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Williams’ editorial

By JohnL on Mar. 28, 2006.

As carried in “Education Gadfly” over on the Fordham Foundation’s site, Jim Williams has an editorial entitled “Why can’t learning disabled students read?” In his view, the answer to his question is that they are crippled by education and, more specifically, by special education.

But too often, special education inflicts harm by keeping children from reaching their potential. Instead of giving these students an extra hand, the special education bureaucracy unnecessarily segregates them while passing them from one grade level to the next, irrespective of how well they’ve mastered material. The result is a system that creates in these students a crippling sense of helplessness and entitlement. This is certainly the case for the least well-defined subgroup of special ed students, learning disabled (LD).

Mr. Williams challenges the idea that LD is a disability, rejects the concept of “basic psychological processes,” dismisses discrepancy methods of identifying LD, and contends that inadequate instruction is the root cause of reading disabilities. Although there are germs of truth in many of Mr. Williams’ indictments, there are problems with it, too.

Aside from some ticky-tack quibbles (e.g., omission of math LD), notable among the problems with Mr. Williams’ analysis is that he has aimed quite high, attributing to the entire field the inadequacies that many who are affiliated with special education seek to correct. It has been people with a background in LD—many with funding from federal research projects focused on LD—who have closely examined the issues of discrepancy, effective instruction, and etc. and identified these problems.

In addition, Mr. Williams has overlooked some important evidence, evidence that contributed to the changes in educational policy for assessment of children with disabilities announced a little over a year ago by the U.S. Department of Education (see coverage in Teach Effectively). Important work by J. Torgesen and colleagues and R. O’Connor and colleagues (to name just two groups) has shown that even under optimal conditions, a small percentage of children still fail to learn to read. Those are some of the students about whom LD and special education is concerned.

I’m not sure what Mr. Williams recommends as the means for addressing the legitimate education needs of those students, but I’m sticking with special education for them. I wonder to what extent other readers consider his arguments accurate or inaccurate.

Link to Mr. Williams’ editorial.

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