Why Can't My School Diagnose Learning Disabilities?

So often we hear from frustrated parents that they are receiving a run-around from their school. As a parent, when our child is struggling we want answers.

However, it can be complicated and sometimes it feels like you’re being told different things by different people!

The challenge is that schools cannot diagnose learning disabilities.

Schools can identify red flags and schools can ultimately work through a testing process to determine whether students qualify for additional help but they cannot diagnose learning disabilities.

Being identified with a learning disability is not the same as receiving help from the school.

It is possible for students to be clinically diagnosed with a learning disability and still not qualify for support through the school district. This is because schools are providing evaluations to determine whether or not the student’s performance is low enough (or if they are far enough behind) to get support provided through the school.

This does not mean that a child doesn’t have a learning disability and this does not mean that a child wouldn’t benefit from support or intervention. It simply means that the student doesn’t meet the criteria set in place by the school district to receive additional help.

As a parent, after doing some research, it seems reasonable to go to the school with concerns about a specific learning disability and ask the school to test for the learning disability.

So as a parent, you might ask the school to test your child for dyslexia.

However, schools cannot test for dyslexia. As a parent, it becomes frustrating because that is often the end of the conversation and you feel lost and confused as to what to do next.

The problem here is that we are talking about two different things.

Diagnosis of a learning disability, such as dyslexia, needs to come from a clinical psychologist, a speech-language pathologist, an educational diagnostician, or another similarly trained professional.

If you want the school to provide testing to see whether or not they can provide support or intervention for your struggling child, you need to ask for a different type of assessment.

Schools call this testing Special Education Eligibility testing.

If you want to know if the school can help your child and are less interested in a formal diagnostic assessment, you want to request a “Special Education Eligibility test” and you want to make this request in writing with a specific date included in your request letter because they have 60 calendar days following your formal consent for testing and request to complete the evaluation. They will ask you what your concerns are to determine what and how much testing to complete.

Truly, the more testing the better unless your child has significant testing anxiety as a comprehensive assessment completed through the school can make sure no underlying factors are missed.

A special education eligibility evaluation should include measures of:

• Cognitive Ability (General Intelligence/IQ) - Usually performed by the School Psychologist

• Academic Performance (Reading, Writing, Math) - Usually performed by the Special Education Teacher

• Language Ability - Usually performed by the Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP)

• Social/Emotional Functioning - Usually performed by the School Psychologist

• Motor Functioning - Usually performed by an Occupational Therapist (OT)

Some of these tests might be the same tests as those used to diagnose a specific learning disability so if you decide to seek a private evaluation and also a special education eligibility evaluation you want to make sure to let both parties know so that no assessments are repeated which can invalidate the results on the assessment.

So long story short, schools can’t diagnose specific learning disabilities because they don’t have training to analyze the learning scores profile to determine whether or not they qualify as a learning disability. They have training to identify whether the pattern of scores is sufficient to qualify for a school-identified learning disorder that allows a child to get the help and support he or she needs!