In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include “the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data” and “Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity.” I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she’d finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment.

Caroline’s academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. “I can’t remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless,” she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to “the end of a row” she couldn’t remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia.

Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it’s more complicated than that. People with dyslexia have varying degrees of difficulty not only with reading and writing but also with pronouncing new words, recalling known words, recognizing rhymes, dividing words into syllables, and comprehending written material. Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese. It often occurs in combination with additional speech and language issues, and with anxiety, depression, attention disorders, and other so-called comorbidities, although dyslexia itself can have such profound psychological and emotional impacts that some of these conditions might be characterized more accurately as side effects.

Estimates of dyslexia’s incidence in the general population vary, from as high as twenty per cent—a figure cited by, among others, Sally Shaywitz, a co-founder of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity—to as low as zero, as suggested by Richard Allington, a retired professor of education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who in 2019 told participants at a literacy conference that legislators who supported remediation for students with reading disabilities should be shot. Nadine Gaab, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me that the best current estimates fall between five and ten per cent.

There are reasons for the inconsistency. The condition varies in type, severity, and presentation of symptoms, and early literacy skills have historically been hard to measure. Many children with dyslexia (and their parents) never learn they have it. Because a common strategy for avoiding the embarrassment of reading aloud is to act in a way that results in being sent to the principal’s office, dyslexic students are often treated primarily as discipline problems. At every grade level, they are more likely to be suspended, expelled, or placed in juvenile detention, especially if their families are economically disadvantaged. According to a 2011 study of four thousand high-school students by Donald J. Hernandez, then a sociology professor at Hunter College, more than sixty per cent of those who failed to graduate had been found to have reading deficits as early as third grade. More often than not, schools don’t intervene effectively, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes as a result of misguided pedagogy, sometimes for fear of incurring instructional or legal costs.

The personal and societal consequences can be catastrophic, since even to work at many minimum-wage jobs you need to be able to read. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that proven methods for teaching dyslexic students—which enabled Caroline to become an avid reader by middle school—have been known for decades. What’s more, the main principles that inform those methods have been shown to underlie successful reading instruction for all students, whether they have dyslexia or not. (An administrator at a school for students with reading disabilities told me, “What works for our students actually works for everyone. It’s a matter of dosage.”) Many American schools don’t use scientifically supported instructional methods, though, and, partly because they don’t, dyslexia can be hard to distinguish from what one elementary-school principal described to me as “dystaughtia.” If reading were taught better, almost all students would benefit, and students with neurological differences would be easier to identify and treat before their difficulties with reading derailed their lives. “There’s a window of opportunity to intervene,” Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist, told me. “You don’t want to let that go.”

Shaywitz, in her book “Overcoming Dyslexia,” cites an account, published by a German doctor in 1676, of “an old man of 65 years” who lost the ability to read after suffering a stroke. “He did not know a single letter nor could he distinguish one from another,” the doctor wrote. This was perhaps the first published description of what’s known today as acquired dyslexia, caused by damage to the brain. Two centuries later, a doctor in England wrote a paper about a case of what he called “congenital word blindness.” It involved a fourteen-year-old boy who was unable to read despite years of instruction by teachers and tutors. He could recognize “and,” “the,” “of,” and a few other one-syllable words, and he knew the letters of the alphabet, but when the doctor dictated vocabulary to him he misspelled nearly everything, writing “sening” for “shilling” and “scojock” for “subject.” His disability stood out, the doctor wrote, because his schoolmaster had said that he would be “the smartest lad in the school if the instruction were entirely oral.”

Spoken language arose at least fifty thousand years ago, and the brain has evolved with it. As a consequence, most children learn to speak early and easily, without formal instruction. (Deaf children pick up signing readily, too.) Reading and writing are different. They were invented only about five thousand years ago, and natural selection has not configured the brain to facilitate them. “You can’t just lock a group of kindergartners in a library and expect them to emerge, a couple of weeks later, as readers,” Gaab told me. “It’s more like learning a musical instrument. You can listen to Mozart all your life, but if I put you in front of a piano and say, ‘Play Mozart,’ you will fail.”

To become literate, people have to repurpose parts of the brain that evolved to perform other tasks, such as object recognition and sound processing. “What we have to do, over the course of learning to read, is coördinate these areas to communicate with each other and build what we call a reading network,” Gaab said. The areas are connected by axon bundles, which she likened to highways. The French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, in his book “Reading in the Brain,” writes, “Scientists can track a printed word as it progresses from the retina through a chain of processing stages, each of which is marked by an elementary question: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?”

Sometimes the axon highways almost seem to pave themselves. My daughter, Laura, began to read all of a sudden, the summer before kindergarten. (“It’s hard to believe that ‘knock’ starts with ‘k,’ ” she said, while following along as I read her a bedtime story about Amanda Pig.) But even she didn’t become a reader entirely on her own. All children have to learn the relationships between letters and meaningful sounds. For some it’s harder than for others. “Maybe instead of four lanes you have two,” Gaab said, “or instead of a smooth surface you have a bumpy one.” Caroline had a large vocabulary, and she was read to as often as Laura was, both at home and at school, and there were just as many colorful plastic alphabet magnets stuck to the refrigerator in her kitchen. But she needed teachers who understood that literacy doesn’t happen naturally, especially for children with dyslexia.

A decade ago, Emily Hanford, a senior correspondent at American Public Media, was researching a story about college-level remedial-reading classes. She became interested in dyslexia and then in literacy generally, and in 2022 she produced an immensely influential podcast series, “Sold a Story,” about reading instruction in American schools. The central argument is that teachers all over the country employ instructional methods and materials that were proved, long ago, to be not just ineffective but counterproductive. Such methods, Hanford demonstrated, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how children learn to read. They direct beginning readers to look for hints in illustrations and to make deductions based on context, word length, plot, and other cues, with only incidental reliance on the sounds represented by letters. The idea is that, as children become adept at deduction, the mechanical side will, in effect, take care of itself.

Skilled reading has many elements. A popular metaphor is the “reading rope,” created by the psychologist Hollis Scarborough in 2001. It depicts eight “strands,” which readers weave together as they become proficient. The strands include not just an understanding of the sounds represented by letters and combinations of letters but also such elements of language comprehension as vocabulary, grammar, reasoning, and background knowledge. All the strands are necessary. In Hanford’s view, the ones related to word recognition, including phonological awareness and decoding, have often been neglected. That harms many students and is a disaster for children with dyslexia.

Antipathy to phonetic decoding is sometimes traced to the nineteenth-century American educator Horace Mann, who described the letters of the alphabet as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” and argued in favor of teaching children to recognize words as discrete units. A later, more powerful influence was Marie Clay, a teacher and researcher in New Zealand, who studied schoolchildren learning to read and concluded, in the nineteen-sixties, that understanding the relationships between letters and sounds wasn’t essential. Hanford, in the second episode of “Sold a Story,” says, “Her basic idea was that good readers are good problem solvers. They’re like detectives, searching for clues.” The best clues, Clay reasoned, were things like context and sentence structure. Frank Smith, a British psycholinguist, came to the same conclusion. He argued that, to a good reader, a printed word was like an ideogram. “The worst readers are those who try to sound out unfamiliar words according to the rules of phonics,” he wrote, in 1992.

There have always been opposing voices. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” a brutal indictment of “whole word” methods. “If they had their way, our teachers would never tell the children that there are letters and that each letter represents a sound,” Flesch writes. To illustrate the problem, he recounts a story, told by a literacy researcher, about a boy who could read the word “children” on a flash card but not in a book. (The boy explained that he recognized the flash card because someone had smudged it.) Flesch’s book spent months on best-seller lists, but teaching methods like the ones he had seemingly destroyed remained widely used.

“We’re only walking to the other end of the cage.”

Cartoon by Lynn Hsu

Today, two of the most popular reading-instruction programs are Units of Study, whose principal author is Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom, by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Both are traceable to the work of people like Clay and Smith, and both are sold by the same educational publisher. They have remained entrenched in school systems even though scientific studies have shown that their theoretical foundations are flawed. Technology that allows researchers to track the eye movements of people as they read has demonstrated, for instance, that good readers actually do decode words by looking closely, if quickly, at letters and combinations of letters. Dehaene writes that “ ‘eight’ and ‘EIGHT,’ which are composed of distinct visual features, are initially encoded by different neurons in the primary visual area, but are progressively recoded until they become virtually indistinguishable.” If fluent readers are able to read familiar words in a way that makes it seem as though they’re recognizing ideograms, it’s because they analyzed them phonetically during earlier encounters, prompting their brains to create permanent neural pathways linking spelling, sound, and meaning.

Struggling readers, in particular, need instructors who have been trained in what’s now broadly referred to as structured literacy, research-based instruction, or the science of reading. Such methods are rooted in a neuroscientific understanding of the elements of reading, with an emphasis on enabling students to accurately decode written representations of spoken language. Amy Murdoch, the director of the reading-science program at Mount St. Joseph University, in Cincinnati, said that these methods provide the best framework to teach even non-dyslexic people to read; still, at many universities it is possible to earn an advanced degree in early education without learning them. Margaret Goldberg, a co-founder of the Right to Read Project, a California-based nonprofit, told me that one reason for the persistence of discredited methods may be that they seem intuitively correct to the kinds of people who become elementary-school teachers. “When I train teachers, I ask them how they learned to read,” she said. “And most of them will say they did it very easily, and they’ll have memories of things like sitting at a little table while their teacher pointed out a few things.” With Laura as my sample of one, I would have assumed that teaching a child to read requires nothing more than taking lots of family trips to the library.

Goldberg told me about a workshop she attended in 2015, when she was working as a literacy coach at a low-performing public school in Oakland. The workshop introduced teachers and others to Units of Study, which the school system had just purchased. Participants were shown pages from a story about a kangaroo, written in an alphabet they didn’t recognize. (It turned out to be Greek.) Goldberg recalled that the presenter told them not to worry about the words: “He said, ‘Just see how much reading you can do without even knowing the alphabet.’ ” When Goldberg objected that this kind of guessing wasn’t the same thing as reading, the presenter told her she was wrong.

“In normal science, a theory whose assumptions and predictions have been repeatedly contradicted by data will be discarded,” Seidenberg, the cognitive neuroscientist, writes in his book “Language at the Speed of Sight.” “But in education they are theoretical zombies that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons such as empirical disconfirmation, leaving them free to roam the educational landscape.”

Calkins eventually added phonics to Units of Study, partly in response to Hanford’s reporting. Nevertheless, in 2023, New York City began phasing out the curriculum, which it had used for years. The city recently released test results showing that the number of students meeting the bar for proficiency has risen by seven percentage points. (Columbia’s Teachers College moved away from Units of Study, too.)

Anne Wicks, an education and economics specialist at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, told me that Hanford’s podcast helped transform what had been a relatively obscure academic debate into an approachable subject for laypeople. The remote schooling required by COVID also had a significant impact, Wicks said, by showing many parents how their children were actually being taught. Since 2020, more than forty states have passed laws that push schools to emphasize the science of reading. Legislation doesn’t necessarily translate into classroom change, especially if teachers (and teachers’ unions) resist. In places that have fully committed to improved teacher training, though, results have been impressive. Wicks said that Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee have turned improved curricula into better test results—a change that has been called the “Southern surge.”

Karin Chenoweth, a former columnist for the Washington Post, who has written several books about successful schools, told me about a district that she’s studied closely in Steubenville, Ohio. “It’s in Appalachia, and it’s under-resourced, and it has hardly any tax base, and it’s over ninety per cent disadvantaged,” she said. “But in some years one hundred per cent of their kids in grades three and four meet state standards in reading.” In 2000, the district adopted a science-backed program, Success for All, which was developed in the nineteen-eighties by two professors at Johns Hopkins. At least as important as the program, Chenoweth told me, was that the district’s teachers embraced a different way of teaching. “Building a school culture like that isn’t easy,” she said. “But once the teachers saw the effects they fiercely protected it and they wouldn’t go back.”

Steven Dykstra is a retired clinical psychologist in Milwaukee. He didn’t think much about dyslexia until his son had trouble reading in first grade. He and his wife arranged a conference with the teacher, who asked whether they read to their son at home. “When we assured her that we had read to him every night since he was only a few months old, she was confused,” he told me. “She asked us, ‘Are you sure?,’ as if we had hallucinated all these many hours.” The teacher then asked what they did when their son struggled to read a word. “We told her that we helped him sound it out,” he said. “That was her ‘Aha!’ moment. ‘That’s the problem,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s messing him up. You need to stop doing that. Phonics doesn’t work.’ ”

Dykstra was employed for thirty-three years by Milwaukee County’s public-health department, and he spent most of that time on a mental-health-crisis team that provided counselling to children and young adults. He told me about a case involving a sixteen-year-old girl who had been engaged in many kinds of self-destructive behavior. “She took drugs, and she would sell herself, and she would wake up after being drunk with these awful amateur tattoos,” Dykstra said. She eventually agreed to meet with him on the condition that they do so in her parents’ garage and keep the door open so that she could flee if she felt she needed to.

During their conversation, Dykstra said, the girl surprised him by revealing that she was unable to read—something that hadn’t come up during weeks of interviews with people in her life. The girl told him that, in elementary school, she had avoided being called on by doing things like pretending to be sick or walking out of the room, and that she had once hit a teacher with a book. She didn’t mind being punished, she said, because no punishment could be worse than the laughter of her classmates. “Then the conversation shifted to other things,” Dykstra continued. “I said, ‘You know, lots of other people wouldn’t do the things you do, like go to a motel with a stranger for forty dollars, because they would feel such intense shame.’ And she looked at me like I was an idiot. She said, ‘I’ve been ashamed every minute of my life since I started first grade. I’m used to it.’ ”

Partly because of his experience with that girl and with his son, Dykstra told me, in counselling sessions with young people he always asked, “When you started school, was there one thing that was harder than anything else?” Often, he said, the answer was reading. For children who can’t read, every school day holds the potential for repeated humiliation, and the severity of the humiliation grows as the gap between them and their classmates widens. Hanford told me, “If you are a kid who is struggling to read, you are experiencing failure really fast, and you are experiencing massive confusion, and it is actually fucking frightening.”

To a school administrator, dyslexia can seem to be a problem that solves itself, since many sufferers drop out before graduation. But for some the harm continues long after school. Kareem Weaver, a co-founder of Fulcrum, a literacy nonprofit based in Oakland, told me that more than forty per cent of all imprisoned adults in the U.S. have dyslexia, and that as many as eight in ten are “functionally illiterate.” The correlation between illiteracy and incarceration has been known for a long time. A 1993 review by the Department of Justice found “ample evidence of the link between academic failure and delinquency.” It also found that “research-based reading instruction can be used to reduce recidivism and increase employment opportunity for incarcerated juvenile offenders.” Teaching reading to imprisoned adults has a similar effect on both recidivism and employment. Intervening earlier is obviously more effective, as well as more humane. It’s also less expensive. The average cost of maintaining an inmate on Rikers Island is more than half a million dollars a year.

Caroline’s dyslexia was identified in second grade, and afterward she spent three years at Windward, a private day school for children with language-based learning disabilities. During the time she was there, in the early two-thousands, Windward had an elementary and middle school in White Plains. It has since expanded to the Upper East Side. The total enrollment is about nine hundred and fifty. When Caroline was admitted, she was reading at a pre-kindergarten level and suffering from insomnia and intense anxiety. Both ended when she began to read.

The structured-literacy program employed for the youngest Windward students is called P.A.F., which stands for Preventing Academic Failure. It’s an adaptation of what’s known as the Orton-Gillingham approach to teaching dyslexics and other struggling readers. Samuel Orton was a pathologist and neuropsychiatrist who, in the nineteen-twenties, noticed that people who had suffered left-hemisphere brain injuries had reading difficulties that were similar to those of certain bright children who underperformed in school. He referred to such difficulties as “strephosymbolia,” a coinage whose Greek roots mean “reversed symbols.” Even without modern scanning technologies, he correctly deduced that the condition involved a breakdown in what Seidenberg later called the “leftward shift” in the brain of a developing reader. (Language-related activity occurs in both hemispheres of the brain but becomes concentrated in the left one as we learn to read.) Anna Gillingham was an educator who, with encouragement from Orton, devised teaching methods and materials that rely on explicit, narrowly focussed instruction in the relationship between spoken language and its representation in writing. Students follow a sequence of increasingly complex steps involving things like letter-sound relationships and syllabication, with lots of repetition. (A literacy expert told me, “A typical learner needs three to five repetitions. A struggling reader might need ten to twenty repetitions. A dyslexic reader might need two hundred repetitions.”) Orton-Gillingham is not the only approach to teaching children with reading disabilities—and some of its techniques, such as tracing letters in the air and whispering words or speaking them aloud, are controversial—but methods based on it are widely used in the U.S. in programs that treat dyslexia.

In early September, I visited Windward’s White Plains elementary-school campus, for grades one through five, and watched from the parking lot as students were dropped off by parents and school buses. Staff members greeted each child on the sidewalk in front of the building while a teacher played music from a boom box. Enthusiasm for school is rare among children with dyslexia, but I saw smiles, laughter, and high fives. For many of the students, Windward is likely the first school they’ve attended where simply showing up in the morning doesn’t fill them with dread.

Later that day, I sat in on a fifth-grade reading class, accompanied by Jamie Williamson, the head of the school. A strip of red tape ran along the left edge of each student’s desktop, as a visual reminder that writing in English moves from left to right. A sign at the front of the room read “THE FIRST THING I DO IS ALWAYS THE SAME . . . I PICK UP MY PENCIL AND WRITE MY NAME!”

“We are going to go on a vowel hunt,” the teacher said. “Let’s put on our vowel-hunting glasses.” From her laptop, she projected vocabulary words, one at a time, onto a whiteboard. The first word was “picnic.”

“Our first job is to underline the vowels,” she said. “Who can raise their hand and tell me what vowels we would need to underline in this word?”

“Both of the ‘i’s,” a girl said.

The next task was to place a dot between any pair of consonants.

“Where would I put a dot? Scarlett?”

“In between the ‘c’ and the ‘n.’ ”

“Right there. You’ve got it. Nicely done.”

Then a student “scooped” the syllables, by drawing curved lines, on the whiteboard, under “pic” and “nic.” Finally, all the students read the word aloud.

After they had given half a dozen words the same treatment, the teacher said, “I think we’re ready to write some syllables of our own. Please pick up your pencil and put the tip of your pencil on the next clean line. Are we ready?” As the students worked, a teacher-in-training walked from desk to desk, correcting errors immediately.

Windward’s teachers follow highly structured lesson plans. Students memorize rules about letter sounds, letter combinations, and grammar. They also receive instruction in essay organization and composition. Their progress is monitored and evaluated, and reading classes are regularly rearranged so that students are always grouped with others at similar levels of proficiency. After three to five years, almost all Windward students transition to conventional schools. When Caroline left, after fifth grade, she was reading in the ninety-fifth percentile, and she later qualified for her new school’s gifted program. Windward had made her not only an avid reader but also a skilled writer. (Toward the end of her third year, she wrote a poem that ended, “So come and read, so come and read, Come don those literary Wings!”) Still, dyslexia is a lifelong condition. She told me that she reads slowly, especially academic papers, and that when she writes she will sometimes spell the same word different ways in the same paragraph. But without the help she got at Windward her adult career would have been impossible.

Just before my visit, Windward had held orientation sessions for new parents. Williamson said that at one session a mother told him that her daughter had come home from school, during the first week, and asked to order a book so that they could read together on the couch in the evenings. The mother said that she had excused herself to go to the bathroom, then closed the door and cried. She told Williamson that her daughter had never wanted a book before. “And this was day three,” he said.

Every year, Windward’s faculty trains roughly fifteen hundred teachers from other schools, both on site and online, through a program called the Windward Institute. This past summer, the institute worked with teachers for the Central Brooklyn Literacy Academy, in Crown Heights, a new public elementary school for struggling readers, including those with dyslexia. Most of the teachers were skeptical initially, Williamson told me, largely because they worried that P.A.F. would leave little room for their own creativity. “Before they actually got into a classroom with kids, they were, like, ‘This is going to be the most boring thing ever,’ ” he said. Once they began working with students, though, they changed their minds. “They knew the kids well, because they were from their own schools,” he said. “So they knew that this kid wouldn’t sit still, and wasn’t successful, and was disruptive. But all of a sudden the same child was front and center, really engaged, working incredibly hard.”

C.B.L.A. is the second public school in the city which is specifically for children with reading disabilities. The first was the South Bronx Literacy Academy, which opened in 2023. Both schools are the product of a multiyear effort by the Literacy Academy Collective, an organization founded by half a dozen women who have children with learning disabilities. The women first met in 2019, drawn together by shared frustration with the city’s failure to teach their children to read. In 2021, with teachers trained by the Windward Institute, L.A.C. ran a six-week summer-school pilot, in Harlem. The organization did the same in the Bronx the following summer, then ran a yearlong pilot program for two classes of students in an existing school, also in the Bronx. The pilot was successful, and before the year was half over the Department of Education began the process of establishing S.B.L.A. By the time the school opened, the women’s own children were too old to benefit from it, but their organization has remained deeply involved, supplementing the budgets of both literacy academies with private fund-raising and providing administrative and classroom support. (Their story is told in the documentary “Left Behind,” which was released in 2025.)

“Switching to a third party doesn’t mean I’ll get back together with you.”

Cartoon by Tom Toro

I visited S.B.L.A. in September. The school occupies one floor of a shared building on a narrow, crowded street half a mile from Yankee Stadium. It was early in the school year, and staff members were dealing with complications resulting from bus routes and other transportation challenges—a significant issue, since the school draws students from beyond the neighborhood. Bethany Poolman, the principal, told me, “All the streets here are one-way, so if you get stuck you might be stuck forever.”

Poolman has the energy of a pep-squad leader, and she operates at close to full speed all day long—filling in for an absent teacher, tracking down missing classroom materials, breaking up a playground fight. She majored in religion at Haverford, then joined Teach for America as a special-education teacher at a middle school in the Bronx. She spent a decade there before moving to administration. “We have two brand-new students who are in the lowest reading group,” she said. “They just joined us, and they’re sweet as pie, both of them, but they cannot name the twenty-six letters.” One had been held back twice. Rather than put him in a class with students two years younger, the school placed him just one grade behind and assigned a reading specialist to help him catch up.

“If you were to have a conversation with him, you’d have no idea,” she said. “But then you put three letters in front of him and he can’t read ‘cat.’ ”

I said I was amazed that children could make it so far in school without knowing the alphabet.

“Correct,” Poolman said. “But they’re here now.”

She introduced me to three fifth-grade girls, now in their third year at S.B.L.A. I asked them what they remembered about the schools they’d attended previously.

“If we didn’t get the word right, we would have to stay inside for recess,” one said. “We would have to write the word, like, fifteen times, until we got it, and then we would still have to stay inside, because they said there was no point to go to recess because there wasn’t enough time.” No recess is the elementary-school equivalent of solitary confinement. For kids with dyslexia and other reading challenges, who feel isolated to begin with, not being allowed to play with classmates makes socialization even harder. The girls told me that their old classmates had made fun of them, but no one did that now. They liked school. They liked their teachers. They were about to graduate to chapter books.

In 1975, Congress passed what’s now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which entitles disabled children to a “free appropriate public education,” and in 1993 the Supreme Court ruled that the act can force school districts to cover private-school tuition if public equivalents fail. Taking advantage of that provision for children with dyslexia has never been easy, however. To qualify, parents must submit an Individualized Education Program, a legal document that details their child’s special-education needs (and that has to be updated regularly), plus, in some cases, a neuropsychological examination, which can cost thousands of dollars. They also have to demonstrate that the public system has exhausted its ability to address their needs. Many parents of dyslexic children don’t know that this type of aid exists, and, even if they do, can’t afford to meet the requirements or hire lawyers to argue their child’s case. Windward’s tuition is roughly seventy-six thousand dollars a year, and other private dyslexia programs cost about as much. Much of the $2.3 billion that New York City spends annually on “non-public and contract schools per Special Education mandate” benefits families who have the means to pay private tuition up front and sue the city for reimbursement.

S.B.L.A. and C.B.L.A. use some of the same instructional materials that Windward does, but, because they are public schools on public budgets, they deal with constraints that Windward doesn’t. Windward can limit admission to students who have confirmed diagnoses and are all but certain to benefit from its classes. It has a well-funded financial-aid program, which covers almost the entire cost for some students, but the children in the hallways (and the cars I saw at drop-off) wouldn’t have seemed out of place on the campus of any super-expensive private school in Westchester.

The literacy academies enroll many children who have trouble with more than reading: severe emotional issues, little knowledge of English. New teachers at Windward spend two years in training before they take over classes of their own, a long-term apprenticeship that the literacy academies can’t match. And the academies have to meet city and state requirements that private schools don’t, including standardized testing that preëmpts instructional time and isn’t necessarily meaningful for their students.

Nevertheless, the academies have had the same kind of impact on students and families that Windward has. Ruth Genn, L.A.C.’s executive director and co-founder, told me that she hopes that within a few years there will be a network of five or six literacy academies across the city, but that the organization’s ultimate goal is “to learn from these schools and incorporate aspects of what they do throughout the system.” L.A.C. has been instrumental in changing the way teachers are trained in New York State. A pivotal moment, Genn said, occurred in 2023, when city education officials announced that they would no longer hire teachers who had not been trained in the science of reading.

At S.B.L.A., the lower grades are more likely than the upper grades to have openings for new students—and the same is true at Windward. The reason is not that dyslexia is less common among younger children but that teachers and parents usually fail to identify reading problems until they’ve become obvious. “In second grade, no one is freaking out,” Poolman said. “When you talk to families, there’s less urgency, because the kids’ teachers aren’t alarming them yet.” (She said that when S.B.L.A. opened there were ten thousand second and third graders in the Bronx who would have qualified for it.) One achievement of the city’s outgoing mayor, Eric Adams—who has dyslexia and campaigned in part as an education reformer—is that the city has begun screening for risk of dyslexia in all students from kindergarten through ninth grade.

Earlier intervention would make everything easier. Gaab told me that she thinks of reading as beginning in utero, since that’s when sound and language perception begins. Seidenberg, in “Language at the Speed of Sight,” cites a longitudinal study, employing electroencephalography, in which measurements of brain activity in newborns in response to speech “were strongly related to the same children’s spoken language skills at ages three and five and to reading impairments at age eight.” Such findings constitute a powerful argument for identifying children at risk as early as possible, when the differences are smaller and children who have difficulties are less likely to have suffered negative effects of any kind. One of the most telling indicators in young children, Seidenberg told me, is family history. (Caroline has an uncle who struggled all through school with what he suspects is dyslexia.) Gaab and her colleagues have been working with librarians and pediatricians to create a screening protocol.

I went back to S.B.L.A. the week before Thanksgiving and visited several classes with Poolman. In one, five students sat around a U-shaped desk. The teacher sat in the center and could see all the children’s papers without moving. “All right, guys. I’m going to say a sentence,” she said. “Then I’m going to say it again. You’re going to repeat it, and then you’re going to write it. Ready? They can swim. They can swim.”

“The teachers provide scaffolds, and there’s a whole science to that, because you don’t want to give students more than is necessary,” Poolman said. The teacher dictated another sentence. One boy wrote a “d” backward, like a “b,” but the teacher looked at him and then at the word, and he spotted his mistake. Poolman continued, “If he hadn’t understood, she would have said something, but she didn’t give him more than she had to. Teachers have to learn to do that. It isn’t easy.”

Music played over the P.A. system to mark the end of the period. Poolman and I stood in the center of the main hallway, and students streamed past on either side. “That girl who just went by is in her third year here,” she said. “When she started, she could not read a word. In reading class, she would put her head down on her desk and fall asleep—like, anxiety-induced narcolepsy.” Gradually, though, she had come around. “I remember the day she read aloud for the first time,” Poolman said. “She was so excited that she was shaking.” ♦