Dyslexia: Disability or Difference? Another excellent article by Kyle Redford! Sharing a few excerpts, but it’s worthwhile to read the entire piece.
“Additionally, as long as students with dyslexia have to fight for specialized reading instruction or access to assistive technology like audiobooks in classrooms, we cannot afford to move away from the disability classification. By definition, students with developmental dyslexia struggle to learn to read in spite of adequate instruction and otherwise high intelligence. In other words, their difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and spelling are “unexpected” given the student’s broader intellectual profile and environmental background.”
“Depending on the school’s reading program, dyslexics often need alternative remediation to learn to read. And the same things that make reading hard also make spelling and writing especially challenging. Most important, these challenges are not something students outgrow. Although developmental dyslexia’s impact on students usually morphs over time, it never goes away.”