About 40 percent of the fourth- graders in Hawaii's public schools cannot read at the "basic" reading level. The primary causes of poor reading in this country are poverty and dyslexia and what education expert G. Reid Lyon calls "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

Dyslexia, the most common learning disability, is caused by neuro-anatomical and neuro-chemical differences in the brain. People with dyslexia are intelligent, yet they may have difficulty reading, writing, organizing and expressing their thoughts clearly. Dyslexia has a hereditary component and is found in every segment of society. About 10-15 percent of the population has dyslexia, including approximately 190,000 people in Hawaii.

There is much confusion about dyslexia, even among educators and physicians, and certainly among parents. Some of this stems from the multiple terms used to describe a condition which presents as a family of traits rather than a single, straight-forward indicator. Signs of dyslexia include delayed language development, problems pronouncing words, and trouble learning the alphabet and sound/symbol relationships, among others.

Psychologists may diagnose this set of characteristics as "dyslexia," while the DOE uses the broader catch-all term "specific learning disability." Federal education policy utilizes both terms in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Some speech pathologists call it an "auditory processing disorder" or "visual perception problem" (although it has nothing to do with hearing or vision). This hodge-podge of labels does little to direct parents and educators to reliable community resources.

Many children with dyslexia are never diagnosed. My two college-graduate children were diagnosed with dyslexia many years ago and were lucky to have access to the multi-sensory structured language instruction that research shows is best for teaching those with dyslexia. This approach, not generally a part of a teacher's preparation, is effective with all readers. History is replete with successful people with dyslexia (Winston Churchill, Nelson Rockefeller, Albert Einstein) and many contemporary figures are open about theirs (Jay Leno, Anderson Cooper, Charles Schwab). Some with dyslexia are resilient, making it through their school years with self-esteem intact, even without a formal diagnosis or appropriate instruction.

Many are not so lucky. The National Council on Disability estimates that approximately 30 percent of children in the juvenile justice system and 60 percent of youth in substance abuse programs have a learning disability.

The life expectancy of poor readers is shorter than that of good readers. The connection between illiteracy and incarceration is so strong that several states use their fourth-grade reading statistics as a tool in planning their future prison needs. Locally, Native Hawaiians (who populate Hawaii's prisons at five times their population percentage) are identified for special education at nearly twice the rate of other children. According to the 2007-2008 NCLB School Report, only 25 percent of juvenile offenders at Olomana were found to be proficient in reading as opposed to 62 percent of their peers state-wide; 40-50 percent at Olomana are typically in special education, and, while there are many roads into special education, dyslexia is one of the most common.

We can either pay less now — by providing more training for teachers in the early identification of reading failure, and by intervening aggressively to address the problem — or we can pay more later, in prison costs, social service programs and broken lives.

Change is needed in all quarters. According to researcher Louisa Moats, "teaching reading IS rocket science," because reading is not an automatically acquired skill; it must be taught by professionals with a deep understanding of the components of language. Educators and schools must identify and act on the early indicators of language difficulties as a matter of conscience and need, not a matter of funding. Parents must advocate for their children, educating themselves if they have a child with weak early language skills or who is a persistently poor reader.