Opinion: Another year will pass without universal dyslexia screening legislation. Why is Colorado failing our children?
Colorado Sun
One in five children needs more help than the general student population to learn to read, and an untold number, including my daughter, won’t get that help at the time intervention is most likely to succeed if they aren’t adequately screened for potential reading challenges in the early grades.
That’s why dyslexia advocates like those with Colorado Kids Identified with Dyslexia, or COKID, have been pushing for years for state legislators to pass a bill that mandates students in kindergarten through second grade are screened for dyslexia, an unexpected difficulty in reading in an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader.
Yet, each time advocates have tried, their efforts have failed. Why?
One reason is that those who have the power to pass mandatory screening legislation, including state Sen. Janet Buckner, chair of the Senate education committee, are under the mistaken belief that the state already requires dyslexia screening through the Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act (Colorado READ Act).
In a September 2023 email that was shared with COKID, Sen. Buckner wrote an email addressed to “senate leadership, the senate education committee and supporters of education policy,” in which a policy analyst stated, “According to the Colorado Department of Education (CDE), dyslexia screenings will be added to READ Act assessments for K-3 grades starting in Fall of 2023 for districts that have contracts with larger companies. All districts will be providing the screenings in grades K-3 by Fall 2024.”
The senator was basing her statement on the fact that in 2022, CDE asked the companies that develop reading assessments — tests given at intervals throughout the school year to monitor student growth and guide instruction — to apply for state approval.
The CDE concluded that only two of the 19 applications met the READ Act’s required criteria, which included screening for the characteristics of dyslexia. In the end, the state board approved five assessments after several superintendents of large school districts complained it would cost too much time, money and effort to abandon their current assessment.
However, proponents of a dyslexia screening law argue that most of the tests that passed the approval process do not test all five components of dyslexia and base a student’s risk for struggling to learn to read on a composite or aggregate score rather than specific skills.
Children with dyslexia compensate for weakness in one area, like oral reading fluency, by excelling in others, like reading comprehension. The imbalance bumps a student’s overall score high enough that they don’t receive the needed intervention, which is exactly what happened with my daughter, whose verbal comprehension skills are excellent.
When leaders of COKID challenged Floyd Cobb, CDE’s associate commissioner of student learning and Buckner’s son-in-law, during a phone call as why the state board and lawmakers believe the state is screening for dyslexia, Cobb stated he recommended assessments to the state board of education that have the capacity to screen for dyslexia and that it was up to them to make the final approval.
The capacity to screen for dyslexia isn’t the same as doing so. Curriculum Associates (which owns the state-approved assessment iReady) acknowledged this weakness in its application for approval stating, “To simultaneously address universal screening and dyslexia screening requirements in Colorado, K–3 students should be administered both the i-Ready Diagnostic and recommended i-Ready Literacy Tasks.”
The same is true for Istation, another state-approved assessment. This test doesn’t screen for dyslexia unless you add RAN and look at subtest scores (not composite).
Another widely used assessment, called STAR Early Learning, also requires two tests to meet the criteria outlined in the law, but only the Early Learning test is on the approved list.
Before the Boulder Valley School District began its dyslexia screening pilot in 2019, they used iReady and Istation (the Spanish version) to identify kids needing additional reading intervention. When the pilot began, the district then added an additional English and Spanish dyslexia screener.
Michelle Qazi, the district’s director of literacy, told me, “The interim assessments (i-Ready and IStation) only picked up 41% of the students who came out at risk on the dyslexia screener, meaning 59% of students with characteristics of dyslexia were missed by the prior screening method.”
Qazi said it was clear right away that the interim assessment was not specific enough to pick up the characteristics of dyslexia and that adding the dyslexia screener allowed them to identify students’ reading weaknesses and target the areas they needed the most help.
While CDE and state legislators continue to insist Colorado doesn’t need a universal dyslexia screening law, more and more kids will continue to struggle to ever reach grade-level proficiency.
Forty-one states have passed laws mandating universal dyslexia screening, it’s time for Colorado to step up and do the same.
Suzie Glassman is a freelance journalist covering education, elections and politics. She lives in Douglas County with her husband, two kids, and two rescue dogs.
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