Committee Discusses Dyslexia Research Legislation
(Washington, DC) – Today the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a hearing to review H.R. 3033, the Research Excellence and Advancements for Dyslexia (READ) Act. H.R. 3033 would require a line item in the annual Congressional budget request to Congress for the Research in Disabilities Education program at NSF. Additionally, the bill would require NSF to devote at least $5 million a year to dyslexia research, including in the areas of early identification; professional development for teachers and administrators; and curricula development and educational tools for students with dyslexia.
Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) said of the bill, “I fully support funding more research in language-based learning disabilities, including dyslexia. But I do have to point out that this bill does not provide NSF with additional money to fund that research. Rather, it requires NSF to use existing funding. Although I support more funding for dyslexia research, in the current environment of flat research budgets, I would have liked to see additional money provided for this priority in the bill. But with that said, I do support the goals and intentions of this legislation.”
In response to a question from Ranking Member Johnson as to how to improve the bill, Dr. Tallal said, “We have the knowledge that we need to improve the outcomes of millions of children. We’re just not using it effectively - we don’t have an appropriate roadmap. So my suggestion is that we capitalize on what we already know and that we really focus on the translational path itself because it is so slow and tedious. We’ve been at this for twenty years and we had very effective methods. But those methods have only been given to 12,000 children, and that’s just a drop in the bucket. We know we can do better but, the translational method itself needs a lot of work and NSF can help with that.”
In that regard, Dr. Tallal said in her written testimony, “The next logical step for Federal investment should focus on the development of a more ecologically feasible ‘translational to education’ roadmap to bridge the gap between research scientists, school administrators and classroom teachers to apply data driven research into real world application including evaluation and assessment of impact.”
Congressman Mark Takano (D-CA), provided a different perspective to the hearing. He said, “As a former high school teacher of 23 years, it wasn’t until I did a literacy training that I was able to identify the students in my class with dyslexia.” He asked Dr. Tallal why so many English language learners and children of poverty struggle with learning to read.
She said, “Children from poverty also have linguistic impoverishment…the difference between children of high socioeconomic class families and low socioeconomic class families is a 30 million word gap…for English language learners, they have to be given the sounds (of the English Language) in a systematic way.”
Testifying before the Committee were Ms. Barbara Wilson, Co-Founder and President of Wilson Language Training; Dr. Paula Tallal, Senior Research Scientist at Center for Human Development at the University of California, San Diego, Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Founder and Director of the Scientific Learning Corporation; and Dr. Rachel Rouillard, Assistant Director of 504 Services and Response to Intervention for the Austin Independent School District.
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