BC Takes Steps to Address Dyslexia

When Adrian Fluevog was a child, he didn’t know that he, like his dad, the famous shoe designer John Fluevog, had dyslexia.

Neither had been assessed for the learning disability that is so common some educators believe it affects up to 20 per cent of Canadians.

Fluevog says his disability wasn’t severe enough to be caught by his teachers, so it went “under the radar.”

“Teachers just didn’t think that I was applying myself.”

It wasn’t until the younger Fluevog was 24 that a British Columbia Institute of Technology staffer offered to assess him.

“Sure enough, I was dyslexic,” he said. BCIT accommodated his disability by not deducting marks on assignments or tests for his spelling or grammar mistakes, and by providing extra time to complete assignments and tests. He went from earning C-minus or D grades to being a solid B student almost overnight.

Two decades later, Fluevog is the parent of a dyslexic child, diagnosed after the family paid $3,000 for him to be assessed by a private psychologist. Seeing his child struggle in school was “like looking into a mirror,” he said.

“He got by on just being smart. All of a sudden Grade 5 comes and it’s a little more academic, and he was struggling,” Fluevog said.

With little to no support for kids with dyslexia in the public school system, Fluevog and his wife sent their son to Fraser Academy, a private school in Vancouver geared specifically towards students with dyslexia that charges up to $46,000 annually for tuition. Their other child remains in public school.

“His whole attitude towards school has changed, like overnight,” Fluevog said of his child’s experience at Fraser Academy.

But it’s been bittersweet that it took placing their child in a private school, where class sizes are much smaller than in the public system, for him to be supported in school.

“It shouldn’t be this way,” he said of the lack of resources in public schools for students with dyslexia. “We’ve talked to lots of families in the same situation with dyslexia, and they’ve gone private and seen a world of difference.”

Last spring, the B.C. government announced $30 million in funding for supporting kids with learning disabilities, specifically citing dyslexia, as part of the 2024 budget.

This fall they began implementing early literacy screening for kids in the province, spending $17.5 million on screening, as well as resources and training for educators and school staff.

Overall they hope to screen 150,000 students between kindergarten and Grade 3 over the next three years.

The Tyee requested an interview with Education Minister Lisa Beare about the ministry’s learning disability supports and assessments, but she was not made available.

In an emailed statement to The Tyee, a ministry spokesperson noted the province has tripled the number of literacy specialists available to work with school districts on early screening and “intervention strategies for students.”

“Parents and families are also receiving resources on evidence-based approaches to help children develop literacy skills at home, and who to speak to if they have questions or need additional support,” the statement reads.

Dyslexia support advocates told The Tyee early screening is important, particularly before a child reaches Grade 4.

But they say screening 150,000 children over three years and providing non-mandatory training for teachers isn’t adequate.

“After Grade 4, it’s almost impossible for kids to catch up to grade level,” said Cathy McMillan, a founding member of the grassroots Dyslexia BC advocacy organization.

McMillan and other advocates want B.C. to pass legislation mandating that all children be assessed for learning disabilities before Grade 4.

They also want to see legislation mandating teacher training in the “science of reading,” also known as the structured literacy method of teaching kids to read, as multiple U.S. states have done, to the exclusion of other teaching methods.

But the provincial teachers’ union doesn’t want the government using legislation to dictate how teachers teach kids to read.

“We think teachers have the professional judgment and the expertise to determine the ways that the students in their particular classroom need to experience literacy reading and writing,” said Carole Gordon, first vice-president of the BC Teachers’ Federation.

“A group of students in a particular classroom in any given year, even a semester, come to learning in a variety of different ways.”

At issue are the two main schools of thought on how children are best taught to read: balanced literacy and structured literacy.

Both are umbrella terms that include a wide variety of reading programs and methods. Balanced literacy involves instruction and exercises in reading, writing and thinking across the entire curriculum, not just language arts classes.

Lessons can differ based on each child’s needs and abilities. But one of the core beliefs is that teaching kids to be literate requires both demonstrating reading and writing, and letting students practise these skills on their own. Students are encouraged to guess or predict a word they can’t read, based on context clues such as pictures and the other words in the sentence.

Often referred to as the “science of reading” or “evidenced-based reading instruction,” structured literacy focuses instead on teaching the structure of language, using phonics, phonemic awareness, semantics, syllables, morphology and syntax. Instruction is “explicit, systematic and sequential,” and students practise by reading “decodable” books that include phonic patterns to help them sound out their words.

Ontario switches from balanced literacy to structured literacy

British Columbia does not track how many students in the province have dyslexia, nor does it know specifically how kids with dyslexia are doing in school.

And unlike students assessed as autistic, for example, students diagnosed with learning disabilities do not trigger additional per-student government funding for school districts to pay for support workers and resources.

But some other provinces do it differently. Ontario, for example, changed its language curriculum and implemented universal early screening for students after the Ontario Human Rights Commission released an inquiry report on literacy instruction in the province in 2022.

The report found the province’s 72 school districts had failed to develop “evidence-based instruction” for reading, such as strong “word-reading skills” in students and a focus on phonemic awareness and phonics — in other words, structured literacy.

Instead, schools were teaching students to read using the “three-cueing system,” a balanced literacy approach that teaches reading by modelling reading printed text for students, sharing text reading with students and gradually letting students attempt text reading on their own.

One of the report’s 157 recommendations calls for the government to work with “external experts” to revise language curriculum, kindergarten programs and “related instructional guides” to stop teachers from using the three-cueing system.

This debate over which method for teaching children how to read is best is not new.

Colloquially referred to as the “reading wars,” these debates have been raging between academics, educators, parents and other stakeholders across North America for decades.

While balanced literacy works great for students who don’t have learning disabilities, structured literacy has a better track record for helping some students with learning disabilities to learn how to read, its advocates say.

Structured literacy is influenced by cognitive research into the brains of “strong” and “poor” readers. But even some of the scientists behind this research have warned that there is such a thing as too much focus on phonics and phonological awareness, especially if it is to the exclusion of learning letters and words.

Structured literacy champions point to higher standardized testing scores for students who are taught with a greater emphasis on language structure like phonics and phonological awareness.

But this is also controversial, as standardized tests have been criticized by teachers for not capturing other elements that affect students’ scores, such as poverty, adequate sleep and parental education levels.

There are also concerns that too much of a focus on phonics and phonological awareness doesn’t leave enough space for the development of analytic and critical thinking skills. Where balanced literacy methods like three-cueing focus more on having students understand the meaning of a text and less on correcting a single misread word, structured literacy zeroes in on sounding out words and even memorizing common phonics patterns for words used regularly.

Dyslexia Canada, a national charity and advocacy organization unaffiliated with Dyslexia BC, was one of the experts the Ontario government worked with. It favours the structured literacy method.

It served in an advisory capacity with Ontario’s Education Ministry to assist with policy development, teacher training and screening tool selection last year.

“That was because the universities here essentially made it clear that they were not ready to move forward and provide training to teachers on evidence-based instruction,” said Alicia Smith, Dyslexia Canada’s executive director.

“There’s enthusiasm and support from the grassroots” in B.C. for structured literacy approaches to reading, Smith said. “The roadblock is within your universities and, to a certain extent, bureaucrats within your Ministry of Education.”

Academics, Smith said, are more likely to favour a balanced reading approach, or a reading approach that is dismissive of the science of reading.

Gordon of the BC Teachers’ Federation counters that the Ontario Human Rights Commission report has its own flaws. The commission did not consult with teachers beyond voluntary feedback surveys, which the report itself acknowledged did not cover the breadth of educators’ experiences with different literacy methods.

“It didn’t consider the professional judgment of teachers, and it really didn’t address changes to [education] funding,” Gordon said.

The report also had a “reductive focus” on the results of standardized testing, Gordon said.

“A standardized test isn’t what we look at for how an individual student is doing,” Gordon said. But, she said, that’s what teachers do — aim to meet the individual needs of students.

That’s easier to do when classroom sizes are smaller, too. Like they are at Fraser Academy, Fluevog told The Tyee. Compared with the public system, where 20 per cent of his son’s 25-student class had learning disability designations and just one teacher, now his son is one of eight students per class at Fraser Academy.

“Everyone else there has learning disabilities like him,” Fluevog said. “And then every day he also gets one-on-one with a special learning education person.”

Why BC is a holdout

Dyslexia Canada wants to see the 157 recommendations from the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s report implemented across Canada. But British Columbia, Smith said, “has been a really tough nut to crack.”

The Cowichan Valley School District has embraced an “evidence-based” literacy framework, Smith said, which earned it the 2024 Dyslexia Canada Educational Excellence Award.

The framework includes ongoing literacy assessments for students up to Grade 9, and a five-part instruction method similar to structured literacy’s focus on phonetic learning: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

But unlike Ontario, and much to Dyslexia Canada’s dismay, the B.C. government has continued to consult with post-secondary institutions and the teachers' union, where the non-profit organization would like to see them hear from other experts like speech and language pathologists, pediatricians, psychologists and individual frontline teachers to determine how best to serve students with learning disabilities and what training teachers need. *

In an emailed statement to The Tyee, a spokesperson for the Education Ministry said they are consulting with the University of Northern British Columbia, the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria on literacy and learning disability research and resource development.

The goal, the province says, is to plan and implement a new K-12 literary supports initiative.

The BC Teachers’ Federation, which is also at the B.C. ministry’s advisory table, is appreciative of the $30 million investment by the province, particularly for early screening, Gordon said.

However, the union maintains the province is underfunding inclusive education for students with disabilities by $350 million, on top of an ongoing classroom and resource teacher shortage.

To effectively address literacy rates in B.C., in particular for students with dyslexia and other disabilities, the province will need to provide more funding for inclusive education, Gordon said.

Voluntary teacher training

Meanwhile, Dyslexia Canada has already begun offering voluntary teacher training in B.C.

Last spring it ran a structured literacy workshop series with over 500 B.C. teachers participating. It was later shared online by the Education Ministry’s Provincial Outreach Program for the Early Years.

In their emailed statement to The Tyee, the ministry spokesperson noted that that program, staffed by teacher consultants, is offering districts funding and support with implementing early screening tools and unspecified teacher training.

Optional structured literacy teacher training in B.C. is also provided by Fraser Academy, the Vancouver-based private school, which follows the structured literacy method. The academy told The Tyee it has trained more than 1,300 public and private school teachers from across B.C. and Canada and internationally since 2018.

Gordon said that the teachers’ union is in favour of teachers continuing their education about reading instruction through professional development and in-service days. But, she said, teachers must have the freedom to decide what’s best for their students.

“Having more offerings for teaching literacy is good, but having one approach to teaching doesn’t benefit the profession and it doesn’t benefit kids,” she said.

The union also welcomes the province consulting with inclusive education advocacy organizations like Dyslexia Canada and Dyslexia BC — as long as the province is hearing from all education stakeholders, Gordon said.

“When we’re talking about setting policy, I think it’s important to get information from everybody and have much more of a consultative approach that ensures the people who are doing the work are at the table,” she said.

* Story updated on Dec. 13 at 4:09 p.m. to include notes on who Dyslexia Canada would like to see the province receive feedback from, including learning disability experts and individual teachers.