In many of the conferences I attended in the U.S. and many professors I listen to have stated-it`s not Dyslexia,it`s Dysteachia.

Children who remain confused and are not taught to read and spell start to look like Dyslexics.

That`s where teacher accountability comes in but here in Ontario and many other provinces-the MOE has to stop vilifying phonics and has to legislate the new research-phonemic awareness instruction is the greatest breakthrough in reading research of the 21st century-
So-why isn`t it being taught in every classroom SK and Grade 1-

It is not as cut and dry in England, because of the structure set-up to address children’s needs.

“A child is defined as having SEN if they have a significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of children of their age which calls for additional or different educational provision to be made for them.

Currently more than one in five children (21 per cent) in this country are identified as having SEN but only 2.7 per cent have statements.

The government acknowledges that whilst the circumstances of children and their parents differ greatly; from young people requiring a few adjustments in class to children with life-limiting long-term conditions, families have many shared concerns. Many parents have told the government that the current system is bureaucratic, bewildering and adversarial and that it does not sufficiently reflect the needs of their child and their family life.

The green paper entitled Support and Aspiration: A new approach to special educational needs and disability,  says measures of school performance have created incentives to over identify children as having SEN and that there is compelling evidence that these labels of SEN have perpetuated a culture of low expectations and have not led to the right support being put in place. It says it plans to tackle the practice of over-identification by replacing the current SEN identification levels of School Action and School Action Plus with a new single school-based SEN category for children whose needs exceed what is normally available in schools.”

http://www.webmd.boots.com/children/news/20110309/special-educational-needs-changes

As one can see, educational needs are not being addressed in the current system. “A new approach to special educational needs and disability,  says measures of school performance have created incentives to over identify children as having SEN and that there is compelling evidence that these labels of SEN have perpetuated a culture of low expectations and have not led to the right support being put in place. It says it plans to tackle the practice of over-identification by replacing the current SEN identification levels of School Action and School Action Plus with a new single school-based SEN category for children whose needs exceed what is normally available in schools.”

As for the new model, the government’s main focus will be on children who have multiple needs. As for the children with learning deficits, in the area of reading and writing, that will be the question that needs an answer. From what I have read so far, there is only administration changes being proposed, and not changes to addressed the educational component in SEN children.

As for Canada, the vast majority of change within SE, have only made changes to the administration end, without making wholesale changes to the reading and writing curriculum that is the root cause of children being identified as having learning problems. What is happening in Canada, is that more children are being identified as having a ‘learning problem’, and are given accommodations inside the regular classroom without the need of a formal assessment. Children who have received an assessment that identifies a specific disability in language early on, are retaining their SEN label, but just barely for SEN students who are sitting in the regular classroom.

By grade 9, there is far fewer students who are register as having a specific disability in language than in the previous grades. In my local high school, out of a total of 6 students being label as having a specific disability in language, only one female has retained the specific disability in language label. I have no idea who it is, since the ministry of education has dropped the data regarding age and grades, and it simply tells a person, that there was only 1 female for the year 2009-2010 that had a mild to moderate LD problem. The educrats claimed that it is my youngest, and I believe them because I had to fight tooth and nail for her to retain an IEP starting in grade 6, when the process to change SE and services in the education system began. I was alerted by all the talk on the LD chat lines, and children losing their SEN status. For the main bulk of children, it was the children who were sitting inside the regular classroom, and were not receiving special education services for a few years at the greatest risk.

I was not happy to fight to retain a label for my child, but I had no choice if I wanted the assessments to continue. The assessments are important for post-secondary admittance and to access special services at the institution. All post-secondary institutions require 3 assessments at the minimum, and the last one must be perform in the last two years of high school. If not, the student will have to go through the private route, and dropped $2500 for a current assessment. I have mentioned assessments, because it is the most costly part of a child who has been identified with a specific disability within the public education system. The administration changes that have been made, is to limit the amount of assessments in the high school years, so they can untied the bottle neck occurring in the lower grades, for the number of students on waiting lists for assessments. I had to fight it, because my youngest was and is currently in need of having accommodations such as a alternative accommodation for exams, since her core deficits have never be addressed effectively.

Nancy,the whole point of the article is that too many kids are ending up in special ed unnecessarily.There has to be a connection between instruction and results-I saw stuff in my reading clinic that I wish I didn`t remember.

I believe as you do, it is the reading instruction and results. Although you did not state it anywhere, the children you are seeing in your reading clinics, are children that mainly have not been taught reading, but are identified as having some kind of learning disability, with the majority having only an informal assessment?  If so, the fault lies within the structural setup of addressing deficits, and special education funding. Schools get more funding since the regulations have change, to where it is no longer necessary for children to be identified formally. From my parent perspective, lots of children moved ahead the line ahead of my child who was formally identified. And yet I had to fight for every little thing to address her needs, and other children were getting SE services, and accommodations without the need of being formally assessed. The majority of children who are formally identified as having a learning disability, are children whose cord deficits lie in reading and extends into writing problems. And yet it is this set of students that are not seen often in the SE classes, the identified ones, but the main bulk are the ones who have not been identified formally. And yet both groups would benefit greatly from intensive reading and writing instruction. This has been my own experience, and it has been confirm talking to other parents whose children have been formally identified as having low-phonemic awareness as its defining problem. The increase in the number of children being identified as having LD, is directly contributed to the increase of children who are informally identified as having LD. The actually rate of children who have dyslexia, has not change much over the years, and it is within the statistical norm of approx. 5 % of a student population. What has happen, is that the school boards are benefited from increase funds from the ministry, without the pesky need to be held accountable for how the money is spent.

In a 2004 letter from the LD association of Ontario, The special education allocation has dramatically increased in the past six years. It has gone from $1.17 billion in 1998/99, the first year that the new formula was fully applied, to the current total of $1.65 billion. That is an increase of $480 million or 41%. During that same period the total provincial population of students, excluding JK, has increased by only 44,659 students or 2.3%. Although there are no up to date numbers available for the ISA eligible population for the current school year, we understand that the numbers are approaching 50,000, more than double the ISA numbers reported for 1998/99. As the discussion below indicates, this has been almost entirely at the expense of students with identified learning disabilities and gifted students.
It may seem odd that an organization, such as LDAO, would be concerned about this situation, i.e., the allocation of additional dollars to special education. But the facts, as described below, indicate that there are some major problems with the way this funding is calculated, allocated, spent and accounted for. The impact on students with learning disabilities is devastating.”

Further down in the report, “The most obvious example of this has been the impact on IEPs, where identification of needs is being increasingly driven by efforts to make a student fit a revenue-generating profile. We know this because, in some instances, parents have been successful in obtaining access to the ISA documentation on their child and they have been shocked by that information. Some boards have been reluctant to fully implement IEP standards because of their concerns that full implementation will negatively affect their ISA claims. In these cases, the emphasis has shifted from strengths to needs and has established a definite disincentive to reporting student progress. This represents a situation where learning expectations are being lowered to increase ISA funding prospects. This pattern is also noted in the report released by the Ontario Human Rights Commission called The Opportunity to Succeed.”
http://www.access.resources.ldao.ca/main/professionals/resources/Legislation/04FundingFormula.pdf