Recently, American Public Media (APM) released the documentary, “Hard Words: Why Aren’t Our Kids Being Taught to Read?” APM Correspondent, Emily Hanford, began her reporting on this topic back in 2017 with a documentary about why so many students with dyslexia have a hard time getting the help they need in school. She discovered that the kind of reading instruction students with dyslexia need is the same kind of instruction all kids need. But many kids are not getting this kind of instruction in school. Emily has come to think of kids with dyslexia as canaries in a coal mine, a warning sign that something is wrong with the way reading is being taught.

More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers. According to Emily’s reporting, a big part of the problem is that many educators don’t know the science on how children learn to read, and they are not using approaches to reading instruction backed up by that science.

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