We Know How to Teach Every Child to Read, ft. Psychologist David Hurford, Ph.D.

And he looked up at the interventionist, who was Thomas, and he said, am I reading? And Thomas said, yes, you're reading. And the kid goes, oh my gosh, that's the first word I've ever read. And, you know, Thomas became that child's hero. Every day is like, thank you for teaching me how to read.

Hey, everyone. We are Sonja and Nick, and this is Dyslexia Journey. And today, we are excited to welcome Dr. David P. Herford. David P. Herford, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Center for Reading and is the Founder and Manager of the Center for the Assessment and Remediation of Reading Difficulties, a nonprofit dedicated to assisting individuals with dyslexia to become competent readers. He has been publishing on the Identification and Remediation of Reading Difficulties and Related Topics since the late 1980s.

He has authored reading curricula designed to prevent reading difficulties in kindergarten, called Secret Codes, and First Grade, Advanced Codes. The Center for Reading and Card, Inc. used his identification and remediation strategies to provide high-quality and accurate assessments and successful interventions for children and adults who have dyslexia and reading difficulties. He contributed to the writing of the Kansas Blueprint on Literacy, SB-438, which was passed into law last April. He serves on the Literacy Advisory Committee that was formed from that legislation.

Herford's interests include dyslexia, reading difficulties, attentional difficulties, including ADHD, educational research, statistics, and special education law. Dr. Herford, welcome to Dyslexia Journey. Thanks. I'm very happy to be here. So, we have several topics to discuss with you. There's quite a few different ways we could go. But let's, you know, since this is our focus, is dyslexia specifically, we're curious just to find out, like, in your background, where your interest specifically in literacy, but also in the dyslexia piece came for you.

That's a great question. If you were to ask me what I wanted to do when I became an adult when I was four years old, I would have told you I wanted to be a scientist. And that really centered around astronomy and then later astrophysics. And in high school, I found that humans were way more interesting. And then I figured out, well, maybe I can apply science to humans, which is psychology.

And I'm really interested in how people change over time, which is development. So, my doctoral program, I did in developmental psychology. And my interest was working with older adults because I thought that's where the research was. And I still think it is. And I think if I'd have gone that way, it'd be interesting now because I'd be studying myself.

But there was a required course in my doctoral program, which was research-based. Every class that we had, we were required to come up with a research proposal based on the content of the class. And one of the classes we were required to take was the psychology of learning disabilities. And I realized, dang, everything that I liked about science and human behavior was in that. And so, that became my dissertation, which was published in the Journal of Child Experimental Child Psych.

And then that begat the next study and then the next and then the next and then before too long, we're realizing we can identify kids pretty accurately before they begin formal reading instruction and then provide them with intervention to help them become competent readers before they even know they have a reading issue. So, that was kind of the early part of it in a nutshell, but I love what I do. I've been in this space for 40 years now.

And every day I'm excited to do something different with what's going on with reading because, you know, I think we have a lot of it really solved in terms of what we need to do to prevent reading problems. And for those who can't get prevented from experiencing those issues, what we can do to help remediate. So, I think this is just a really exciting time to be involved with, you know, reading.

Yeah. It seems to us, kind of from the outside, not being officially involved in either academia or the educational system, that dyslexia and learning differences don't get the attention that we think they deserve, kind of, from the academy. Would you agree with that or do you feel like it's more that the findings, as you said, just haven't filtered into the actual educational system? Yeah, it's more the latter. At this point in time, we've essentially known what to do about reading to a general extent for the last hundred years.

If we look at the last 50 years, there's just been an explosion of research that's been done in the area of reading failure and how to teach reading. The problem has been that scientists generally don't speak to practitioners. They speak a different language. They're interested in moving along the knowledge base. And the teachers, the practitioners, the educators have been involved with teaching kids. And so those that that gap between the two really hasn't, you know, kind of bridged yet.

And in reality, that was the whole point between and for no child left behind, because Reed Lyon, who was involved in grantmanship and they were giving out millions of dollars in grant, a child health and human development. And every year they're finding that, yes, in fact, we can help struggling readers become competent readers. And so Dr. Lyon, when George Bush came to office, he had some interest in reading from Texas, as his brother did in Florida, and they wanted to solve the reading problem.

So they developed no child left behind. But of course, as we know, you know, reading first was the solution. And that was the science being applied in schools. But the problem was that, you know, people being people, some people said, well, I don't really like George Bush, so I'm not going to do what you say. And there was some other issues involved with the piece of legislation that didn't seem to lead to lots of people getting involved.

And part of that was that annual yearly performance, you know, instead of trying to encourage, there was more of a stick, or at least people saw it as more of a stick. And people generally rebel against that. And, you know, we can't tell teachers, it's your fault that kids aren't learning how to read. It's not their fault. And I really dislike that conception of how things are working. The problem has been that that gap between research and practice hasn't been really bridged and developed.

And what we're seeing now, I think, you know, to kind of go off on a little bit of a tangent here is, you know, when No Child Left Behind was happening, there was some pushback, obviously. And there's actually lots of pushback from colleges of education. And then there was pushback from educators in general. And in 2011, a small group of people from New Jersey said, you know what, we're just sick and tired of schools saying we don't have to deal with dyslexia.

And the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which was the reauthorization of Public Law 94-142, which was the Education for All Handicapped Children's Act, specifically said dyslexia in the legislation. So no one could really say anything about, well, we don't have to talk about dyslexia. We don't think dyslexia exists. I mean, you're contrary then with federal law. So those handful of people in New Jersey started a group called Decoding Dyslexia. And it really kind of rung a bell because I found out about them in 2013.

And they went from four or five parents in New Jersey to 47 states and two provinces in Canada in 2013. And a short period after that, they're all in all 50 states and four provinces in Canada. And so they went to legislators and said, hey, we know what the solution is. Science is telling us what the solution is. We need to deploy the science. And that's where you see so many different state legislators creating laws on dyslexia.

And then we have the Emily Hanford sold a story podcast that just torched everything. I mean, when we're talking about getting people motivated and she did such a brilliant job because she's such a great writer and an intelligent person and really understood the issues. And when she spoke about them, she was non-accusatory and just told the story of how did this happen. And a lot of teachers who are like, yeah, I'm struggling to teach my kids how to read.

And some of the curriculum that we have seems to be contrary to actually producing good readers. And they're like, oh, that's why. That's why there's a problem. Teach me the science of reading and structured literacy. And that's happening now. And, you know, what we're seeing is teachers are very motivated. They're being more educated in literacy and how literacy works, and they're excited about it. So, you know, I think it's, you know, and you guys doing your podcast and helping parents understand what's happening, there's a lot of things that are coalescing right now to get us on the right path.

And so I think that gap is getting smaller, is what I'm saying. And we hosted a small group of teachers at the Center for Reading on Monday, and they had all been through Louisa Motz's letters program, Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, which was meant to help teachers get access to the science of reading, which they were not getting. And they told me when they got through letters, they're like, oh, my gosh, this makes so much sense.

I understand now how we should be teaching reading. So I think there's a lot more of that happening. And as a function of those things happening, we're going to get a lot more kids who are learning how to read. And as you mentioned in the introduction, in Kansas, we have the Kansas Blueprint for Literacy, Senate Bill 438. And that requires everyone in the state of Kansas to teach the science of reading and structured literacy.

You know, we can't think, hey, I think this is a good idea of how we should teach reading. We just give kids books and they'll just naturally learn how to read. That doesn't happen. And we know it doesn't happen neurologically. We know it doesn't happen because of learning principles. We know lots of reasons why it doesn't happen. And so, you know, I think if we're successful here, which I think we will be, other states are going to say, how'd you do that?

Let's make that happen in our state. So I think we're in a really good place right now. And I'm happy I've stuck it out to the point where I can see it happening. That is so encouraging to hear, you know, that it sounds like, you know, it is gradually coming together. And, you know, maybe it just takes a little while sort of to see it, but that it sounds like maybe there's even a tipping point happening.

That's so encouraging. And interesting to hear, too, that the legislation piece does sound important, though. So let's get into the research a little more, too, because, you know, most people, I think, don't know about the specific findings. You know, as we've talked about with you, it doesn't always filter out to the public, even if it is happening. So maybe just like what are one or two of findings that you found extra interesting or surprising as our beginning of the research piece?

Well, you know, early in my career, I found it all exciting and surprising. And the early work that I did was involved in trying to determine what is different about children who learn how to read versus those who don't. And, you know, at that time, even though we use the term dyslexia, we generally in the research field said good and poor readers. And for me, although we know that there's somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of kids who have dyslexia.

And that's a neurologically based kind of difficulty that just makes it challenging for people to learn how to read. And I think it's important to note that we're all slightly neurologically different. You know, that's that's why you guys are, you know, you're like, hey, I need parents to understand this stuff. I'm going to do a podcast to help. And we're going to ask good questions and we're going to make something happen at a podcast.

You know, there are people neurologically who are kind of set to become teachers because they love children and they can take a concept and, you know, change how they teach maybe 10 or 10 or 12 different ways until a child understands it. So we're all slightly neurologically different. But in this particular iteration of neurodiversity, these children who have dyslexia, there's a couple of parts of the brain that just don't function like other children's.

And that's perfectly fine. But in our day and age now, we require everyone to read. And so today, reading is a basic human right. We have to teach children how to read because it's not just an academic struggle. You know, these children struggle psychologically and emotionally. We see children as young as kindergarten who have anxiety, you know, about going to school. And that morphs into depression in second and third grade and suicidal ideation and dropping out of school and all kinds of other things.

And, you know, what what job do you have today that doesn't require some level of reading? It's just they just don't exist. So reading is our introduction and a requirement for us to gain access to our society. So back in those days when we were looking at how we can differentiate between those kids, we were finding that it was language processing. The way they were processing speech signals was different. And so we developed an intervention around that and found that we could help kids process speech slightly differently and more effectively.

And then that led to, well, what can we do then to deploy those types of things that we're learning to things that are more related to reading? And when we did that and it was successful, then we're like, OK, then we know that we can help. And this was in parallel to other people's works, obviously. And, you know, the Orton-Gillingham approach to teaching reading, there's some similarities there that, you know, we kind of discovered, you know, kind of the same things, even though we weren't trying to.

So what's interesting in science is, you know, you can probably get 10 or 12 different researchers to look at a problem and get 10 or 12 different solutions. But there will be a common thread among those solutions that get to the real issue. And I think we're at that point right now. And the other thing that I wanted to say about the struggling readers is that, you know, we have somewhere between, you know, generally I say 15 and 20 percent, but certainly between 10 and 20 percent of kids who have dyslexia who are being challenged to learn how to read.

But across our nation, we have nearly 40 percent of our children who are reading below the basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and Reading. And the basic level means you have the skills there, but you just haven't become a proficient reader. Below basic means that you are either a non-reader or you're such a struggling, labored reader that you cannot comprehend what you read. So if we have 40 percent of children who are struggling and half of them have dyslexia, then we have half of them who aren't getting the types of materials that are helping them become competent readers.

So whether, you know, for me, whether we're talking about dyslexia or, you know, not dyslexia, it doesn't matter as much to me because I want to help all children become competent readers, whether we label them or identify them as having dyslexia or not. It's critically important and it's critically important on so many levels. You know, even the defense of our country is dependent on people who can read. You know, the Barbara Bush Foundation found that adult illiteracy costs the U.S. economy two point two trillion dollars a year.

And in addition to that, those are people who don't really they didn't have a good experience with school. And sometimes I think teachers think, well, you know, this kid is struggling to learn how to read. Why doesn't the parent show up for parent-teacher conferences? And the answer to that is a lot of adults who've gone through the school system as struggling readers have post-traumatic stress disorder as a function of even the concept of walking in a school.

So they tell their kids, hey, I'm going to the parent-teacher conference tonight. They get in the car, they start sweating. The closer they get to the school, the more they sweat, they get out of the car like, I just can't do it. And then the next time they might get to the door and like, I just can't do it. I mean, that's post-traumatic stress disorder. So, you know, it's it's a systems problem.

It's just not an academic problem. We can solve a lot of our nation's difficulties by helping people become competent readers. There's I mean, it's not just my opinion. That's factual. We can look in the literacy and literacy and see, you know, how many people are struggling readers who end up dropping out of school. Lots. Those are the people who are dropping out of school. You know, who are the people who are not getting the types of jobs they'd like to get the kind of job that pays well enough.

They can have a family and do the things they want to do in life. A lot more people who can't read. Who is in, you know, incarcerated. Generally, people who have difficulties learning how to read, who dropped out of school, who, you know, they're not getting to realize the American dream. So this is critically important. And, you know, for me, the fact that we're at a point now where we can help so many people become competent readers is really exciting.

The solution is right in front of us. We just have to help people get there. Yeah, so let's dig into that a little bit. And if possible, can you give a, like, sort of two-minute summary of what the effective approach is to teaching literacy? Oh, absolutely. Generally, before the International Dyslexia Association coined the term structured literacy, I referred to it as the mechanics of reading. And so it's important to look at how did writing systems get invented in the first place.

And in reality, it came out of commerce where, you know, they were, you know, they were buying and selling things. And, you know, someone would say, like, hey, I forgot my wallet. You know, oops, is there a way I can owe you this? I mean, I'm obviously being somewhat facetious here. But they created little clay figurines of what the person owed. And they would put them in clay pots so that they couldn't say, whoops, I just forgot this, too, and I don't have to pay for it.

And then they have to break the clay pots to see what was in it. And then they thought, well, you know, it would be really more efficient to paint on the outside of the pot what was in it. And then they got to the point where it's like, that's not efficient. Let's just write what's in the clay pot on a tablet. And then it became, well, okay, Nick owes us some money.

How do I say it's Nick who owes us the money and not David? And so then they thought, well, we can create these kind of logograms where, like, a picture of a sun meant day. And then, like, two eyes may be vid. So David was sun plus eyes, you know, that rebus of that. And then they got to the point where, like, well, that's not very efficient either. Is there a way to represent the sounds of our language with some type of grapheme or letter or symbol?

And that's what, you know, became the alphabet. And the alphabet is absolutely brilliant because when you get to a word as an adult you've never seen before, you can still read it or have a high probability of pronouncing it correctly. Where if you have to deal with logographs, there's so many logographs that you can memorize, and then it becomes a real challenge. So the point of this is that the graphemes or the letters represent the sounds.

So, in other words, learning to read is like learning a second language that's graphemic in nature to represent the sounds. In other words, the alphabet is a code, and we have to teach the code. There's absolutely no ifs, ands, or buts about that. Now, imagine being a piano teacher and putting sheet music on, you know, the piano and saying to a kid, hey, just guess at the notes. Just guess. And the kid's like making some noise, and it's like, well, that's not what the piece is having you play.

Like, well, you said guess, and I'm not making very good guesses, right? And so the three-queuing system, which is balanced literacy, reading recovery, you know, and other programs, you know, like that whole language, Fontenelle, Calkins, they're essentially at the root are saying, and the person who came up kind of with the current version of it, he called it psycho-linguistic guessing. And so if you don't, and in reality, you know, what's the goal of reading is to comprehend.

So we wanted to get people to comprehend as soon as possible. So, you know, Goodman and others thought, well, just guess at words so you can get to the comprehension part. And that seemed pretty reasonable assumption, right? And so if you're reading a story and you get to a word you don't know, look at the pictures and guess based on the pictures. That's a cue that will help you. And if that doesn't work, then look at the context of what was read before that.

Does that help you understand what the word is? And then, you know, the third strategy is to decode the first part of that word you don't know and then guess the rest of it. Well, that seems like a reasonable thing. And that's what I mean by we have to understand how science tells us reading should be taught versus what our ideas are. Because that seemed like a reasonable idea, but it was 100% incorrect.

No doubt about that. And probably people listening to this right now are saying, yeah, but when I get to a word as an adult, I don't know. I try to figure it out from context. Right. But you know how to read already. If you're trying to teach a kid how to read by having them guess, guess what's going to happen? They're not going to learn how to read. And that's led to the 40% of kids across our nation who are not reading at the basic level or better.

Because of the strategies that we've been using are strategies that don't work. So when we teach it that it's a code, then we get to the point where kids understand that. And so, you know, a little bit further than that, the way that we do it with the curricula that we developed is we tell kids in kindergarten the first day of the curriculum, hey, you know, there are codes out there and you got to figure these codes out.

So they walk around and see, you know, bathroom signs, exit signs. We talk about, you know, McDonald's arches signs. And there's codes out there that tell us about those kinds of things. And then we tell them they have to be little detectives to figure some of these things out because the English writing system is a beautiful writing system. But it's also very challenging to learn how to read. Like there are writing systems we call transparent writing systems like Spanish and German, Italian, Greek.

And for, you know, kids who have dyslexia in those systems, they're still going to struggle to learn how to read because decoding is an issue for them. But, you know, those writing systems are so easy to decode that they eventually get there. And, for example, if you look at the German literature on dyslexia, you'll see that, which German is a transparent writing system, they have children who are slow readers, not non-readers.

In the United States, we have non-readers because the code is challenging. And so then the next day we come and we show them the letter A and we tell them it's ah. And then they do some things with letter A, write about it while they're saying ah. And the next day we come in and they review ah again, the letter A, and we introduce the letter N, which is hmm. We don't talk about letter names at this point.

And there's been some debate whether that's, you know, a good thing or not. But we get to that three quarters of the way through the curriculum. And then the next day we do the same thing, review A, N, and then put T in there. And then on the fifth day we review A, N, and T and then show them the word ant and say, what's this letter? We point to A and they say ah.

What's this one? Hmm. What's this one? Let's put them together. And see, now they're using the mechanics of reading. They're decoding the sound letter correspondences that they've learned. And they're synthesizing, which is blending them together, and they're reading the word they already have in their vocabulary. So it hits all those things that's important for initial reading. And then if they can decode and read ant, they can decode and read at and an and tat, right, and tan.

And then they realize, oh my gosh, there's some utility in learning these sound letter correspondences. And so they go a couple more days learning more sounds, then we start working on spelling. And so, you know, it's important that we, when we teach that it's a code, that we teach them it's a reciprocal process. That we decode to read, but we encode to spell and to write. And we need to do those in the very beginning together so they get it's a code.

It's like, I don't know if you guys are old enough to get those decoder rings in cereal boxes, but they did that when I was a kid. And the decoder ring that have a code and you would decode it and read what they're trying to have you read. And then you can produce your own code, right? So that's essentially what we're doing here. And amazingly, kids understand that. Because by the end of the kindergarten year, almost every child in the kindergarten who's using the secret codes has read 550 different words and spelled all of them.

And they also understand punctuation, which is a period, exclamation point, and a question mark. And, you know, some of them are actually reading some fairly lengthy paragraphs. And these aren't things like we're just like, you know, we thought calculus is good to learn in college. Let's see if high schoolers can do it. And then it's like, oh, let's push calculus down into middle school. Oh, maybe first graders should do calculus. Like we're not pushing things down into kindergarten that they can't do with reading.

It just, you know, I'm a developmental psychologist, so I'm interested in doing things developmentally appropriate. And I guess it was a little bit of a surprise that they did so well. I mean, it was amazing. But the thing is, when you teach kids, even with kids with dyslexia or kids who are going to struggle with reading, how the mechanics of reading works, in other words, structured literacy, they get it. And when it becomes more challenging, then they have a basis for understanding it.

And so what I was trying to do with the secret codes is to create a temporary transparent writing system, because even kids with dyslexia with those transparent writing systems kind of eventually get that. And then we teach them the stuff that's more challenging later, which is we do that. You know, in kindergarten, it's all about phonology and coding and decoding and synthesizing. First grade, it shifts to morphology, where we talk about, you know, the meaning of prefixes and suffixes and roots.

And we're still learning about phonology. But I know that was more than two minutes. No, that was great. I like how you really got into the curricular stuff already, too. That flowed out right from what we were talking about. And I really appreciate the explanation, actually, of, you know, why, how our ideas about it, you know, I liked having that explanation for, like, yes, this is why we think that. But here's the link to why that is not going to really teach them.

Because I think I hadn't, you know, I kind of know that just from hearing about what works and what doesn't. But just to make that connection, I think that's really useful. So I really appreciate that. Well, you know, the other thing I can add is some people would argue we do have some, you know, people who are performing at the advanced and proficient level in terms of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Reading.

Well, then our stuff actually works. Those kids, most likely, for the most part, someone is teaching them decoding issues. Or they figured out that, oh, my gosh, if we just decode, this makes more sense. And we've actually known since the 1970s that the guessing thing really doesn't work because an amazing researcher named Keith Stanovich, who's retired, but in Canada, he's absolutely one of our, like, the Einsteins of in psychology. But he spent quite a bit of his career looking at reading.

And early on, I think the reason why he got interested in reading is kind of test that notion, does guessing really work? Because, you know, at the outset, it's like, oh, wow, if that works, that's so easy to teach reading. Just guess. I mean, there's no, you don't even really have to teach reading, right? You just help guide them, right? Which is, you know, even guided reading, right? That's kind of what we're talking about.

But Stanovich and Wes, what they did is they created a system and then they looked at people, how they actually learned how to read. And the gist of it is what they found was that, firstly, struggling readers will guess because they don't have the ability to decode. They weren't taught to decode or they don't know how to decode. They're, in desperation, going to guess based on the picture, best guess based on context and whatever.

And he found that, Stanovich and Wes found that, yeah, that's, you've got to teach decoding. It's just how it has to go. And that's really, you know, what Samuel T. Orton and Anna Gillingham were saying is we've got to teach the code. So that was the 1920s and early 1930s. So we've really known this for a while. And even prior to strangely progressive education, which is really great, but one of the problems with progressive education is they said that teaching the code is going to bore kids to death.

You know, Horace Mann, who is an amazing figure in education and pushed modern education to where we are now, was completely wrong about how to teach reading. So when we apply science, what science does is the whole purpose of science to help us understand reality. And we do so by applying the scientific method that helps us to extract what we think is reality without our personal biases involved. And so when you're an adult and you're like, I don't know how I learned how to read, but I'm a good reader.

And these poor kids are trying to figure out these squiggly lines and they're boring and they're terrible. And we don't want kids to have to be bored with that, not realizing that's how they actually learn how to read, right? So we built a system that really did a great disservice to our kids because, in my opinion, I can't imagine that it wouldn't be possible to teach probably all kids how to read to some extent, but at least around 97%.

I mean, there's the 95% group that says 95%, I think we can really do better than that. And, you know, and people will say, well, what about intelligence? Aren't some kids just not bright enough to learn how to read? Well, when you even look at kids who have intellectual disability, which is the lowest 3% in terms of intelligence, 85% of that 3% are in the mildly intellectually disabled range. And the oldest person we taught to read here at the center was 63 years old and he had intellectual disability.

And we know there really is no relationship between intelligence and reading, you know. So one of the things that I pontificate whenever I get the opportunity is we have to get away from what's called the discrepancy definition of reading issues. And that's a strategy that's been used for some time because we're like, well, what is happening in a child who has, you know, enough intelligence to learn how to read? Why aren't they learning how to read?

And then the notion was, well, then we really need to look at kids who have intelligence levels that are higher than their reading levels because kids who have low IQ and low reading, well, we just don't expect them to learn how to read. And I think that's, we born out in research as well. Linda Siegel, who's another Canadian researcher, and my work in the early 1990s and late 1980s showed that's not true.

You know, we can teach kids how to read. Yeah, that's, well, this is wonderful hearing about all the research. And if we, if there's any other research that we didn't cover that you want to bring up, definitely just feel free to bring it up. But we'd love to also switch over to your advocacy work and hear more about that. Can you tell us more about the Center for Reading? Yes. The Center for Reading was an outgrowth of our research.

And once we got to the point where we knew we were 98.6% accurate in identifying kids at the beginning of first grade who were having reading problems, because then we followed them for a couple of years and saw where they were performing, like, wow, we were very accurate in identifying kids. Then the next step is, well, what do you do about that? And the next step, obviously, you know, because a lot of the state laws are like, we have to do early identification.

And right now, early identification means beginning of kindergarten or right prior to kindergarten. And then the question is, well, what do you do after that? Like, OK, you all have or likely have a reading problem. That's good information to know. But what are we going to do about it? So the second thing that we did was then to develop an intervention where we would go into first grade classrooms in a school system, identify all the kids at risk.

And then we work with kids two or three times a week for about 30 minutes at a time, because that's what we could get access to them and help them to get closer to where they needed to be with their peers in their classroom. And we obviously, because researchers, if they're listening, it's like, dude, 20 or 30 minutes, three times a week is not going to do jack, right? So we created the center so that kids could come after school and during the summer and get additional help, because reading is something that takes a lot of effort.

I mean, even if you're going to be a good reader, it still takes for most kids a lot of effort to get to the point where you become a competent reader. So the center we created in 1996 and we're a fairly small operation. It was myself and a graduate assistant, which grew into myself and two graduate assistants. And then, you know, we did quite a bit of work training undergraduate students to provide the intervention for us.

And then that just kept building. Today, we have five full-time staff, two professional part-time staff who do interventions, five graduate assistants who do the evaluation. We do about 300 evaluations per year, and then we train undergraduate students to do online and in-person interventions to help them. And we've been quite successful in doing so, but we're still a small operation and we've never advertised and we still have lots of people come here.

And, you know, we were self-funded, so we did charge for our services, but it was on a sliding scale based on family income. Because one of the things that I think we need to do a better job of is providing services to people who can't afford those services. So right now, it's not unheard of that it would cost $8,000 to $10,000 in some places for an evaluation. And it's not unheard of to pay $150 an hour for intervention services.

Well, we live in a poverty area and, you know, we're not going to limit what we can do to help people who may not be able to afford it. And so, you know, if you go to our website at the university and see the sliding scale, you're like, well, that's ridiculous. You know, but we're not here to make money. We're here to help people become competent readers of all ages. And so that's kind of morphed into other things.

We've created the I Have Dyslexia books for children for them to understand that they're not alone. And, you know, what dyslexia is all about, which is a neurologically based issue. We're writing some books for adults to understand what dyslexia is all about. And strangely enough, I'm writing them out of order. Because when I was asked to write the book, I thought, well, that's crazy. I mean, there's so many books out there that are really great.

Why write another one? But the person convinced me that I'm a pretty decent storyteller and parents kind of relate to what I'm telling them. So I started writing the books, and that book became a series of seven. And I wrote volume five and six first, which is the history of special education and the application of special education law, which is volume six. Because so many parents, they go into their first IEP meeting unprepared for what that's going to be like.

So they go in thinking, oh, we're just going to talk about my kids' reading struggle. And they get in there and realize, oh, they're creating a legal document in terms of what services my child is going to get. And I think we're missing some stuff, but it's too late. So I wrote those books because I wanted them to know that special education law is one of the most amazing things that has happened in this country.

I mean, civil rights, you know, women's rights, you know, there's lots of things that we've done that have been pretty remarkable. But one of the top of those on my list is special education law. Because in the 1950s and 60s, there were millions of kids who did not get to go to school. And when they did, they didn't get much of an education. And so the Education for All Handicapped Children Act changed that.

And it changed it to an enormous extent. And parents had a seat at the table because Congress knew that parents knew their kids. And to get this right, we needed parent input. But a lot of parents today don't know that. And quite frankly, teachers don't know this. So, you know, the Volume 5 and Volume 6 are for teachers, parents, and students and administrators. We wanted them to understand this because it's complicated.

And so we can get these things right if people know what they're doing. So information is really important. And, of course, we do in-service training and, you know, we have teachers come to our center. You know, we're really all about trying to help as many people become competent readers. And the more people who know how to do these things, how to do structured literacy, the more kids will learn how to read.

So it's not like, hey, this is our stuff and people got to pay for it. You know, we're saying, here's what you do as a teacher. Do these things in your school. If you want to use the secret codes, great. If not, you need to use something like that. So, again, I think it's just so exciting that, you know, like you guys have a podcast, so people are going to learn more about these kinds of things.

And the more people who learn about it, the better off we're going to be. And we have to work together. You know, even in an IEP meeting, if there's some disagreement or dispute, it's really important to work together. And the law allows for mediators to come in and help, you know, if the law also allows for due process for a complaint to be taken all the way through the system. And that's not a very satisfying solution because for parents, that requires then going to court, which is costly.

You can do it, you know, without taking a lawyer, but you're probably going to lose. And even with a lawyer, it's going to be challenging because the school system has lawyers, too. And then it becomes adversarial where then everyone feels bad. The teachers feel bad. Administrators feel bad. Parents feel bad. It's just if we can work together. I know it seems crazy in this era, someone saying we need to work together because it doesn't seem like people are doing that, but we can do it.

And the bottom line is we want to help kids become readers. That's the bottom line. So I think we can all, you know, put our egos aside and say, because I learned from my parents. I haven't stopped learning. I've been in the field for 40 years. I learned new things, you know, every day it seems like. And I check my ego and say, yeah, tell me about that. I don't know what that is, you know.

So we just have to work together. And I think the solution is there. So I think that's the exciting thing for me. Yeah. I want to just quickly put in a plug. We have a recent interview with Jennifer Bernheim, who founded the Right to Read Advocacy Group, and she talked a lot about the parental rights. We also have an interview with an attorney talking more about that, that will probably be live by the time this interview goes live.

So we'll link to that as well. Yeah. Just for anyone who wants to delve even further into those particular topics. But let's... I think one thing I'll add about the legal issue is, you know, there have been people who have been successful. Like when you talk about the Endro F. case, the Supreme Court, in my opinion, got the Rowley case incorrect, which basically the Rowley case, without going into a lot of detail, because I know this is time limited.

So, but this was a child who was deaf, who needed a sign language interpreter, who was a great lip reader, who in kindergarten could read the lips of the teacher very well. In first grade, the teacher's turning around, talking and writing on the board, so she's missing a lot. She still did well in school because her mom spent four or five hours a night teaching Amy Rowley how to do things. And the Supreme Court, I think, really got it wrong because the Supreme Court essentially said, it's not about getting you an education.

It's getting you in the door. That's what's important, getting you in the door. And the Endro F. case was a case with someone who was on the spectrum. And the Supreme Court, in my opinion, got that one correct and said, it's not just about letting people in the door. It's about giving them an appropriate education. Because remember, the term is free, appropriate public education, not free public education, whether it's appropriate or they're learning or not.

It's free, appropriate public education. And so, you know, we need to make that happen. But part of the problem is that ever since 1975, the Supreme Court or the Congress said, we're going to fund the states by giving them 40% of the cost of educating a child on top of what they're getting from the state to help a special education. And every year since, they've underfunded it. So now we've created a system where parents know they have rights.

They may not know all their rights and they may need to be more educated on that. But the school system is also between a rock and a hard place because parents know their rights. There are more people coming out requesting special education now than ever before. And schools are underfunded to the point where they're like, we want to help. We don't know how to help. We have to deny services and then see, then we get in trouble.

So we need parents to get out there and talk to their Congress people and say, please get this bill that's supposed to get funding up for special education. Get that passed because that's important for this all to work. Yeah, I want to go back to the Center for Reading really quickly. And do you have an anecdote of a success story or two that you'd like to share? Sure. You know, it's always exciting to see children, you know, when they're able to read.

And it's like we do the intervention, like I said, in person, online, but we also have what's called a week-long intensive intervention. And people come from all over the United States for that. And it's 9 to 4 or 4.30 and they get a lot crammed in that week. And, you know, just a couple weeks ago, we had a child here who was in third grade could do absolutely no reading, none whatsoever.

And by Wednesday of the week, we had him working on the mechanics of reading such that he was able to decode, synthesize, or blend, and read a word. And he looked up at the interventionist, who was Thomas, and he said, am I reading? And Thomas said, yes, you're reading. And the kid goes, oh, my gosh, it's the first word I've ever read. And, you know, Thomas became that child's hero. Every day he's like, thank you for teaching me how to read.

I mean, granted, he's got a lot of work ahead of him. But, you know, to get to that point where you can see how it works and he's reading, that's exciting. And then, of course, my favorite story, which is, you know, a public story now because it's been written about. But we had a third grade student from Switzerland and his dad had a friend at Oxford University and said, hey, my son is a struggling reader.

Where can I go to get help? Tell me the three best places in the world to go. And quite frankly, I don't know how we became one of them, but because I thought for the most part we're under the radar. I mean, we publish stuff and do things. And this was, you know, 15, 16 years ago. And so Joel came here and is here for a week and a half. And when he left here, strangely enough, I told the parent, I said, look, we're going to get him up to speed on phonological processing and how to decode, how to decode sounds from letters and focus on the phoneme and those types of things.

But when he left here, he was actually reading. And I know people aren't going to believe this, but he was at the 85th percentile in reading, which was obviously people like, seriously, dude, you can't really tell us that. That can't be true. But, you know, as a scientist, we don't say things that aren't true. You know, we don't like making what's called a type one error, saying something's true when it's not or something's going to work when it doesn't.

And granted, he had to go home and still work. You know, it's when you go to an intensive, if you go to running camp, you do a lot of running. You go home, you can't say, well, I did that. I'm going to be great for the cross country season in the fall. I can just take the next month off. You got to continue to run. And so he continued to work very hard.

And his motivation at the time was to be able to read Harry Potter books. But three years ago, he graduated from Max Planck University with a doctoral degree in neuroscience. So we feel really good that, you know, he doesn't really remember what we did because in third grade. But and granted, he's still somewhat of a struggling reader. Right. A little bit. He's but he can still read. He's a competent reader. He can still read and comprehend.

And it got him to the point where he's able to defend a dissertation and get a doctoral degree. So that's probably my favorite story. But there's so many other kids who come here, you know, that learn how to read. And it's not just us. I mean, any place that is teaching the science of reading, structured literacy based types of programs are going to get kids who are competent readers. it's just kind of where we're at.

We just need to spread it to, you know, far and wide in schools and everywhere we can, because we know we can teach kids to become competent readers. There's just no doubt about that. Yeah, that's it's so touching and motivating, both. So I love hearing those stories. so before we ask you to share your contact information with us, where people can find you one final question, and that gets back to those books that you specifically wrote for kids.

and I, you know, I'm thinking this relates to sort of what you want to impart to those kids. what was your inspiration or what are you hoping that you they get from those books? Well, actually a couple things. firstly, we had a lot of children coming to our center and at the time, so you have to remember, I mean, these, we've been here for a long time. And, you know, when we would first have our, parent feedback session, parents would, would cry.

It was very emotional for them to find out there's something going on with their kid for real. And, of course, we could tell them, but we have the solution, so it's okay. And, you know, fast forward another, you know, 20, 30 years, when children today find out they have dyslexia, they're like relieved. They're like, oh, okay. You know, I'm not, I'm, I'm still as smart as I thought I was. I still can do well in school.

I have a specific difficulty that we can work on to help. And it's strange how those things have changed. but the, the two first books that we wrote, these guys here, we wrote one for boys and one for girls. And it's important because, you know, we found in our early research and then early to mid 1990s, that about the same number of boys as girls were experiencing reading difficulties. And when we see a difference, it was like 55 versus 45%.

It wasn't a big difference. most in, and I usually, when I'm talking to parents, I tell the dads earmuffs, because almost everything that can go wrong in humans goes wrong with males more so than females. you know, like you take it, you take anything, you know, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, almost any developmental issue is going to affect more boys than it is girls. But it's not true with dyslexia. It's roughly half and half.

And at the time we wrote them about 80% of the main characters in children's books were males. It's like, you know what? That's just not right. again, you know, a lot of wonderful things have happened in our nation for women, you know, women's rights and civil rights and those types of things. But one of the more important things I think for people to learn about who they are as people is title nine.

because, you know, boys got to learn about sports that what you put into it is what you get out of it. And, you know, girls needed to have that same experience, which is obviously happening now. And the reason why we're dominating in the world, women's soccer is because we had title nine and, you know, that's where, you know, young girls get to learn about themselves that, you know, when you fall, you get up, you just keep going or you, you know, you put the work in, then you're going to get results.

And I think that's important. So, I wanted girls to have their own book that they could relate to. And then, you know, for me, it was important to then have books for kids who are multicultural kids, kids of color. And so we have those in boys and girls too. And then we translated them all into Spanish. And, you know, those, they can get at jetpublishing.net, which is J E T T publishing.

And, you know, jet is for my three kids and my son-in-law. So when we created the company, you know, we're kind of a family oriented family, obviously. And so that's where jet comes from because like, what's up with that? You're not even spelling jet, right? It's like, yeah, no. but you know, those, those books were exciting because the kids who got them early on have graduated from college. And they still say, they'll, they'll send me some information on Facebook or something and say, it's still my favorite book.

Cause it's my book. It's for me. and it tells them basically, you're not alone. Here's how reading works. It's a neurological issue. that, you know, you can work on and, you know, the last pages, let's get started, you know? So it was for our students here and then other people liked them. And then, you know, they're all over the place now. Fantastic. Yeah. So we'll put a link, in the show notes to jet publishing, as well as to the, center for reading.

is there any other, online presence you'd like to share? let's see. We've got jet publishing, card ink, which is our nonprofit. most of what we do is, is really through the center for reading now, because before, you know, we had, we still do some things out of, card ink. but most of what we do is out of the center for reading, but there's also, not a for-profit place, called dyslexia, one-on-one.com. And that's with two partners and I, and it's a for-profit, and it's to help, again, do more than what we were able to do at the time at the center for reading.

But we've been injected with some funding from dyslexia, one-on-one, one-on-one dot com, if a parent is worried that they might have a child who has a reading problem, but they're not really sure, they can go to that site. And if they register, they can take our reading evaluation. It's called the dyslexia evaluation tool. They can take it online for free. And, but if they, if they do that, they have to recognize it's going to take an hour probably to do it.

It's a bonafide reading evaluation tool that parents generally don't get access to. Like if a parent wanted to, you know, like if a parent wanted to test their child's intelligence, they wanted to get the Stanford-Binet, they couldn't. They wouldn't be allowed to. Or if they wanted to check their child's phonological processing skills and do it through the CTOP, the company wouldn't allow them to have it because they're not trained to administer or interpret it.

But the dyslexia evaluation tool, we did the research and found it was psychometrically valid and appropriate. We standardized it on 2,500 kids. And we did research pitting parents assessing their children against trained professionals. And parents were just as good as the trained professionals. In fact, there are no statistically significant differences, but parents actually outperformed the trained professionals slightly. And that was a surprise to me because you kind of figure parents like, oh, you really know this, right?

And then they'd write that the kid did it when they didn't. But they were invested in finding the truth. And as a function of that, they're very accurate. So that's cool. That's interesting. Yeah. That's a free resource. Well, I think we're at time here. This has been wonderful, though. Just so many different aspects and really laying a lot of things out for people that they may not realize and all the resources.

So thank you so much. And we really appreciate all the work that you've done over your whole career to really increase just our knowledge in general about dyslexia, as well as the practical steps that you've taken and advocacy work. So we really appreciate that. Well, and thank you, because, you know, to gain access to this information, the types of podcasts that you're doing are very helpful. My buddy, Tim, my buddy, Tim Odegaard does a podcast as well.

And he is an individual who is dyslexic. He struggled as a student. He struggled as a child and obviously is a very bright person, PhD and running the Center for Reading at Middle State, Middle State, Tennessee University. And he talks about his struggles and I think it's really valuable for parents to realize, OK, he's doing OK. He struggled. And it's really great for for children to realize, yeah, he struggled. And, you know, he he managed through.

So I probably can, too. So there's lots of great resources out there. And of course, if people haven't listened to Emily Hanford's Sold a Story, that that's a big one. And I think then listen to Tim Odegaard to see what it's like for someone who was a struggling reader. And there's a Florida Center for Reading Research. You know, there's there's so many resources out there. It's just we need to get them all on the same page and working together.

And we're at the we're at the premises of really solving the problem. So wonderful. Excellent. I think that's a fantastic. I was going to say that's such an encouraging, helpful. Thank you. Thank you so much again.