Popular Myths About Learning Disabilities

Raising the achievement of students with learning disabilities is hard, expensive, controversial and complex. School systems must pay private-school tuition for students they can’t adequately serve. Educators and parents sometimes disagree on what methods to use. Education writers like me rarely deal with the subject because it is difficult to explain and lacks many success stories.

That explains in part why learning disabilities are so poorly understood, as revealed by a remarkable survey just released by the nonprofit National Center for Learning Disabilities. The representative sampling of 2,000 Americans provides a rare look at the depths of our ignorance.

Forty-three percent believe that learning disabilities correlate with IQ. Fifty-five percent think that corrective eyewear can treat certain learning disabilities. Twenty-two percent believe that learning disabilities can be caused by spending too much time watching computer or television screens. All of those impressions are wrong.

Other mistaken views include the 31 percent of survey respondents who think learning disabilities are caused by poor diet, the 24 percent who blame childhood vaccinations and the more than a third who think those disabilities are caused by poor parenting or teaching in early childhood.

That so many of us know so little is a shame, although the survey shows that at least one disability is familiar to most people. The survey found that 90 percent of Americans know that dyslexia is a learning disability, and 80 percent can accurately define it. This may be because so many of us know someone whose reading difficulties have been blamed on dyslexia or have seen the many television shows dramatizing that disability.

Even though we have not educated ourselves well on what learning disabilities entail, we have been spending increasing amounts of our tax dollars to deal with them. One study by Richard Rothstein and Karen Hawley Miles of the Economic Policy Institute found that from 1967 to 1991 in nine school districts, money poured in to help students with disabilities. Per-pupil spending increased by 73 percent during that period, but only a fourth of the increase went to regular education. The portion of all spending designated for special education in those districts went from four to 17 percent.

Read more at Our ignorance of learning disabilities.

To learn more about improving special education, see the recent EdWeek Commentary, titled Improving Special Education in Tough Times, which was written by ERS' Stephen Frank and Karen Hawley Miles.

Read the online version of the article here.