The Ontario Human Rights Commission has released an inquiry report on the ‘Right to Read’, which goes into detail about providing resources for students who have reading disabilities such as dyslexia.
“It’s a very exciting time in education, especially in Ontario,” Todd Cunningham of the University of Toronto told Humber News.
Alicia Smith, President of the International Dyslexia Association of Ontario said that she has been involved with this report since the beginning.
“For me personally, it’s been about three and a half years,” she said.
Smith also told Humber News that this lack of data collection from the OHRC is one of the issues with this report.
“Not only on the provincial level but even within the school boards,” she said.
“With the COVID pandemic, we have been looking for data in other places in Canada. They’re doing a little bit of a better job of collecting data. There’s been a real push in our data collection.”
This ‘Right to Read’ first came about back in 2012 when the Supreme Court of Canada released a unanimous decision recognizing that learning to read is not a privilege, but a basic and essential human right.
This right to read applies to all students, not just ones with reading disabilities, according to the report, and the inquiry’s main focus is going into detail about how Ontario’s school boards aren’t fulfilling their obligations of this right to its students.
The new report says that students at risk of having reading difficulties are; those with dyslexia, those with other disabilities (autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disabilities, hearing disabilities), and marginalized students (Black, First Nations, Métis and Inuit students, multilingual students, or students from low-income backgrounds).
The latest report says that the key elements to help teach and support students with this ‘right to read’ are; curriculum and instruction, early screening, reading intervention, accommodations, and professional assessments.
The main data to determine how many students did poorly with reading, the OHRC relied on EQAO reading test scores from 2018-2019.
Their findings found that:
- 26 per cent of all Ontario Grade 3 students and 53 per cent of Grade 3 students with special education needs (students who have an Individual Education Plan (IEP), excluding students whose sole identified exceptionality is giftedness) were not meeting the provincial EQAO standard. Although the EQAO tests do not measure word reading accuracy and fluency separately, these significantly impact early reading comprehension. The results improved only slightly for Grade 6 students, where 19 per cent of all students and 47 percent of students with special education needs did not meet the provincial standard.
- The inquiry found similar results in the eight school boards. Far too many students with special education needs in these boards were unsuccessful on the Grades 3 and 6 2018–2019 EQAO reading assessments. When looking specifically at students identified with a learning disability exceptionality, in most boards, only about half of the students with a learning disability exceptionality were able to meet provincial EQAO standards, even with a high rate of accommodations.
The International Dyslexia Association’s report ‘Lifting the curtain on EQAO scores’ found that in 2018–2019, only 8.5 per cent of Grade 3 students with an IEP achieved the provincial standard on the EQAO reading assessment without using assistive technology or scribing.
Cunningham, who is Chair of the School and Clinical Child Psychology Program at the U of T, said that the general curriculum taught to students from kindergarten and onwards needs to be revised.
“Our curriculum has been based on the three-cueing system, which has been not been supported by the larger science of reading,” he said.
“But in terms of really getting down to the core elements of how to start the reading system off, the three-cueing system hasn’t supported that fact.”
Laura Daire, a parent of a dyslexic 6-year-old daughter and associated with the Toronto District School Board, said that she counts herself “as one of the lucky ones because my daughter is reading well.”
But she also shares her experiences with forming a small committee to have TDSB utilize the ‘Right to Read’ initiative, as they have not and aren’t mentioned in the inquiry report like the University of Toronto was.
“When I think about the report, I think more about the parents that I have been speaking with over the past year, and learning from, and what ‘trauma’ these families are experiencing,” she said.
Daire also told Humber News through email that “in terms of forming the literacy committee, the parent council chair has reached out to the Parent Community Engagement Office of the TDSB for guidance. The chair wants to support me but is concerned about the limitations of the parent council.”
Smith also told Humber News that the challenge with this report is that there is a lot in it since it also dives into a lot of the systemic issues associated with students being able to read and understand English.
“It was even more comprehensive than I was expecting,” she said. “I think that you really need to tackle all of those things because it is really a deep and convoluting issue.”
“But the issue I feel like they’re having right now is that they really don’t know where to start.”