I’ve been thinking a lot about schools lately.
Not in an abstract way, but in the very real, day-to-day experience of watching your own kid sit in a classroom and wonder whether they’re actually being taught what matters.
That’s what led to my conversation with Donell Pons, a Utah-based dyslexia expert who has spent more than two decades working with students who struggle to read. What struck me right away is how often we get the problem wrong from the start.
“In school, what’s the thing that we need students to do the best and the most?” she said. “Well, it’s reading.”
That sounds obvious. It isn’t.
Instead, what we often see is behavior being diagnosed before the root cause is understood. A kid can’t sit still. They don’t pay attention. They avoid work. The label comes quickly: ADHD.
But Donell pointed out something that most parents don’t hear nearly enough.
“If you’re diagnosed with dyslexia, you should have an evaluation for ADHD. That’s how common it occurs, at about 50%.”
That overlap creates a problem. As she put it, “We can probably be misdiagnosed for one or the other, or miss one or the other.”
That’s where things start to go sideways.
A kid who struggles to read will naturally avoid reading. They’ll fidget, check out, act out, or find anything else to do. From the outside, it looks like an attention problem. From the inside, it’s often frustration.
And once the wrong label is applied, the solution tends to follow the label.
We medicate. We accommodate. We manage behavior.
But we don’t always teach the kid how to read.
One of the more surprising things Donell said is something that still doesn’t seem to have sunk in culturally.
“We know that IQ is not related to reading.”
You can be bright, curious, even advanced in other areas, and still struggle to decode words on a page. Reading is not a natural process. It’s something that has to be taught, and taught well.
And English doesn’t make it easy. We have 26 letters, but more than 40 sounds, and countless ways to spell them. Without explicit instruction, it’s easy for students to fall behind.
The frustrating part is that we already know what works.
“We know how to teach it too. It’s called structured literacy.”
It’s not trendy. It’s not complicated. It’s just systematic, direct instruction in how language actually works. And according to Donell, it benefits every student, not just those with dyslexia.
Where things begin to break down is in comprehension.
A student might be able to read the words on a page, but that doesn’t mean they understand what they just read. That deeper layer, making sense of the text, connecting ideas, pulling out meaning, is often left to chance.
“We find that it’s not being taught. Rather, we’re thinking that kids will just get it, and that’s not happening.”
I’ve seen that gap myself. We spent a summer working through books with my daughter, reading a chapter and then having her explain it back. Not every detail, just the main idea. What happened. Why it mattered.
It wasn’t easy at first, but something started to click.
Then she went back to school, and it felt like everything slowed down. Less depth. Less emphasis on understanding. More just moving through material.
At the same time, kids today are dealing with something we never had to think about.
Screens.
Fast cuts. Bright colors. Constant stimulation.
Donell didn’t hesitate on this point.
“We’ve definitely paid for attention. That’s what’s happened—we can’t keep our attention on anything.”
That’s a problem when you’re asking a kid to sit down and read a book. Reading takes a different kind of focus. It requires patience, concentration, and a willingness to stay with something long enough to understand it.
“There’s nothing that replaces a sustained read and everything we get from a sustained read over time,” she said.
That’s where vocabulary is built. That’s where ideas connect. That’s where real comprehension happens.
And if kids don’t develop that skill early, it gets harder to catch up later.
What changed my perspective the most in this conversation was how Donell approaches behavior.
When a kid is acting out, the instinct is to correct it. But she looks at it differently. Behavior is a signal.
Something isn’t working.
Sometimes it’s academic. Sometimes it’s emotional. Sometimes it’s both.
She told me that anxiety often shows up alongside dyslexia. But what’s interesting is what happens when the reading improves.
“If you remediate the reading, the anxiety goes away.”
That’s not what most people expect.
We tend to treat the symptoms. But in this case, addressing the root problem changes everything.
Utah has started to make some moves in the right direction. There’s been legislation aimed at improving early reading instruction and giving teachers better training.
But it’s still limited, mostly focused on the early grades.
Meanwhile, there are students in middle school and high school who still can’t read at the level they need to succeed.
And once they fall behind, the system doesn’t always bring them back.
That’s where parents have to pay attention.
Not just to grades, but to what their kids can actually do. Can they explain what they read? Can they connect ideas? Do they avoid reading altogether?
Because the kid who struggles to read isn’t necessarily behind.
They’re not lazy. They’re not incapable.
More often than not, they’re being asked to do something they were never properly taught how to do.
And until we start addressing that directly, we’re going to keep mistaking the symptoms for the problem.
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