For parents who have recently received a dyslexia diagnosis for their child One in Five may offer the comfort and compassion of shared frustration with public and private K-12 education. However, the next steps in progressing the field of service and support in the education system are lacking. Still, this is a decent place to start for anyone new to dyslexia and there are worthwhile references that provide context and more specificity. For those readers looking for more definitive action, One in Five may be a bit simplistic.

ONE IN FIVE by Micki Boas, an educational rights activist and mother of students with dyslexia, is an in-depth, personal look at “How We're Fighting for Our Dyslexic Kids in a System That's Failing Them.” The publisher says, ONE IN FIVE “shares the secrets the ‘professionals’ won’t tell you but that make all the difference” which is such a very apt description of the experience of navigating public schools with a child who has dyslexia. Boas herself was motivated by the legal battles involving her son's education and feels strongly that school take a "don't ask, don't tell" position because they frequently lack funding to provide needed resources. I was honestly shocked to learn that The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity (where Sally Shaywitz who wrote Overcoming Dyslexia is based) found that dyslexia affects "up to 20 percent of our population and up to 90 percent of all those with learning disabilities." Boas argues that parents either are forced to pay out of pocket for private testing or mistakenly trust the schools' view that students will "grow out of it." I particularly liked Boas' comment that "true educational equality doesn't exist for those who learn differently" as it seems especially true in these COVID times. Sadly, "children who experience reading difficulties by third grade are four times more likely to leave school" and The Literacy Project "reports that three out of five people in US prisons can't read, and 85 percent of juvenile offenders have trouble reading." These statistics, accompanied by data on funding shortfalls, delayed intervention, and outdated or limited training, are a call to action. Boas has written a power book full of practical advice (e.g., figure out who is writing your child's IEP goals) for parents like her, but she also invites us all to "join the dyslexia fight club," helping to speak for parents and students who may "lack emotional support, knowledge, or resources" to successfully meet this challenge. We all need to do more to make education equitable.

This book made me so angry! Not the author, she did a fantastic job explain the topic. I'm so infuriated with the education system. It is completely failing our kids.
Micki, thank you for sharing this. I'm telling all my friends to read this!!

It's estimated that one in five children has dyslexia. My daughter is one of them. As an Orton-Gillingham trained reading interventionist and mom of a dyslexic child, I was so eager to read this book and learn some new informaiton that would benefit my child, my students, and the parents of my students. Instead, I got very little out of this book. The book was full of stories about the author's own cuildren and anecdotes from other parents of children with dyslexia, but contained very little facts or new information. It was like a really long list of complaints about how both public and private schools had failed the author's children. As a teacher, I don't deny that teacher training programs leave educators very ill-prepared to identify students with language disabilities and even less prepared to help them, but the reader was practically beaten over the head with the constant stories of how terrible all schools and teachers are. Some of her ideas were downright distrubingly over-the-top, like when she suggested that her son's school use his private tutor in place of the teacher assigned by his school. I wanted so much more from this book.

I was excited to read this book as a mother of two dyslexic kids. I was disappointed because I felt like this book was mostly about the legal aspects of getting intervention for your child. I did not fee like the majority of the book could apply to every parent of a dyslexic student. The author did a great job sharing from her personal experiences of what worked and did not work for her 2 children.