For decades, Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) have been built on a predictable shape. A wide base of students succeeds with strong core instruction (Tier I), a smaller group needs targeted support (Tier II), and a small number requires intensive intervention (Tier III). The way most schools are staffed, scheduled, and budgeted still assumes that pyramid holds — that roughly 80% of students arrive ready to learn from grade-level text.

That assumption no longer describes many of today's classrooms. With nearly 70% of students in grades 4–12 reading below proficiency on national assessments, the middle of the distribution has grown and the “ready” base has narrowed. In practice, the pyramid has become a diamond: the largest group of students is no longer the one that thrives on core instruction alone, but the one that needs help accessing the very texts the curriculum is built around.

This is a Tier I problem, and no intervention schedule can absorb it. When most of a class struggles with disciplinary text, the answer cannot be a pull-out group or a specialist's caseload — it has to live inside daily content instruction. Increasingly, effective Tier I teaching includes helping students read, interpret, and learn from the complex texts of science, social studies, mathematics, and other content areas.

Which puts the burden somewhere your program may not currently be preparing anyone to carry — on the science teacher, the world history teacher, the algebra teacher. Not as dyslexia therapists, but as the adults responsible for making a discipline’s text accessible.