Press release on the same study:

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/pressreleases/proct02/dyslexics.html

(I looked this up to get a better idea which countries were considered, and which were not.)

Excerpt from a good book on dyslexia by some of the leading researchers in the field:

http://books.google.com/books?id=OTMYM5ijMtMC&pg=PA383&#...</a><p>Here's another good link on dyslexia:<p><a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/l15r432m85775666/" rel="nofollow">http://www.springerlink.com/content/l15r432m85775666/</a><p>Here's a link to a forthcoming book with practical advice to parents about dyslexia:<p><a href="http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047042981X.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047042981...</a><p>My overall comments on the submitted article and the claim in its title are:<p>a) Yes, the English penchant for preserving etymological spellings from multiple languages (especially Norman French) makes learning reading of English more daunting than learning to read a language with a reformed, consistent spelling such as Spanish. But linguists have applied thoughtful effort to improving reading instruction in English, and it is possible with the best materials, for example Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach by Leonard Bloomfield and Clarence Barnhart,<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloomfield/dp/0814311156/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloom...</a><p>to make great progress in reading English independently in less than one year of instruction. (It's regrettable that more schools don't use superior books like Let's Read for initial reading instruction.) Part of the difficulty that pupils have in school in English-speaking countries comes from suboptimal reading instruction rather than from inherent features of the current English writing system.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-Instruction-Science-Bradford/dp/0262134381/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-Instruction-Science-Brad...</a><p>b) The study didn't test "European languages" exhaustively. It may be that there are some languages in Europe that present similar difficulties. Certainly there are languages in other regions of the world (including languages in the Indo-European language family) that present tougher challenges to primary-age learners learning to read, although those learners often overcome those challenges.<p>c) For overall adult performance in reading, exposure matters, and for second-language learners of English, the network effects of having huge numbers of users of English (both first-language users and second-language users) all over the world ensures that most second-language learners still reach quite an adequate level of reading proficiency in English, which indeed in many cases exploits the similarity of English spelling to spellings from foreign languages. English gains its position as the world interlanguage honestly and will not be challenged as the world interlanguage by any other language in the lifetime of anyone reading this message.

The Gifted and Talented magnet school in St. Paul now has the name Capitol Hill. I don't know if that is a successor school to the one you remember.

In general, I'm not sure how schools have been teaching reading in specific places in the relevant generations, but I would agree with the critics who say that reading could have been better taught than it usually was in school over the last few generations.

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-about/dp/00609134...

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Read-Thinking-Learning-about...

http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Dyslexia-Complete-Science-B...

http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-Instruction-Science-Brad...

Best wishes in your continued efforts to add to your technical vocabulary. I learn new words fairly regularly here on HN.