(The New Yorker) – Proven methods for teaching the readers who struggle most have been known for decades. Why do we often fail to use them?

What’s more, the main principles that inform those methods have been shown to underlie successful reading instruction for all students, whether they have dyslexia or not. (An administrator at a school for students with reading disabilities told me, “What works for our students actually works for everyone. It’s a matter of dosage.”) Many American schools don’t use scientifically supported instructional methods, though, and, partly because they don’t, dyslexia can be hard to distinguish from what one elementary-school principal described to me as “dystaughtia.” If reading were taught better, almost all students would benefit, and students with neurological differences would be easier to identify and treat before their difficulties with reading derailed their lives. “There’s a window of opportunity to intervene,” Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist, told me. “You don’t want to let that go.” (Read More)