Every educator knows the student I’m talking about.
The kindergartner who struggles to recognize rhyming words. The first grader who can’t consistently connect letters to sounds. The second grader who works so hard to decode each word that there’s little energy left to understand what the story is about.
We see the signs. We recognize that something isn’t quite clicking. But too often, we wait.
We wait to see if the child will catch up. We wait for another assessment. We wait until the next grading period. Sometimes, we wait until the student is significantly behind before initiating a referral for additional support.
And while we’re waiting, the gap can continue to grow.
The question we need to ask isn’t whether a child is far enough behind to qualify for help. It’s whether we’re acting early enough to prevent that child from falling further behind in the first place.
A Small Gap Today Can Become a Much Bigger Challenge Tomorrow
Language and literacy development are cumulative. Children build new skills on the foundations they’ve already developed.
Before children can become successful readers, they need opportunities to develop oral language, vocabulary, phonological awareness, and an understanding of how spoken and written language work together.
When those foundational skills are not developing as expected, the challenges don’t simply disappear when a child moves to the next grade.
Consider a child who enters kindergarten with limited phonological awareness. Without appropriate instruction and support, that child may struggle to connect sounds with letters. As reading demands increase, those early difficulties can affect decoding, fluency, and ultimately reading comprehension.
What began as a relatively focused instructional need can become a much more complex challenge.
That’s why early identification and timely support are so important. We have an opportunity to address emerging difficulties while children are still building their foundational skills, rather than waiting until they need increasingly intensive intervention to access grade-level learning.
Why Are We Still Waiting?
Schools have made tremendous progress in using assessment data to identify students who need additional support. Universal screening, progress monitoring, and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) have helped educators make more informed instructional decisions.
Yet, in practice, students can still spend too much time moving through a process before receiving the help they need.
Sometimes the hesitation comes from a genuine desire to give children more time to develop. Young children do develop at different rates, and not every developmental difference signals a learning disability.
But there is an important distinction between respecting developmental differences and overlooking persistent signs that a child needs additional instruction.
Early referral for support does not mean prematurely labeling a child. It means taking what we know about the child’s learning and doing something meaningful with that information.
It may mean providing targeted small-group instruction, involving a reading specialist, consulting a speech-language pathologist, or gathering additional information about the child’s language development.
And when a disability is suspected, it may mean initiating a formal evaluation without unnecessary delay.
We need to make sure our systems are designed to respond to emerging needs, not simply document how far behind a student has fallen.
The Research Is Clear: Early Support Matters
The importance of early literacy instruction isn’t simply a matter of educational philosophy. It is supported by decades of reading research.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, through its What Works Clearinghouse, identifies strong evidence supporting instruction that helps children recognize the sounds in spoken language, connect those sounds to letters, and develop word-decoding skills.
The same guidance recognizes that children who persistently struggle with phonological awareness often benefit from targeted small-group or individual intervention.
Institute of Education Sciences+1
This matters because we don’t have to wait until a child experiences repeated reading failure to begin addressing foundational skill gaps.
We can identify specific needs. We can provide evidence-based instruction. We can monitor progress and adjust support.
And we can do all of this before a child reaches the point where more extensive intervention may be necessary.
Of course, early intervention doesn’t eliminate every reading difficulty. Some children will need specialized or intensive support regardless of how early we identify their needs.
But identifying those needs early gives us more opportunities to respond appropriately.
Our goal should never be to wait until a child fails. Our goal should be to recognize when learning isn’t progressing as expected and respond while we still have an opportunity to change the trajectory.
Three Things We Need to Do Differently
- Make early referrals a normal part of supporting learning
We need to change the way we think about referrals.
A referral for additional language or literacy support shouldn’t be viewed as a last resort. It should be a natural next step when classroom observations, screening results, and student work suggest that a child needs something more.
That might begin in preschool, when a teacher notices persistent difficulties with understanding or using language. It might happen in kindergarten, when a child struggles to identify and manipulate sounds in spoken words. Or it might happen in first grade, when a student is not making expected progress in decoding despite appropriate instruction.
These observations deserve attention.
Teachers shouldn’t have to wait until a student falls substantially below grade-level expectations before asking for help.
We also need clear processes that distinguish referrals for supplemental instruction from referrals for special education evaluation. Both have an important place, but they serve different purposes.
- Connect assessment data to immediate instructional action
Assessments are valuable only when we use the information they provide.
We collect an enormous amount of student data. But how often do we stop to ask what happens between identifying a concern and actually changing instruction?
If a screening assessment identifies a child who is at risk for reading difficulties, what happens next?
Does the teacher have access to targeted instructional resources? Is there a clear process for involving a reading specialist? Do families understand what skills their child is working on? Is someone monitoring whether the additional support is making a difference?
These are the questions that matter.
The Institute of Education Sciences emphasizes the importance of adjusting instruction based on student needs and providing more focused support when students continue to struggle.
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We need to move from simply identifying students who are at risk to creating a responsive system that connects identification, instruction, monitoring, and additional support.
- Bring families into the conversation early
Families are often the first to notice that something isn’t developing as expected.
A parent may notice that their child has difficulty following directions, expressing thoughts, remembering familiar words, or recognizing sounds. They may not know whether those difficulties are typical for their child’s age, but their observations are important.
We should be inviting families into these conversations long before a child is significantly behind.
And those conversations should be constructive.
Instead of simply telling a parent that their child is struggling, we can explain the specific skill we’re working on, what we’re doing at school, and how they can help at home.
For young children, this might include talking about pictures during shared reading, singing rhyming songs, telling stories, or playing simple sound games. For beginning readers, it may include practicing specific letter-sound relationships and reading appropriate texts with guidance from the teacher.
We also need to recognize that children learning more than one language bring valuable linguistic knowledge to the classroom. Their skills should be considered across the languages they use, and differences in English proficiency should not automatically be treated as evidence of a disability.
Families need to know that we’re working with them, not simply reporting a problem.
What About Children Who Need More Intensive Support?
There will always be students who need intensive intervention, specialized services, or individualized instruction. Early identification doesn’t change that reality.
But it can help us distinguish between children who need a relatively focused instructional adjustment and children who require more comprehensive support.
One important safeguard is worth emphasizing: Schools should not require students to complete multiple rounds of intervention before considering a special education evaluation when a disability is suspected.
The U.S. Department of Education has explicitly clarified that MTSS cannot be used to delay or deny an evaluation under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
That distinction matters.
Early instructional support and timely special education evaluation are not competing approaches. Both are part of a responsible system for meeting children’s needs.
We should be asking whether each child is receiving the right support at the right time, not whether they’ve spent enough time struggling to qualify for it.
Building a Culture of Upstream Readiness Instead of Downstream Remediation
At Footsteps2Brilliance, we believe the strongest literacy systems begin well before third grade, and certainly before children are identified as significantly behind.
Our Connected Readiness System reflects that belief, connecting early language development, foundational literacy instruction, educators, families, and community partners across the learning continuum.
We know that children need rich language experiences from birth. We know that teachers need instructional resources that help them respond to different learning needs. And we know that families need meaningful opportunities to support language and literacy development at home.
But perhaps most importantly, we believe these supports need to be connected.
A preschool teacher should be able to recognize emerging language concerns and know where to turn. A kindergarten teacher should have resources to address early literacy gaps. A first-grade teacher should be able to respond when a student isn’t progressing as expected.
And families should be part of that process from the beginning.
Footsteps2Brilliance helps support this work by providing developmentally appropriate language and literacy resources from birth through the elementary grades, along with tools that connect classroom learning and family engagement.
Technology alone cannot identify every learning difficulty or replace the expertise of educators and specialists. But when instructional resources, educators, and families work together, we can create more opportunities to respond to children’s needs before those challenges become more difficult to address.
That’s the difference between building a system around upstream readiness and relying primarily on downstream remediation.
The Cost of Waiting Is Too High
I believe one of the most important questions district leaders can ask is this:
How long does a child have to struggle in our system before we do something different?
If the answer is months, semesters, or even years, we need to examine our processes.
Not because teachers aren’t working hard enough. They are.
Not because every child who struggles needs a formal evaluation. They don’t.
But because we have enough knowledge about early language and literacy development to recognize that waiting for difficulties to become severe is not an effective instructional strategy.
We need to give educators permission to raise concerns early. We need systems that make it easy to connect students with additional support. And we need to ensure families are informed, involved, and equipped to help.
Most importantly, we need to stop treating significant reading failure as the point when intervention should begin.
A child shouldn’t have to fall further behind to get the help they need today.
The earlier we recognize a need, the sooner we can respond.
And sometimes, that timely response can make all the difference in a child’s experience as a learner.
Penny Reinart is Chief Impact Officer at Footsteps2Brilliance, specializing in early childhood development, literacy, and community-based approaches to expanding educational opportunity. She works with education leaders to build connected systems that support children from their earliest language experiences through literacy proficiency.
Research and references
These sources substantiate the article’s central claims and can be linked in the published WordPress version.
- Institute of Education Sciences, What Works Clearinghouse. Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade (2016; revised 2019). Read the practice guide
- Institute of Education Sciences. Phonological Awareness: The Sounds of Reading. Explains instructional responses for children with persistent phonological-awareness difficulties. Read the research summary
- U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs. Child Find Under Part B of IDEA (2021). Clarifies that MTSS cannot delay or deny evaluation when a disability is suspected. Read federal guidance