A starting place for the most-asked questions from parents navigating reading struggles, evaluations, and special education.
Standardized Testing & Screeners
Plain-English explainers for the assessments and screeners that show up in school evaluations and IEP reports.
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How to Read a Psychoeducational Evaluation Report
A parent-friendly walkthrough of how to actually read your child’s psychoeducational evaluation: what to read first, how to compare cognitive…
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5 Questions to Ask Your School About Its Reading Screener
Most parents never see the test their kid took. They see the result, sometimes a label like “approaching grade level”…
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i-Ready Scored 50% in Michigan’s K-3 Screener Review. Here’s the Line-by-Line.
This is the deep dive. If you want the higher-level take on what California and Michigan said about i-Ready as…
Special Education, IEPs & Advocacy
How to advocate inside the system: evaluations, eligibility, IEPs, 504 plans, and parent rights.
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Practice the IEP Meeting Before You Walk In (Free AI Prompt for Parents)
Here is the thing nobody tells you about IEP meetings. You will walk in prepared. You will have your folder.…
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504 vs IEP: Which Does My Child Need?
504 plans and IEPs sound similar but are very different legal tools. Here’s how to tell which one your child…
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How to Read Your Child’s Special Education Evaluation (Without Getting Talked Past)
Every single standard score on a special education evaluation has measurement error baked into it. If you get a report…
Reading Science
What the research actually says about how kids learn to read, what gets in the way, and what works.
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What Is Structured Literacy? A Parent-Friendly Guide
Structured literacy is a teaching approach with five specific characteristics, not a single program. Here’s what it actually means, what…
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Why Timed Reading Tests Aren’t the Enemy, and What They Actually Tell Us About Your Child
Reading Rockets describes fluency as the ability to read text accurately and quickly with appropriate expression. The key word is…
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Why Your Struggling Reader Isn’t “Catching Up” (and What the Data Actually Says)
You’re sitting in the classroom or at the kitchen table, watching your second grader stumble through a sentence that’s supposed…