James Wendorf -  Learning Disabilities, Dyslexia and Difficulties Learning to Read 

Index: Personal Background Defining Learning Learning Disabilities Neurobiological Vs. Acquired Deficiencies Instructional Casualties Most of Our Children Not Reading Proficiently Profound Reading Crisis Stewarding the Health of Learning Reading is the Gateway Skill Good and Bad News Early Literacy Screening Learning to Read is All But Fating Insufficient Oral Language Experiences   Whitehurst’ s Dialogic Reading  The Costs of Teaching Reading The Real Cost is Lost Self-Esteem What We Have Learned Inside the Brain Visualization The Social-Educational Challenge Dispelling the Myth that Reading is Natural Lost Potential & Self-Esteem Loss Self-Esteem and the Affect of Shame How should we Educate? Stewarding the Health of Learning (2) We Don’t Value Reading in our Culture Transforming Society’s Understanding of Reading Postscript

James Wendorf is the Executive Director of the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD).  NCLD increases public awareness and understanding of learning disabilities and conducts educational programs and services that promote research-based knowledge, and provide national leadership in shaping public policy. Additional bio info  Mr. Wendorf is dedicated to improving the learning and life opportunities of children and adults with learning disabilities.

The following transcript has not been edited for journal or magazine publication (see 'Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.

Personal Background:

David Boulton:  First of all I’d like to start by saying welcome and thank you. I really appreciate you making the time.

James Wendorf:  David, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

David Boulton:  How do you come to be here and what is the National Center for Learning Disabilities? Why does it exist? What does it do?

James Wendorf:  Well, I’m here because my career over the last twenty-something years has been primarily about building literacy and learning programs for kids. Working with not-for-profit organizations, working closely, especially recently, with people in the research community as well as with practitioners, to bring those programs to the field. To get them to kids, to get them to teachers so they can start to make a difference.

Prior to coming to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, I spent many years at Reading is Fundamental.  The goal there was to provide access to books for kids who generally did not have access. The challenge that I faced in coming to the National Center for Learning Disabilities was to address this access issue in a new way. To ensure that kids with learning disabilities had access to not just books and to learning materials, but also to a curriculum,  to teachers who were well trained, and to the kind of evaluation procedures that would really test what they knew rather than what they didn’t know or couldn’t do. So, that’s what attracted me, and why I came to the National Center about four and half years ago as the executive director.

David Boulton:  What personally hooks you about this work?

James Wendorf:  I think all of us are challenged by the toughest cases. When you look at the kinds of struggles that children with learning disabilities face, you quickly realize that these kids must overcome a lot of obstacles; there are a lot of challenges. I, and the people I work with in the research community and in the advocacy community, are very much attracted to this group of kids and adults. We want to help make their lives better - to give them opportunities that they wouldn’t otherwise have.  

Defining Learning:

David Boulton:  The National Center for Learning Disabilities, implicitly you must have some operational definition of learning itself.

James Wendorf:  I think when you talk to people in the field of learning disabilities and ask about learning, you quickly start zeroing in on processing. How does information processing impact learning as a very, very key component of the learning process? For kids and adults with learning disabilities that’s where the chief problem is - how the brain either does or does not process information. How the brain sometimes very inefficiently retrieves information, stores information, processes it and expresses it. So, any theory of learning for us is very practical. How do people make sense, especially sense of language, and of other kinds of information that the brain has to work with?

David Boulton:  So, rather than it being subject-specific or topical in the outer boundaries of experience, you’re focused more on the core process of processing.

Learning Disabilities:

James Wendorf: Information processing really is an issue that cuts across so many different disabilities. The term learning disabilities is itself an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of disorders and problems, the biggest one being dyslexia or reading disability. Even within reading disability, there could be problems with decoding, there could be problems with comprehension, there could be problems with expression, any number of things. So, it’s the processing of information that is really critical. Rock bottom: how does the brain either work or not work in dealing with that information?

Neurobiological Vs. Acquired Deficiencies:

David Boulton:  An important distinction here is the difference between a biological insufficiency or mis-development of the capability to process, as distinct from an instructional or learning environment inefficiency or deficiency that’s led to a learned or acquired learning disability. How are those two related and how does that spectrum play out?

James Wendorf:  I don’t think we draw that kind of distinction. I think there is a difference between a student who is an ‘instructional casualty’; in other words, a student who has not flourished in the schools, who has not had access to the right kind of teaching, a student whom the schools have failed in some way. There’s a difference between that kind of student and a student with an underlying neurobiological disability. Learning disabilities are not acquired; they are there - they are life long - they are real. They can be expressed in any number of ways early on; they could appear later in a school career, even as late as high school or adulthood.

David Boulton:  They come in at different developmental stages.

James Wendorf:  Different stages depending upon the kinds of learning tasks that a person might actually face.

David Boulton: So, you don’t make a distinction between this across the spectrum as to what might be the cause of it?

James Wendorf:  Well, we’d love to know the cause. We’d love to know the cause.

David Boulton:  I mean the distinction between what’s neurobiological in origin and what’s a consequence of instruction.

James Wendorf:  Well, I think for most people, and especially teachers, the kinds of problems that they’re trying to deal with, the weaknesses that they’re trying to address in children, whether they have a neurobiological cause or whether the cause has been simply lack of access to a certain kind of instruction or teaching, makes very little difference. An appropriate scientifically research based intervention that’s delivered in the right way can address both of those problems.

That’s good news for teachers; it simplifies the task. It says that what works for kids with learning disabilities, reading disabilities for example, also works for students who may have problems with reading because they didn’t have access to books or spoken language as they were growing up…kids from poverty.

Instructional Casualties:

David Boulton:  Right, and I totally understand and appreciate that. And with respect to what to do, how to be helpful to any particular individual child, defining the cause is less important than meeting them on the edge of whatever they’re showing and learning to work with them at that level. But, in terms of the kind of education that we need to provide, we do need it to reduce the amount of instruction related casualties. In that sense, the more that we understand, the better. For example, in our conversation with Dr. Lyon, he suggested that about ninety-five percent of kids failing to read are instructional casualties and that they are not neurobiologically deficient.

James Wendorf: There’s good research that points to the dramatic efficacy of good instruction. It is true that not enough good instruction is getting to kids. Kids just don’t have the benefit of it. Teachers need to be trained in order to carry out the kind of instruction that is effective. There is good research to show that up to ninety-five percent or so of reading problems, reading difficulties can be effectively addressed if that instruction is there and delivered in the right way. That still leaves about four to six percent of the student population that is not responding, that is still struggling, that needs some other kind of intervention, some other kind of instruction. 

And interestingly, the percentage of children in the school age population who have learning disabilities right now is about five percent.  And they need even more intensive, individualized instruction in order to address their underlying problems. Not all the problems are going to be solved simply because we get classroom teachers up to a certain level.

Most of Our Children Not Reading Proficiently:

David Boulton:  If we  look at the basic and below reading stats and the proficient and below reading stats, and if we aggregate the populations, we’re talking about most of our children reading less than proficiently. Most of them.

James Wendorf:  Yes.

David Boulton:  And we know that the consequences of not reading well are profoundly influencing and shaping the core information processes that you’re talking about. So, to some degree, all of the children who are not learning to read well are developing/acquiring some degree of disability to learn. 

Profound Reading Crisis:

James Wendorf :  I wouldn’t go there. I wouldn’t go there. I think it’s important to maintain some distinctions. (see Postscript) There’s a reading crisis in the United States. It’s undeniable. Thirty-nine percent, almost forty percent of fourth graders do not read even at the basic level, and as we know, a majority of students do not read at the proficient level. In inner cities the percentages are much higher. So, there is a profound reading crisis in the United States.

Children with reading disabilities and other learning disabilities are part of that reading crisis, they are part of that group, and their problems need to be addressed as well. We need to reach children - whether they have learning disabilities or whether they have reading difficulties - virtually in the same way, and reach them early on before they even get to kindergarten and identify their strengths and weaknesses and then step in with the appropriate kinds of instruction.

By doing that, by reaching out to all of those children, we can ensure that the children with difficulties can actually be brought up to speed, can be brought up to grade level in reading and they have a very good chance of having that happen. But we also ensure that children with reading disabilities and other learning disabilities are identified early on and have the opportunity to get better instruction, individualized instruction, special education services early on rather than later in upper elementary school or middle school when it’s very difficult and very inefficient to address their problems.

David Boulton:  Good. I appreciate and agree with your distinction and focus. I’m just wanting to stretch us out here.

James Wendorf:  Not a problem. We’re not going to go, as some will say, that fifteen to twenty percent of the population has a reading disability. The data don’t support that. About five percent of children in the schools have been identified with a learning disability.  (see Postscript)

None of us is happy or satisfied with the methods that are currently being used to identify at risk children. However, there’s pretty good history over ten to twenty years to suggest that we’re in the right ballpark regarding the percentage of the population that might have a true disability. 

Stewarding the Health of Learning:

David Boulton:  Right, but let’s suppose for just a moment that your position wasn’t the National Center for Learning Disabilities, but the National Center for Stewarding the Health of Learning.

James Wendorf:  Absolutely.

David Boulton:  And you were the executive director for stewarding the health of our children’s learning.

James Wendorf:  Yes.

David Boulton:  From that vantage, we then take a look at reading and the consequences of reading, the consequences of not reading well early. There’s the Matthew Effect, what reading does for the mind in terms of developing self-reflexivity, core cognitive processing ecology, information processing efficiency, the infrastructure of our abilities for abstractions, generalizations and on up to the more obvious educational implications. Then the down side, the downward spiral. For example, Lesley Morrow said in our interview last Monday that reading is so powerfully predictive that some states use literacy data to project how many prison cells to build.

James Wendorf:  Yes.

David Boulton:  Some research is saying that how fast a child comes up to speed in reading in first grade predicts where they'll be in the twelfth grade.

James Wendorf:  Yes.

David Boulton:  It’s that solid of a correlation. So, how well children come into learning to read profoundly effects how healthily they learn in their life.

Reading is the Gateway Skill:

James Wendorf:  Reading is the gateway skill. It leads to all sorts of success,  both academically and in life. It is the skill that undergirds most of the curriculum, and if children aren’t learning that skill by the end of third grade, they are in desperate trouble. For kids with learning disabilities it’s a double whammy. You know seventy to eighty percent of students with learning disabilities have their main problem in the area of reading, with reading based learning disabilities.

For us in the learning disabilities world, we’re very much concerned about literacy, about getting children up to speed in reading, and that usually means an early diagnosis and very intensive intervention…breaking skills down into individual steps so that students can actually learn step by step the decoding process, everything that goes into that plus comprehension strategies. It’s incredibly important.

You said, if I were looking out for all kids. Well, in many ways we do. The National Center for Learning Disabilities is very interested in the well being of all kids. That’s why we’re calling for universal early literacy screening. Every four year old should have the chance to have his or her skill development in literacy screened before entering kindergarten. That should be universal just as it is for vision and hearing. We should know where a child is in making progress or not making progress on the road to reading because reading is so important. It is the gateway skill.

David Boulton:  Excellent. I totally agree. I guess where I’m trying to go with this is, again, most of our children aren’t learning to read well. Most!

James Wendorf:  Yes.

David Boulton: And not learning to read well is learning capacity diminishing.

James Wendorf:  Yes.

David Boulton:  So most of our children in the process of their struggle to learn to read are going through a process that is diminishing their ability to learn.

James Wendorf:  Yes.

David Boulton:  That seems to me to be the nation’s biggest learning disability.

James Wendorf:  There is a reading crisis and the reading crisis leads to an education crisis, and also is certainly connected to an economic crisis as you look at job formation.  Do we have people coming through the school system who can really perform the job functions that American business has to have? The answer to that now is clearly no. The schools are not producing.

What we’re really talking about is lost human potential and it’s absolutely tragic. It’s tragic. Parents who have children with learning disabilities have lived this tragedy for many, many years. They know what’s it’s like to see a child not able to fully embrace what a school has to offer. They’ve seen schools that have failed in reaching the children, that have failed in actually addressing the children’s individual methods of learning and addressing their needs.

David Boulton:  I just think that we, the parents of the sixty or sixty-eight percent, or whatever number you want to say that are below proficient, don’t grasp the significance of this in terms of how learning disabling, learning constraining the effect of this is because it’s accepted as almost normal.

James Wendorf:  Yes.

David Boulton:   There’s a gross miss on how significant this is to the developmental process.

Good and Bad News:

James Wendorf:  Well, there’s been some good news over the past ten, fifteen years. Some good news is that I think there have been many campaigns with some success in focusing on children’s books, reading to children, reading aloud to children, making sure that children have access to literacy opportunities. There has been a lot of talk and a lot of campaigning about that and it’s done some good and it’s helpful.

What we’ve seen less of is sort of the hard edge of literacy: the instruction. What kind of instruction in what kind of setting over what period of time is most effective in getting children up to speed in reading? Now we have some reports and good studies that have come out and there have been efforts to get the word out not only to parents and the public, but certainly to schools - the 15,000 school districts around the country that are making decisions everyday about how to teach kids the skill of reading.

The real problem, the tragedy, is that even now we see that school districts are not fully embracing the most effective methods of teaching reading to children. They are not doing it. And they need more help, they need more guidance in making better decisions about the instructional materials they use and also the kind of professional development that teachers need in order to be effective. Because teachers do want to be successful. They do want to help kids, but they’re not being given the chance.

We need to raise public awareness and we need to change the way that decisions are made in schools. Parents can be a loud voice; they can be terrific advocates. Not just for various kinds of activities in the school, but specifically, advocates for curriculum reform to make sure that reading is being taught in the most effective way. That’s what we want to hear. That’s what we need to produce across the country.

Early Literacy Screening:

David Boulton:  And as you said, we need a screening tool. We want to check where children are at when they are coming in. Just like we want to check their eyes and their ears to see where they’re at in their development so we can meet them closer to where they actually are, rather than over generalize.

James Wendorf:  We have the means now to screen children for early literacy skill development. It’s not invasive; it does not involve testing kids. But with twenty questions over a period of twelve minutes costing less than two dollars per child, a teacher or a parent or a paraprofessional can be trained to actually screen a child and understand what it means.

To understand how a four-year-old child is making progress in areas such as knowledge of print or written expression or linguistic awareness, knowledge of how language works is incredibly valuable to an early childhood educator, to a preschool teacher. There’s much that can be learned, and once teachers and parents can understand that, they can then become better teachers, whether it’s in a home as a parent or whether it’s in the pre-school.

There is a revolution coming. It is happening. Instruction, curriculum, an emphasis on cognitive development, an emphasis on early literacy skill development. It is coming to pre-school. Over the next five to ten years that’s going to be a very important new frontier in the literacy movement.

Learning to Read is All But Fating:

David Boulton:  One more step on this front end. What we’re saying is that how well children learn to read is all but fating to their academic, economic, psychological, intellectual, and cognitive health – that it’s that pervasively powerful. A great deal of this depends on the soundness of the instructional process, the educational process and also on the preparation of the child long before they get to school, how well they are unfolding. That it is in fact critical, how they come to school, how well they’ve started to develop and exercise the kind of sound and letter distinctions and familiarity with the correspondence between oral and written language, which are the ideal ground to pick up from and move with in education. That solidly rests on the parents.

James Wendorf:  All of us have a responsibility to kids, to our youngest kids. Certainly parents have that responsibility to help them develop the language skills, the literacy skills so that they are ready to embrace school when the time comes. It’s true that children who come from backgrounds of poverty are at a tremendous disadvantage. By the time they actually enter kindergarten, they’re lagging in skill development and their vocabularies are dwarfed by the vocabularies of children of middleclass and upper-middle class homes who’ve been surrounded by language in very different ways.

So they enter the school door, they enter the classroom really lacking the equipment, lacking the context to even understand a lot of what the teacher might be saying. They don’t know the names of things. It’s not just that they don’t know, in many cases, the letters of the alphabet. It’s that they don’t know the names of things. They lack language.

Insufficient Oral Language Experiences:

David Boulton:  There’s an insufficiently rich oral language facility from which to move into learning.

James Wendorf:  Correct. And as we talk about the development of literacy skills, certainly we can’t neglect vocabulary development, oral language experience. It’s probably one of the most difficult areas to work in and it’s the one subject with the least amount of control. Most of it is not in the classroom; it’s out of the classroom. And it’s oral, it’s not written; very difficult to control.

David Boulton:  That is why it seems so important for parents, across the spectrum socio-economically, to understand how significant this is.

Whitehurst’s Dialogic Reading:

James Wendorf:  There are some things, some steps that parents and teachers can take to help improve comprehension and to build vocabulary development. One of the areas is actually in the sharing of children’s books. One of the programs that Dr. Whitehurst has developed called Dialogic Reading addresses this very issue. 

Those of us who’ve worked in the literacy field, we’ve all said ‘Share a book.' But we also know, those of us who have worked in this area, that many parents and some teachers simply do not know how to effectively share a book with a child. It may sound bizarre but it’s true. Videotape doesn’t lie when you’re actually running demonstration programs and then studying what happens when a child and an adult and a book share time together.

The Dialogic Reading technique that Dr. Whitehurst has developed - and it’s the only research based program of its kind - is really there to encourage a specific kind of interchange between a child and an adult with a text as the shared experience. A child is actually drawn out to answer certain questions, to use language, to point, and in doing so is led through a series of exercises that actually builds language skill and vocabulary development.

David Boulton:  It helps them focus on distinctions.

James Wendorf:  And to demonstrate that he or she knows what’s being said and developed in a story. Whether it has to do with colors, characters, words on the page, letters on the page, any of those things.

David Boulton:  Or meta-cognitive summaries.

James Wendorf:  Right, and understanding of plot and understanding of the beginning, the middle, the end…all those things.

The Costs of Teaching Reading:

David Boulton:  Do you have any sense of what it costs us to teach our children to read?

James Wendorf:  I don’t have a number for you. I don’t have a number.

David Boulton:  Even a rough idea? A percentage?

James Wendorf:  No. I can tell you that for those children who need remediation, if children do not have reading fluency by the end of third grade, it’s going to cost seven to eight times as much in time and in money to address their reading problems and get them up to grade level in reading.

David Boulton:  Seven or eight times ‘x’, an unknown?

James Wendorf:  Right. In other words, I don’t have that.  In terms of dollars, every school district spends a different amount per child and that’s a statistic that is usually a very important one for school districts to trot out and either pride themselves on spending so little or pride themselves on spending so much, depending on where you live and what the property tax is like. But, I think it would be very difficult to come up with something like that for the country as a whole because there’s so much diversity.

David Boulton:  There’s a lot of talk about the aggregate expense of reading difficulties from the 200 billion dollars in lost income opportunities to the adults that can’t read above a fifth grade level to the costs that literacy organizations, the federal government and so forth are spending to remediate reading. Do you have any number, any scope at all that you can comment on? Even a magnitude of order?

The Real Cost is Lost Self-Esteem:

James Wendorf:  Well, it’s billions. Billions lost.

I think the main thing to emphasize for anyone who has worked with a child or with an adult who has a reading problem, either who is low literate or is just struggling with reading, is that it is very apparent that it is the lost human potential, the lost self-esteem…that is the most poignant.  And in the end it’s the most significant, because the loss in self-esteem is what leads to a whole host of social pathologies that are very difficult to look in the face. Crime, substance abuse, and the school drop out rate -any of those things - they are very difficult to face. And there is a line to be drawn between low literacy skills and those social pathologies.

David Boulton:  Please say as much about this as you care to.

James Wendorf:  There is a twenty-seven percent drop out rate of students with learning disabilities; that is more than twice the rate of the general population …lost human potential. There are problems with substance abuse and juvenile justice problems.   And certainly looking at the general population of students that drop out, one can go to prisons and see that it is very apparent the majority of inmates lack reading skill.

What We Have Learned:

David Boulton:  When we first began our conversations on the phone you referred to an interview in which somebody had asked you, and I’ll repeat the question for you…what have we learned in this last decade? What have we learned about the center of this problem?

James Wendorf:  Over the past ten years we’ve learned that learning disabilities are real. For those who ever doubted, it’s absolutely apparent now in the science that learning disabilities are real. The brain research and the fMRI research showing images of the brain at work reveal conclusively that dyslexia and reading disabilities are real. We understand where in the brain the problem is and the functioning that is not happening in those who are experiencing that disorder.

The research is also leading us toward instruction, leading us toward ways that we can address the problem. That really is the challenge for the next ten years: to apply the basic science, the research that’s taken us so far in understanding the neurological based root causes and issues, and moving towards practice. How do we train teachers so that they can carry out instruction in a way that effectively addresses the reading problems, the reading disorders of children in the classroom? Because the children are there day in and day out and they need that kind of help.

The teachers being trained today in schools of higher education are simply not, in many cases, getting access to the kind of training that is based on the insights that the research has revealed to us. We need to close that gap and we need to ensure that our teachers are ready for the schools of the twenty-first century. 

Inside the Brain Visualization: