Wait to fail: When reading deficits become disability 

When Congress passed IDEA in 1975, the assumption was that general education would successfully teach most children to read. Special Education existed for students whose disabilities prevented them from learning through standard instruction. It could be said that special education wasn’t originally designed to teach everyone to read.

As explicit decoding instruction became less common, more children struggled. Schools had to determine if the student’s needs were because they had: dyslexia, language disorder, autism, ADHD, intellectual disability and/or poor instruction. This is difficult. 

NCLB required schools to improve test scores. This created a focus on measurable proficiency and encouraged interventions aimed at helping students pass tests. But passing a test isn’t the same as becoming a fluent reader. 

Inclusion changed what special education looked like as districts educated more students in general education classrooms. This has benefits for many students. But it also means some students receive accommodations instead of explicit remediation. For example, having a text read aloud by a device instead of being taught to decode the words themselves.

As more students required intervention, schools developed Response to Intervention (RTI) and later Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS). Providing increasingly intensive interventions before referring a student to special education, if done well, can help many students become proficient readers. But, in practice, many families describe years of:

• “Let’s try another intervention.”
• “Let’s wait another semester.”
• “They’re making progress.”
• “They aren’t far enough behind.”

This is where the phrase “wait to fail” comes from. In many balanced literacy implementations, decoding is not taught as explicitly or systematically as in structured literacy approaches. As a result, some struggling readers compensate with memorization and contextual guessing until the demands of reading increase in third or fourth grade. By the time they fail badly enough to get an Individualized Education Program (IEP) they are years behind and often traumatized by their experiences.

The “wait to fail” system creates an equity gap. Affluent parents can afford private neuropsychological evaluations and private tutoring such as Orton-Gillingham in first grade without waiting for the school’s response. 

Title 1, Reading Recovery, RTI and MTSS aren’t legally special education, they often exist within the same organizational structure, share staff and serve as the primary pathway into special education evaluations. The same system intended to reduce unnecessary referrals can also postpone necessary ones, making special education harder to access. 

If districts had continued using systematic phonics instruction beginning in the 1980s, would today’s special education populations look different? 

When a school district switches from balanced literacy to explicit, systematic phonics (the Science of Reading), special education referrals can drop by 30-40%. Schools can test phonemic awareness in kindergarten and first grade and catch and fix decoding deficits immediately, preventing the need for an IEP. 

Examples of Districts that have seen immediate results with implementation of the Science of Reading:

• Bethlehem, PA: After training elementary teachers in structured phonics, end of year kindergarten benchmarks shot from 54% to 90%, causing a large reduction in early grade special education referrals.
• Marietta, GA: Switched to structured literacy and saw a double digit percentage drop in students needing intensive reading intervention and psychological testing. 
• Mississippi: After statewide literacy reforms, posted some of the nation’s largest gains in fourth grade reading, including for students with disabilities, while maintaining relatively low per-pupil education spending compared with many states. 

How many students would be impacted? 

To understand the balanced literacy fallout, we can track the data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Learning Disabilities Association of America: 

7.5 million total U.S. Students with IEPs

32% Categorized under Specific Learning Disabilities =  2.4 million students. 

75%-80% of SLD deficits rooted in language and reading = 1.8-1.92 million students

Data and case studies show that switching from balanced literacy to systematic phonics reduces early grade reading referrals and new SLD placements by 30%-40%. Applying that reduction to the 1.8 million to 1.92 million reading deficit students:

• Conservative estimate: (30% reduction) 540,000 fewer IEPs across the nation.
• High impact estimate: (40% reduction) 768,000 fewer IEPs across the nation. 

The Local Impact: Northampton By The Numbers 

When we scale these national percentages down to a local level, we can see the impacts in our community. 

In Northampton we have 2382 total students

24.8% IEP Rate: 591 students currently have an IEP.

32% SLD Rate: 189 of those students are categorized under a Specific Learning Disability

75% Reading Deficit Baseline: At least 142 of those SLD diagnoses are rooted in basic reading and language deficits. 

30% Referral Reduction: Implementing systemic phonics prevents 42 students from ever needing a special education referral. 

If Northampton had maintained systematic phonics instruction since the 1980s, the number of IEP students could have been reduced from 591 down to 548 students. 

The fall 2025 program evaluation from CASE, goes into detail about intervention needs.

What happens when Special Education becomes the intervention system? 

 If general education stops reliably teaching children to read, special education becomes the safety net. We often hear that special education has grown too large. But much of that growth may reflect a shift of general education’s foundational responsibility onto a system that was never designed to carry it. 

When special education becomes the primary intervention system, academic help is often accessed later, through a more expensive and bureaucratic process. Special education teachers spend increasing amounts of time delivering foundational academic instruction, instead of specialized instruction. While students continue advancing through grade level content without mastering prerequisite skills. 

As more students enter special education, the system becomes more visible, more costly, as well as more politically contentious. Staff, families and students may face increased scrutiny or resentment, even though the pressures stem from the broader instructional problems rather than disability itself.