The boy in the hallway can’t read your worksheet. Now what?
He’s been in the hallway again. The principal has had the call with mom three times this month. The counselor has met with him weekly. His teacher is exhausted. And nobody has asked the question that explains everything: can he actually read the material he’s being asked to do? If we don’t ask that question, we will keep mistaking a literacy crisis for a behavior crisis and we will keep losing students who were never disruptive to begin with.
The Connection Schools Miss
Imagine sitting in a 90-minute class where every text on the screen is in a language you can’t read. Now imagine doing that five times a day, every day, for years. You would shut down. You would act out. You would refuse the work. You would avoid school entirely. That is the daily experience of many students we label as ‘behavior problems’ and the labels follow them through high school.
The Data Connection Is Overwhelming
- Students who read below grade level are dramatically over-represented in office referrals and suspensions.
- Reading difficulty correlates strongly with school avoidance, chronic absenteeism, and dropout risk.
- Improving reading instruction reduces office referrals, often dramatically, without any changes to the behavior system.
This is not a coincidence. This is cause and effect. Reading struggle creates shame. Shame creates avoidance. Avoidance creates conflict. And the conflict gets the label, while the reading problem stays invisible.
What Leaders Should Do Differently
1. Screen every chronic-referral student for reading skills.
Before another behavior plan, run a decoding and fluency screener. If the student is reading two or more years below grade level, you have a literacy intervention to start not just a behavior contract.
2. Build literacy capacity into your MTSS-Behavior team.
Most behavior teams don’t include reading data. They should. The two systems are not separate.
3. Give students text they can actually read.
Differentiation isn’t a kindness. It’s a behavior intervention. A student given accessible text engages. A student given inaccessible text resists.
4. Train staff to see literacy through the behavior lens (and vice versa).
Every teacher should be trained to ask: ‘Is this student avoiding because they can’t access the material?’ That single question would change thousands of disciplinary outcomes a year in any given district.
| Behavior is communication. When students who can’t read are loud, fidgety, defiant, or absent, they are telling you something important. The question is whether the adults in the building are listening. |
We don’t have a behavior crisis in K–12 schools. We have a literacy crisis that has been miscategorized for decades. Treat the literacy and the behavior will often resolve on its own because the student finally has a way to participate.
| Concerned that your school’s behavior data is masking a literacy problem? CSAS runs integrated Literacy + Behavior MTSS audits that surface the connection and the fix. Book a complimentary conversation. |