Trapped in the Gap
One more way "the rules" can hurt children in need
“As has happened many times sitting in meetings like this one, I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance as my mind flooded with yet another horrible new insight into the fundamental brokenness of the intersecting systems ostensibly designed to help students.”
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When I switched from Social Studies to English language arts a decade into my teaching career, I didn’t get special training. It being Texas, I just had to pass a test. What I knew about supporting adolescent literacy I had learned from trial and error, collegial advice, books and articles, and any training I could find and afford. I left the school I had called home for 5 ½ years, taking an ELA position in a middle school near my home in anticipation of my son entering kindergarten up the street the following year. When I started my new position in January, I inherited 80 students whose teacher had passed away. They had churned through ten substitutes and assumed I would be gone soon. I spent much of that semester just trying to get my feet under me, earning students’ trust and respect, and preparing them for the state test.
I looked forward to a fresh start the next school year. That fall, my sixth graders and I read together and independently—novels and short stories, articles, and poems. We wrote and talked about what we read. I felt my way through teaching comprehension strategies and became more systematic in my vocabulary instruction. We began doing timed fluency assessments, and I began to learn about assessing phonics knowledge.
Athena* was a shy and soft-spoken 12-year-old, polite and petite. With so many students demanding my attention, she was good at blending in and getting by. I learned she had not passed the state reading test since she began taking it as a third grader, and her norm-referenced Stanford scores suggested she was reading several years below grade level. Even so, she had not been identified as having a learning challenge. After a couple of months of working to assess and build students’ skills, I could see that Athena could decode but was genuinely struggling with comprehension. I knew what I was doing would not be enough to help her close the gap. I pressed for more support, and the school initiated a special education evaluation.
After the district diagnostician conducted a battery of tests, she met with Athena’s teachers and the special education team to explain why she did not qualify for special education. The diagnostician told us there needed to be a 15-point difference between Athena’s IQ score and reading scores, but her IQ score of 74 was similar to her normed reading score. There wasn’t a big enough gap. The diagnostician also shared that if Athena’s IQ score were four points lower, she would be designated as developmentally disabled, thus qualifying for special education.
As has happened many times sitting in meetings like this one, I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance as my mind flooded with yet another horrible new insight into the fundamental brokenness of the intersecting systems ostensibly designed to help students. I was 11 years into my career; I had repeatedly worked with, challenged, and pressed our special education department to serve our students better. I had attended countless ARD meetings and had many conversations with special education team members. Even so, this was the first time I had ever heard of the IQ-Achievement Discrepancy Model, though it had been federal law for decades.**
Faced with the realization that help was not on the way for Athena, I decided to act on faith, believing that she would grow with effort and skillful coaching. I sat with her and told her the truth: “Listen, reading is hard for you. You have to work twice as hard as some kids. But I believe with all my heart that if you do that, you will grow, and it will get easier.”
She began to attend after-school tutorials with me, along with perhaps a dozen other students. In our regular classes and tutorials, we read passages and practiced the comprehension strategies I was just learning how to teach. I taught students how to annotate. I learned that not all readers generate images in their minds as they read, so I taught them how to visualize. We previewed text features and practiced prediction. I read aloud; we read chorally; they learned to “read and say something” with a partner. I also coached them on the metacognitive aspects of reading. Students like Athena learned to monitor their comprehension and make repairs when they realized they didn’t understand.
After a few months of hard work, students took the state reading test. I was heartened by reports from my colleagues that students had worked carefully throughout the testing period, annotating and deliberating. The results came back right before the end of school. Athena had passed the state test for the first time!
She did not quite meet the district’s threshold for Stanford, but she made progress. She was not able to annotate and take her time on that test, and her comprehension was assessed as equivalent to an average fourth grader.
Athena and many others have been my teachers. It is through working with them, seeing the miracles, the transformation, that I have developed my faith in their ability to grow beyond their and often our expectations. Despite the inadequacy of resources, the crushing weight of bureaucracy, and the grinding poverty, children can and do grow. But they deserve so much more.
* Athena is a pseudonym to protect this student’s identity, but all other details are as accurate as my memory allows.
** When IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) was reauthorized in 2004, the law was changed to allow alternatives to the discrepancy model, including RtI, or Response to Intervention. Eleven states have since banned the use of the discrepancy model, but Texas still allows districts to use it.
Recommendations
The Vanderbilt IRIS Center is a national center that provides professional development on effective evidence-based practices and interventions, many of which are available for free. https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/
For more about Response to Intervention (RtI), check out this module from IRIS:
The IRIS Center. (2006). RTI (part 1): An overview. Retrieved from https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/rti01-overview/
Deep Sense News
The manuscript is in! The Deep Sense book is expected out in early 2025. For more about the Deep Sense approach, visit the Pauloski Pedagogy website at https://pauloskipedagogy.com/pauloski-pedagogy/deepsense/.
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