It can be confusing at first to understand why it takes several years for a student to meet the eligibility criteria for a learning
disability. Most people ask, "If a student has a learning disability, wouldn't he or she have one in the first grade as well
as in the third grade?" The answer to that question is "Yes!" Unfortunately, current methods just don't do a good job of
identifying learning disabilities during the early elementary-school years. As students progress through the elementary grade levels,
their academic skills should progress at a parallel rate. However, there is a small group of students, those with learning
disabilities, who demonstrate average intellectual ability but who lag behind in reading achievement. These students' reading skills
are, in effect, progressing at a snail's pace while their classmates' skills are developing much more rapidly. Since the
average kindergarten or first-grade student's reading skills are fairly limited, many assessments are not sensitive to the small gap
in skills exhibited by struggling young readers. Since the discrepancy needed to meet the qualifying criteria for a learning
disability is quite large, it often takes several years for the gap between the performance of the lagging students and that of their
peers to become large enough to meet eligibility for special education services. For this reason, students are often not
identified as having a learning disability until the third grade or later. It's not that their skills are getting worse or that they
somehow develop a learning problem somewhere between kindergarten and third or fourth grade--they've been struggling all along. They
were just not identified sooner because the IQ-achievement discrepancy was not yet large enough to qualify them for special
education services.