The Dyslexic Prom Queen

Ellen Burns Hurst, writing in 2017, tells the story of a student with undiagnosed dyslexia and argues for early reading intervention and for noticing girls who hide the difficulty. A section after the essay adds the research on who gets referred, what Yale says about screening in the early grades, and how Georgia now screens every young student.

Slipping through the gender cracks in secret by Ellen Hurst

Once upon a time there lived a beautiful prom queen. This prom queen possessed all the requisite physical characteristics that one might expect in a fantasy queen. She had golden tresses, blue eyes, porcelain skin and a perfect white smile. She gave the illusion of developed sexuality without denying the possibility of innocence. She was a combination of loner and outsider. She had the ability to mediate conflicts within her high school population because she had the genius of communication. She could be characterized as a cultural heroine in that she unified the individual and the group.

Our prom queen differs significantly in one aspect of her life. She lived with a secret that she kept hidden throughout her school years. This young woman walked into my office and set my research into motion. This vision of perfection had one veiled flaw. She was an undiagnosed dyslexic.  

Preparing Teachers for Diverse Learners

The majority of teachers in today’s workforce are white, female and middle class. Teachers of color comprise about 16 percent of the teaching force in the United States. In addition, pre-service, as well as in-service teachers, have little experience with children with learning differences or from cultures and languages different from their own.

Our call as advocates is to determine the particular attributes, skills, and dispositions that are needed to increase the probability that all teachers will be able to deliver an academically appropriate pedagogy to stop the industrial mentality of turning out products, flaws and all.

With the advent of Response to Intervention (RTI), all teachers are mandated with the task of meeting the educational needs of all children. General educators are understandably uncertain regarding their level of preparation for their new role of delivering differentiated pedagogy. New research must focus on how well we are preparing teacher candidates with the theoretical understandings and pedagogical skills necessary to meet different learning needs and styles of our children.

This call to arms to change how and what we are doing to our students must be shouted from the rooftops, “Something is rotten in the state of American education.”  I can’t help but suspect that unequal treatment of cisgendered children may have something to do with a collective failure to adequately educate all of our children.

Gender Gaps in School Performance

The statistics are grim. Boys are kept back in schools at twice the rate of girls. Boys get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls. Boys are diagnosed with learning disorders and attention problems at nearly four times the rate of girls. They do less homework and get a greater proportion of the low grades. Boys are more likely to drop out of school, and make up only 43 percent of college students. Furthermore, boys are nearly three times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Considering 11 percent of U.S. children –6.4 million in all – have been diagnosed with ADHD, that’s a lot of boys bouncing around U.S. classrooms.

Boys do not suffer alone. Many undiagnosed dyslexic girls enter the Literacy “closet” early in life, spending childhood years anxiously avoiding classroom participation in oral reading for fear of embarrassment and disclosure. Because girls tend to be affiliative by nature, the fear of possible peer rejection results in sustained levels of anxiety. Carried further, this fear of disclosure may curtail participation in typical literacy activities such as note writing, emailing, blogging and yearbook signing.

Gender and Teacher Grading

All of us share the common goal of providing equitable learning opportunities for every student in every classroom. This daunting task cannot ignore the elephant in the room  –  gender. A new study on gender disparities in elementary-school performance examines both the objective and subjective aspects of this deteriorating academic performance (Conwell, Mustard & Van Parys, 2012). Surprisingly, they show that:

…the grades awarded by teachers are not aligned with test scores. Girls in every racial category outperform boys on reading tests, while boys score at least as well on math and science tests as girls. However, boys in all racial categories across all subject areas are not represented in grade distributions where their test scores would predict. Boys who perform equally as well as girls on reading, math and science tests are graded less favorably by their teachers, but this less favorable treatment essentially vanishes when non-cognitive skills are taken into account. For some specifications, there is evidence of a grade ―bonus for boys with test scores and behavior like their girl counterparts. (Conwell, Mustard & Van Parys, 2012, p.1).

This seems to defy the logic of assessment. It appears to be blatant discrimination. There were some exceptions to this puzzling phenomenon.  Teachers didn’t downgrade boys who had identical test scores to girls… on one condition. Boys that shared the girls’ positive attitude toward learning received the same grade. The well-socialized boys received a higher grade for good behavior.

To summarize, boys who match girls on both test scores and behavior get better grades than girls. Boys who match girls on both test scores but have bad behavior are graded more harshly. This means that the issue of what to do with underperforming students just became much more complicated.

Gender is a significant factor at play in determining performance in reading and writing. Yet, it is not the only factor. We cannot lose sight of the fact that the differences among boys and among girls are greater than the differences between boys and girls. We must be careful not to focus on the gender differences between students, but rather to recognize that the effectiveness of certain approaches in literacy instruction may be tied to gender. If we keep this focus, we will be better able to provide appropriate and equitable opportunities for both boys and girls.

Four Categories of Students Who Do Not Read

There are four distinct categories of students who don’t read:

• The dormant reader: “I’m too busy right now!”
• The uncommitted reader: “I might be a reader, someday.”
• The unmotivated reader: “I’m never gonna like it!”
• The disabled reader: “It doesn’t make sense.”

By understanding these views, we can gain greater insight into why some students choose not to read. The frightening fact is as students get older, they increasingly describe themselves as non-readers. Few have this attitude early in their schooling, but nearly 50 percent describe themselves as non-readers by the time they enter secondary school. The downward spiral continues as students in middle school reported fewer social supports, less self-efficacy, and lower intrinsic motivation—the internal desire to attain academic goals.

The Case for Early Reading Intervention

My study of gender and dyslexia began some years ago when the Dyslexic Prom Queen courageously walked into my office. Long before I met her, I had many years working as a reading specialist. Many days have been filled with conversations with parents in which they report they have been told that their child’s reading delay was due to nothing more than a developmental lag. They are told to give it some time and their child will eventually catch up.

When a kindergartener confuses letters, associates the wrong sound with a letter, or cannot distinguish a rhyme, it usually has nothing to do with social maturity. Please do not accept the developmental lag excuse that has been used for generations. If your intuition tells you something is not right, do not wait to seek help.

The National Institutes of Health state that ninety-five percent of poor readers can be brought up to grade level if they receive appropriate early intervention. Of course, it is still possible to help an older child with reading, but children beyond third grade require much more frequent and intensive help. The longer you wait to get help for a child with reading difficulties, the harder it will be for the child to catch up.

Seventy-five percent of children receiving intervention at age nine or later continue to struggle throughout their school careers. Waiting until fourth grade, rather than taking action in kindergarten, will only make the task of remediation more complex and time intensive. It will take four times as long to obtain equivalent results.

Awareness of the red flags of reading disability is the first step to an early and accurate diagnosis. Those red flags will be the subject of my last in this series on Literacy. In the meantime, get up on your rooftop and do some shouting.

Early reading intervention for dyslexia in girls: what the research says and what schools do now

Early reading intervention is the central request in Ellen Burns Hurst’s essay above, and the research on who gets noticed for reading difficulty explains why the account of the dyslexic prom queen still matters. Hurst writes that undiagnosed dyslexia in girls can go unseen through an entire school career. This section looks at what a 1990 study found about boys, girls and referral, what a Yale School of Medicine profile says about screening in kindergarten and first grade, and how one state now requires every young student to be screened, so that a reader can compare the school practices of 2026 with the situation Hurst describes.

Who gets referred: the 1990 Connecticut study

Hurst raises the question of gender in reading difficulty. The best-known study of it was led by Sally Shaywitz of Yale University and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1990. Education Week reported at the time that the study followed 445 Connecticut children from kindergarten through third grade. Schools identified four times as many boys as girls with reading disabilities in second grade and twice as many boys in third grade. When the researchers tested all of the children with the same instruments, boys and girls had equal rates of the disability in both grades. The same report says teachers rated boys as more active, more inattentive and as having more problems in behavior, language and academics than girls, although the boys’ measured ability and achievement were comparable to the girls’.

That finding fits Hurst’s description of girls who avoid oral reading and hide the difficulty. It also has limits. It is a single study from the early 1990s, conducted in one state, and it concerns who is referred. It does not settle every question about how common dyslexia is among boys and girls in other populations or with other definitions. The Yale School of Medicine states in its profile of Shaywitz that the research found dyslexia occurs equally in girls and boys.

Why early matters: what the screening evidence says

Hurst argues that parents should not accept a “developmental lag” explanation and should seek help early. The Yale profile supports the timing, stating that the reading gap between typical and dyslexic readers is evident as early as first grade and persists, and that it says treatment works best as early as possible, in grades 1 to 3, when the learning slope is greatest. It also describes the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen, which a teacher completes on a tablet to get a yes or no result for risk, and which Yale says was built to identify at-risk children as early as kindergarten and first grade. The Yale text describes the screener’s quality in the authors’ own terms, so a district weighing it should look for independent evaluations.

Hurst also quotes figures about how many poor readers can reach grade level with early help, and how long it takes to catch up after third grade. These are attributed in the essay to the National Institutes of Health and were not checked for this section; a reader who needs to cite them should look for the original source.

What a state requirement looks like: Georgia

Some states now require what Hurst asks for. Under Georgia’s State Board rule on dyslexia identification and support, beginning in the 2024-2025 school year each local school system must, at a minimum, screen every student in kindergarten through grade 3 for characteristics of dyslexia every year. The screening tool must cover phonological and phonemic awareness, sound-symbol recognition, alphabet knowledge, decoding, rapid naming or reading fluency for students with some reading ability, and encoding. Families are notified before screening, but their consent is not required for the universal screen. Once intervention begins, progress must be monitored at least monthly. The rule is one state’s approach, and requirements differ elsewhere, so families and educators should check their own state’s department of education.

The list of skills in the Georgia rule also gives a reader a concrete way to understand what Hurst describes when a kindergartener confuses letters, links the wrong sound to a letter, or cannot tell whether two words rhyme. Those are observations about sound and letter knowledge, and a screener is designed to collect them for every child, whether or not a teacher has already noticed a problem.

What parents and teachers can do

1. Ask whether the school screens every child. Universal screening does not depend on a teacher’s referral, which is the step where the 1990 study found schools identifying far more boys than girls.
2. Look at the quiet student too. Hurst describes a girl who avoided oral reading and hid the difficulty. Teachers can watch for avoidance of reading aloud or writing tasks, and can raise it with a reading specialist.
3. Do not wait. A concern in kindergarten or first grade is worth raising in writing with the school, since the Yale text puts the strongest reading gains in grades 1 to 3.
4. Ask what intervention follows a screen. A result is useful only when it leads to instruction. The Georgia rule requires monthly progress monitoring once intervention starts.

For related reading, the edCircuit science of reading guide covers reading instruction, and the special education guide covers evaluation and services. Younger children are covered in the early childhood education guide.

Further Reading

1. TES – Girls lose out in PE gender gap
2. New York Times – Gender Gap in Education Cuts Both Ways
3. The Times – Bias of female teachers ‘could limit boys’

More on Dyslexia