t, which is why the school gives up, because they do not know how to succeed. You may have to take your child out of school for a short time; some people do a couple of weeks intensive work at a workshop, and others arrange to take the child for an hour a day for tutoring out of school. You may find it best to hire a tutor privately after school and on school breaks. You may get info and tutor the child yourself. There is the extreme option of finding a private LD school instead; or home-schooling. All of these options can work and work well, and all of them have pros and cons to weigh in your own situation.

The main thing is not to waste years and years and thousands of dollars in going around in the same circles. You can test and test and test until you are blue in the face, and you have a pile of test results but the child still hasn’t had a reading lesson. This is a delaying tactic popular among some administrators. You can get a lawyer and start legal action — but if your school board is recalcitrant, they know that all they have to do is play for time for four or five years and then they are rid of you, and you just have a huge pile of legal bills and still the kid hasn’t had a reading lesson.

So find real reading teaching wherever you can — in the school if you are lucky, outside for many people, by yourself if you have more gumption and time than money — and get your child the needed help now; do the testing for info, and fight the school board for better services later, but take productive action now.

Thank you! I have started this school year working aggressively with her. Before now everyone said she will be fine give her a chance to catch up. Well, times up! I have a friend who is a teacher and she let me borrow a Orton-Gillingham based reading program so I can work at home with her. I also have purchased earobics for her to work on. It is a shame that there are people working in our schools who are only there to collect a paycheck not to help our children. I do firmly support teachers 100% and believe that they are molding our future and I will not let this lady cloud that view. Thank you for your help!

as usual, I agree with Victoria. It’s not a bad situation — it is *very* important not to let a child get bogged down by their reading level, and some teachers and/or admins will do that — they have “high standards,” so the child is not permitted to move forward until that reading advances. They don’t get that language input and further vocabulary and comprehension development.

Frankly, if you had a choice of being a nonreader with otehrwise excellent language skills, and giving up the other-than-reading language input to go to a special ed class and do something tha tmight or might not work to bring the reading level up, I woudl choose the former, hands down. That background knowledge, high personal expectations, self-knowledge of intelligence, and a host of other things are actually more important than raw reading skills — and even intense work is not going bring her reading level up to her *thinking* level in the next year.

So — you’re doing the right thing to plug away behind the scenes at the foundations (because it is still a very serious impediment and will be more serious the further along she goes).

Kylene Beers (Senior Reading Researcher, Yale Child Study Center) and author (When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do), says disfluent readers need 20 minutes/day with instructional level text (child can read 90-94% of words independently) as opposed to frustrational level (where child can read 89%).

It takes lots of decoding instruction and practice to get to the instructional level.

The supervisor may be trying to avoid paying for what it will take to get her there or may think that gifted readers can just listen or use technology or that some whole language reading miracle will happen by osmosis when it is already clear it likely won’t. As Victoria says, you may have to go outside the school system even though you shouldn’t have to.

I know a gifted LD university stream high school student, gr. 11, whose life is hell because she can only decode 75% of what she needs to read independently. Sure she has access to Kurzweill, both at home and at school, but the ad hoc reading she needs to do in class is what sinks her.
Obviously, she can’t take the Kurzweill with her everywhere. She does so many hours of homework a night her mother is worried she will have a breakdown. Had she had a timely and appropriate reading intervention earlier, life would be very much easier now.

Good luck with your fight to get your daughter what she needs.

They need 20 minutes/day if independent reading is going to improve/progress at all.

Naturally, she should continue to be exposed to challenging materials. Given her intelligence, remediating the missing decoding/fluency piece, will have a dramatic impact. Surely the school should be flexible enough at that level to both enrich and remediate. I would fight for some EA time in side the large class for decoding instruction and keep her out of special ed. but meanwhile I’d make plans as you are doing to remediate on my own.

Agree- if they aren’t going to provide the decoding instruction, you should negotiate for giving her a break during the day — does the librarian need an assistant? — so she’s not working her brain off all day and then going home for more, and so she has something at school where she is being helpful, is liked, and is comfortable and confident.