Why Good Intentions Aren't Enough to Fix Reading Crisis

What happens when lawmakers rush to solve a crisis but forget to build the bridge between good intentions and real change?

Over the past decade, nearly every US state has passed dyslexia legislation—a sweeping response to families' pleas for help with children who struggle to read. The promise was simple: identify reading difficulties early, train teachers properly, and provide targeted support. The reality, as new research reveals, tells a much more complicated story.

The Promise vs. The Reality

Between 5% and 15% of children show symptoms of dyslexia, yet schools have historically been slow to identify and respond to these learning differences. Parent advocacy groups, armed with growing scientific evidence about early intervention, successfully lobbied for state-level action throughout the 2010s.

By 2025, all states except Hawaii had enacted some form of dyslexia legislation. The laws shared common goals: early screening for reading difficulties, evidence-based instruction, and expanded support for struggling readers. Families, educators, and advocacy groups widely praised these efforts.

But when researchers examined nearly two decades of national student data, they found something unexpected. More than half of states with new dyslexia laws showed no significant change in identifying reading-related learning disabilities. Even more troubling, reading achievement among students with identified learning disabilities often declined rather than improved after these laws passed.

States like Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia saw reading scores drop among their most vulnerable students. Only four states—Arizona, Mississippi, Nevada, and Oklahoma—showed significant gains, with improvements ranging from 3 to 10 points on state assessments.

The Implementation Gap

The disconnect between legislative intent and classroom reality reveals a fundamental challenge in education policy: passing a law doesn't automatically change what happens when teachers close their classroom doors.

Many states required early screening for dyslexia but failed to ensure schools had trained staff to conduct meaningful screenings. Others mandated evidence-based instruction without providing the professional development teachers needed to deliver it effectively.

Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and North Carolina exemplify this pattern—strong mandates paired with weak implementation support. Even when schools successfully identified students with reading difficulties, screening alone proved insufficient without high-quality follow-up instruction.

Funding emerged as another critical barrier. Most dyslexia laws came without dedicated resources for teacher training or instructional materials, forcing districts to absorb costs from existing budgets. Well-funded districts moved faster than their cash-strapped counterparts, creating uneven implementation across states.

What Success Looks Like

The states that did see improvements shared three key characteristics that distinguished them from their struggling peers.

First, they treated screening as the beginning, not the end, of the process. When students were flagged as at-risk, schools were expected to provide immediate, additional reading instruction rather than simply documenting the identification.

Second, these states invested in practical teacher training focused on foundational reading skills like phonics and word decoding—areas particularly crucial for students with dyslexia. This wasn't one-time professional development but sustained coaching and support.

Third, successful states aligned their dyslexia policies with broader literacy reforms rather than treating them as standalone mandates. Mississippi, often cited as the gold standard, paired its dyslexia law with a comprehensive overhaul of reading instruction that included structured curricula, teacher training, and literacy coaches in schools. The result was a notable boost in reading achievement scores from 2013 to 2019.

Louisiana and Alabama adopted similar comprehensive approaches and also saw reading gains for students with learning disabilities after enacting their dyslexia laws.

The Broader Questions

This pattern extends far beyond dyslexia legislation. It reflects a recurring challenge in American education policy: the gap between what lawmakers mandate and what schools can actually implement.

Consider the perspectives of different stakeholders. For parents of children with dyslexia, these laws represented hope after years of watching their children struggle. For teachers, they often meant new responsibilities without adequate preparation or resources. For administrators, they created compliance pressures without clear pathways to success.

The cultural lens matters too. American education policy tends to favor mandates and accountability over sustained investment in capacity building—a approach that contrasts sharply with countries like Finland, where teacher preparation and ongoing professional development receive substantial, long-term investment.