Testimony of Dr. G. Reid Lyon
“Learning Disabilities and Early Intervention Strategies: How to Reform the Special Education Referral and Identification Process”

Does the education profession create instructional casualties by inadequately preparing both general education and special education teachers to address learning differences among children?

Once identified, why are special education services not effective in improving learning?

Most importantly, can answers to these questions lead to improvements in how LD is defined, how it is identified, how it is prevented, and how children who appear initially unresponsive to early interventions can be taught effectively with effective remedial strategies?

 The identification of students with LD is a highly subjective process. When teachers do not receive the benefits of robust training, many children entering their classrooms who require differentiated instruction to address these learning needs leave the classrooms as instructional casualties and/or referrals to special education.

Given that remediation of learning difficulties is minimally effective after the second grade, it is especially troubling that there has been a large increase in the identification of learning disabilities of students in the later grades. Reading failure seems to compound learning failure exponentially with every grade year passed.

The assessment and identification practices employed today under the existing definition of LD and the accompanying requirements of IDEA work directly against identifying children with LD before the second or even the third grade. Specifically, as Dr. Pasternack explained, the over reliance on the use of the IQ-achievement discrepancy criterion for the identification of LD means that a child must fail or fall below a predicted level of performance before he or she is eligible for special education services. Because achievement failure sufficient to produce a discrepancy from IQ cannot be reliably measured until a child reaches approximately nine years of age, the use of the IQ-achievement discrepancy literally constitutes a "wait to fail" model.

Both special and general educators must be prepared on the basis of the converging scientific evidence of how children learn, why some children have difficulties, and how the most effective instructional approaches can be identified and implemented. Effective early instruction can not only help a child learn to read, but also may induce changes in the brain to mirror normalized levels of activation.
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