It's fine, everything's fine, we're all fine here

He has an IEP! My work here is done! Now the school takes over and they actually teach him to read! My relief at getting services in place was palpable. But, it turns out that I should have realized that in a school where the teachers are not using evidence-based, systematic instruction in the regular classrooms, it's probable that they are not using evidence-based instruction in the special education classroom either.

Sidebar: I know that this sounds very "blamey" and like I think everything that happened can be laid at the feet of the teachers...and I do kind of feel that way. But, I also understand, intellectually, that this is the way these teachers were taught to teach (the fact that this sentence is grammatically correct means that English is weird.). It's all they know. Someone that they respected told them that teaching reading was as easy as providing rich texts and discussion about those texts. Just sit the kids down with a pile of awesome books and they will magically learn to read! And even though the Oregon Department of Education has been preaching evidence-based instruction as long as I've been working in higher education, our district was NOT on board. So, while I am angry about what happened to my son, (and all those other kids who have struggled) I get it. And I think that the teachers would feel bad if they knew how much damage they were doing to kids who DON'T magically learn to read (which is about 80% of kids).

As it happens, our CTL Reading Clinic was on the cusp of coming back to campus, so I signed up immediately. I thought that with Clinic help and SPED, we were going to get this kid reading. It took me a few months to realize that his SPED class was not helping him at all and that the program we were using at the Clinic, while somewhat helpful, either didn't seem to be the right fit for him or was just not enough extra help.

To this day, I have no idea what they were doing in the SPED classroom. I think they were reading poetry. And I think that there was absolutely ZERO direct instruction in phonics or phonemic awareness. I am not even sure if they would have understood what that was. There was a lot of fluency work and probably comprehension? But most of that resulted in frustration for our son because he really was still sounding everything out, substituting sounds that didn't belong, unable to spell anything...I do believe that they finally got him to understand how print works. So that when he wrote a sentence, even if everything was spelled phonetically (to his ear), at least it was arranged from left to right with space between each word and a period at the end of a sentence. So...progress?

It was a difficult year, to say the least. And by summer, I was desperate again. I found a teacher who worked in the district at a different school who did know a bit about reading instruction and she agreed to work with our son over the summer using Phonics for Reading (this is a program I was familiar with and was happy to have someone who was going to use something that I knew a little bit about.). Unfortunately, as often happens with summer tutoring, we took vacation, she took vacation, we missed lots of sessions due to camps...but we did the best we could.

That summer - 2016 - CTL (where I work) put in a proposal for a National Comprehensive Center to Improve Literacy for Students with Disabilities. When it was funded in September of 2016, everything changed and the National Center on Improving Literacy was born. And that year, the 16-17 school year, was a game-changer for me and my understanding of what my son needed.

Read the next installment: Fine. I'll Do It Myself.