Overview:
Growth for students like Yaneth, a multilingual learner with a long-term reading disability, can be real and meaningful—even when it doesn’t align with traditional benchmarks—manifesting in access, confidence, language development, and participation rather than standardized measures.
Yaneth is a multilingual learner who has been on an IEP since preschool. She is in sixth grade now, and she still cannot read.
That sentence makes people uncomfortable. It invites questions—some curious, some accusatory. What intervention failed? What program didn’t work? How does this happen after so many years of schooling? What it often invites, too, is blame.
Yaneth has had instruction. She has received explicit, systematic reading instruction delivered by trained professionals over many years. She has had progress monitoring, data meetings, revised goals, and carefully selected supports. What she has not had is a system designed to honor growth that unfolds outside rigid timelines, especially when disability and second-language acquisition intersect.
Yaneth is what many educators would recognize as a long-term resource student. She has received special education services for most of her life. She is also navigating school in a language that is not her first.
Disability does not pause second-language acquisition, and second-language acquisition does not cancel disability. Together, they create a learning profile that is complex, nonlinear, and frequently misunderstood.
For students like Yaneth, the system assumes that with enough time, the gap will close. That reading will eventually “click.” That progress will accelerate if the right program or intervention is found. When that does not happen, the unspoken implication is that someone has failed.
But not all growth moves toward grade-level benchmarks. Some growth moves sideways. Some growth moves inward. Some growth simply makes staying possible.
Yaneth cannot read. But she has grown.
She has grown in access. She understands far more than she can decode. With oral supports, visuals, and opportunities to explain her thinking verbally, she engages with grade-level content. She participates in discussions. She demonstrates comprehension in ways that rarely register on standardized assessments.
She has grown in confidence. When she first set foot in my reading class, she would refuse to do her work. Even with 1:1 support she would say “I can’t read,” and go back to her preferred activity. Once she was taught to use the tools to help her participate, she suddenly became the most vocal class participant. Now her little voice is one of the loudest in the room.
She has grown in language, even if that growth does not resemble traditional literacy. Her receptive language has expanded steadily. Her expressive language emerges slowly and unevenly. She moves between languages fluidly, using both to make meaning. This kind of linguistic competence is often invisible in classrooms that prioritize written output above all else.
Yaneth cannot read, but she can explain, make connections, advocate, and endure.
There’s a quiet truth about long-term resource students
Some students will not exit special education services. Some students will make progress that looks more like maintenance than acceleration. For some, preventing regression is the work.
This is an uncomfortable truth in a system built on the promise of catching up.
For long-term resource students, especially those who are also multilingual success is often defined by what they cannot yet do. Less often acknowledged is how much effort it takes to keep showing up to a system that continuously measures you against a standard you may never meet.
Teachers feel this tension deeply. We carry the quiet grief of watching students work extraordinarily hard and still fall short of benchmarks that were never designed with them in mind. We hold families’ hopes alongside our own realism. We celebrate growth that may never be recognized beyond the walls of our classrooms.
So, what do we do when our definition of success fails the child we are teaching?
When reading by sixth grade becomes the primary marker of growth, students like Yaneth are framed as failures, regardless of how much they have gained.
This narrow definition of success does more than misrepresent students. It distorts the work of educators and erases the complexity of learning for students with disabilities, multilingual learners, or both.
Data matters. Accountability matters. But when numbers are treated as the only truth, we lose sight of what growth looks like for many children. Difference becomes deficiency. Outcome becomes a proxy for effort. And students whose progress does not follow a predictable arc disappear into the margins of our systems.
Growth is not always about closing gaps. Sometimes it is about increasing access—to learning, to community, to self-understanding. Sometimes it is about building a life inside the gap that already exists.
Yaneth is still not reading. That fact matters. It deserves continued attention, support, and instruction.
But it should not be the only thing that defines her story.
A more honest question is not; did she catch up? It is, does she have more access than she did before? More language. More confidence. More ways to participate in a world that moves faster than she does.
For students like Yaneth, growth is real, even when it refuses to look the way we expect. The challenge is whether we are willing to see it.
