Massachusetts IDEA Child Find Project

08/26/2026

Dyscalculia: from a team in Arizona, an education policy brief. Link's in a comment below.

-- excerpts --

“To help leaders seize this opportunity, we organized our brief around what dyscalculia is, how it differs from more general math difficulty, why schools miss it, and what early identification, intervention, and policy each requires.”

“The cost of missing this window is not abstract. When dyscalculia goes unidentified, repeated failure can generate math anxiety, erode self-confidence, and progressively narrow the academic paths that students believe are available to them.”

08/22/2026

07/25/2026

For years, my son’s school kept asking me to trust them.

But every time I looked at what they were actually doing, it was the opposite of what the research said he needed.

They were using balanced literacy instead of structured literacy.

They’d dabble in an intervention for a little while, but the people delivering it weren’t always trained to do it. They’d stop interventions before they had enough time to know if they were working. Progress monitoring was inconsistent. Data wasn’t driving decisions. When he wasn’t making progress, no one stopped and said, “Something isn’t working. We need to figure out why.”

Instead, they just kept asking me to trust them.

Then, when I asked for the instructional methodology to be written into his IEP, they refused. They wanted to write the goals. They wanted to write the placement. They wanted to write the minutes to reflect their own story. But they didn’t want to write down how they were actually going to teach him, because then someone could hold them accountable for providing it.

And somehow I was the difficult parent for asking questions.

Trust isn’t something you ask for. It’s something you build.

Show me you’re following the evidence. Show me you’re collecting data. Show me you’re changing course when a child isn’t making progress. Show me you’re willing to put in writing the instruction you’re promising to provide.

Then we’ll talk about trust.

07/15/2026

07/11/2026

Hot take: A double or triple dose of Tier 1 won’t effectively remediate students with dyslexia.

The goal of strengthening Tier 1 was never to make special education unnecessary.

The goal was to ensure that fewer students struggled because of inadequate core instruction, so the students with true neurobiological learning disabilities, like dyslexia, would stand out sooner and receive the individualized support they need.

Way too many have begun treating more Tier 1, plus Tier 2 and Tier 3, as though every struggling reader can be remediated within MTSS if we just give them enough time.

That’s not what fixing Tier 1 was about.

Yes, every classroom should provide high-quality, structured literacy instruction.

Yes, every teacher should understand how children learn to read.

But we can’t forget that students with dyslexia often need more than excellent core instruction.

Dyslexia isn’t simply a reading problem. It’s a neurobiological learning disability that affects the processes underlying skilled reading. The specific areas of need vary from student to student, and that’s exactly why an evaluation matters.

An evaluation identifies which underlying skills are affected so instruction can be individualized.

Some students will need specially designed instruction through an IEP. Others may benefit from intensive intervention without special education. But assuming that a double or triple dose of Tier 1 is the answer for everyone risks delaying the identification and services that some students need.

We must stop using MTSS to keep students in intervention longer and get more committed to identifying who needs something different.

We must also invest highly trained dyslexic specialists who have completed extensive practicum experiences who are capable of providing intensive, individualized instruction to students with dyslexia, not simply more minutes of the same instruction.

Fix Tier 1, but please don’t let “fixing Tier 1” become the reason students with dyslexia wait longer for the specialized instruction they need.

06/27/2026

Bravo!!!

04/03/2026

Less than one week to go! Register here- bit.ly/4pq8hfq

Come learn more about our specialized school supporting students in grades 1–8 with dyslexia, ADHD, and other language-based learning differences.