By Donald D. Deshler, Ph.D. Chair, NCLD Professional Advisory Board
For more than 35 years, the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) has provided essential information and needed resources and services to the learning disabilities community. And in response to a rapidly changing educational landscape, it has recently broadened its mission to address the needs of the more than one in five children, adolescents and adults who are impacted by learning and attention issues every day, in school, at home, in the community and in the workplace. This revised and expanded 2014 edition of The State of Learning Disabilities reflects NCLD’s commitment to ensuring that everyone who is concerned about the well-being of individuals—with or without identified learning disabilities—has access to the most relevant and updated information.
This new report is much more than a collection of facts. It provides an overview of what learning disabilities are, of the impact they have on the lives of children during the school-age years and of the ways that they shape the rocky transition that teens and young adults all too frequently have when moving from school to postsecondary educational settings and the workplace. This report has been reformatted to tell a story about the realities of LD in society today: where we’ve been, where we are now and where we seem to be heading. It also points to areas of interest and concern where data specific to individuals with learning disabilities are either outdated, limited or missing. These areas encompass such topics as Response to Intervention, charter schools, vouchers, online and blended learning and juvenile justice. Also worthy of mention in this new report is a section devoted to public perceptions of learning and attention issues. Recent work has yielded results from national surveys and interviews that offer insights into how learning challenges are understood and misunderstood. These data tell a critical story about the realities of having LD in today’s world.
We hope that you will read this report, share it with others and reflect upon the story told by the data presented. Please use it to inform the public and create opportunities for all concerned citizens to work together to ensure that individuals with LD achieve their goals at school, at home and in life. To read the report, please visit:
http://www.ncld.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-State-of-LD.pdf
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