About 40 percent of all school-aged children in special education are classified as having “specific learning disabilities,” which include dyslexia and other disorders, such as dyscalculia (difficulty in understanding numbers and math facts) and auditory-processing disorders, finds the latest study by the National Center for Learning Disabilities.
Disability-specific analysis is not yet available for the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the report says, but it notes that an analysis of the 2013 NAEP scores shows that students with special learning disabilities get worse scores than students with disabilities overall. For example, in 4th grade reading, 69 percent of students with any disability scored “below basic,” compared with 85 percent of students with learning disabilities. For students without disabilities, it was 27 percent.
