My daughter has dyslexia. Her reading difficulties were finally diagnosed this year, three months into second grade. But as many parents with children who have dyslexia find out, this is a constellation of processing and/or auditory weaknesses, and simply giving the disability a name does not make easy to treat.

I write this now, very much in the middle of the process of trying to figure out how best to meet my child's needs within her public school setting. I understand our journey has just begun.

Nonetheless, there are certain things I wish I had known — a few lessons learned — that I hope might be helpful to other parents and educators struggling to figure out how to work within the often confounding parameters of the world of special education.

Lesson 1: Trust your instincts

You know if something doesn't seem right with your child's learning or development. I had voiced concerns during first grade as our daughter struggled to remember the sounds of letters and letter combinations despite having been able to easily identify letters and simple sounds at the age of four.

By the end of her first grade year, while she was sounding out three- and four-letter words, this only applied to those that were phonetically predictable. I was really worried by this point. More so, because no one else seemed to think her snail's pace progress was a red flag.

"Reading happens at different paces for different students," my daughter's young teacher told me, trying to be reassuring. And while I knew this to be true, I was also seeing every possible warning sign that my daughter needed interventions, (instead of me needing hollow reassurances about the variability of child development).

Lesson 2: Do your research

I wish I had found out in advance the criteria necessary to qualify my daughter for the services she needed. Instead, I sought out the help of a top-notch speech pathologist, and we worked on code intensively over the summer after first grade.

But my daughter's fidelity and fluency remained unpredictable. So, at the beginning of this school year, I asked that my daughter be professionally assessed, hoping she would qualify for in-school supports in addition to the private work. The school agreed and did speech and language testing as well as a Woodcock Johnson test, which looks at a child's cognitive abilities.

When the results came back, even though she demonstrated areas of critical weakness in short-term memory, processing speed and a host of other domains, our daughter nonetheless did not qualify for special education because she wasn't two full years behind in her testing in reading and writing.

This was my first introduction to the illogic of special education services in my city. Despite my daughter's demonstrated weaknesses both in her classroom and in her diagnostic testing she was not behind enough.

Lesson 3: Don’t give up.

If your child really needs help, there are often alternative pathways to getting services. After I was told my daughter didn't qualify for an IEP, I realized it was going to be my responsibility to figure out how to get the school the evidence they needed to reopen her case.

I hired the speech and language pathologist we had continued working with to do deeper diagnostic work. Testing revealed there was clear — dare I say alarming — evidence to suggest my daughter had specific and quite severe language-related learning disabilities.

The speech pathologist wrote up a report that supported giving my daughter a data-based diagnosis. I took the report back to the school, and voila, she was given an IEP.

Lesson 4: Become an expert

This is the toughest lesson. You are going to need to become a special education expert. Even if you rail against this, even as you bemoan the fact that your child deserves an appropriate education, it is critical to realize you are going to have to continually and consistently advocate for your child

That means knowing the law, the IEP process, the services available, the options that are most appropriate for your child, and, critically, the level and type of interventions and modifications that your child needs.

This is a civil rights issue. The big picture is troubling. My experience — in a really good public school — illustrates the real barriers to accessing an appropriate education for students with learning disabilities. Many parents or guardians would not have had the means or the educational background (I've been in education-related fields my entire career) to realize that further private testing would be useful in finding an alternative to documenting a need for services.

My ability to pay for private services for my daughter also helped her continue to learn during the period when she was not getting necessary supports at school. In addition, I was sitting in on many of her private sessions and was able, after doing a fair amount of research, to replicate some of what she was doing in therapy at home.

Without the resources I was able to bring to bear, the system would have trapped my daughter in a much deeper downward spiral. And the data on educational outcomes for children who are not reading fluently by the end of third grade paints a stark and pessimistic picture.

Our system keeps kids in need from accessing the services and settings that they need. Every special educator with whom I have spoken about this problem candidly acknowledges that school systems are unnecessarily challenging to navigate, arbitrary and unequal. Ultimately, the laws as well as school practices are often written and interpreted in ways that preclude or advise against early detection and aggressive treatment.

Lesson 5: Inclusion may not work

Fast forward to the end of second grade. My daughter's reading is better, although still not fluent, not easy. She practices daily with me by her side. And she gets pulled out for individual work several times a week by a lovely special education teacher whom she adores.

But the next hurdle is becoming clear. In the last weeks of second grade and moving into third grade, the entire curriculum is now based on the assumption that students are fluent readers: read the instructions on your math problem, read the morning message and write a response, structure your writing with evidence that supports it; and let's do this quickly, you have 30 minutes to organize and write a paragraph explaining your response to a poem you have read.

This focus leaves my daughter behind. She can do the math, but cannot quickly read the instructions well enough to feel secure in knowing how to proceed. She can't write quickly, and on demand. She labors. And she needs to read the poem (and perhaps hear it) several times before she can make sense of it and approach writing about it.

In this environment, she is aware that her reading and writing is slow compared to her classmates. Her confidence has plummeted. It is becoming ever more difficult for her to access the curriculum because reading is the necessary gateway.

So now I am advocating for further testing in order to demonstrate that my daughter's reading and writing challenges indicate she needs modifications and accommodations across the entire curriculum. This time, the IEP team agrees.

We'll see what we accomplish with more in-depth testing. but I’m not optimistic. Despite everyone's good intentions, I wonder whether we can really achieve complete access to a third-grade curriculum that depends so heavily on reading fluency.

Is it possible to have enough intervention, enough time, enough modifications so my daughter can experience success and feel, once again, like a competent student? Is inclusion really the best option? Or is it simply the only one public schools offer for students like my daughter?

Our legal framework (IDEA) tells us children have the right to the "least restrictive setting," but if inclusion is always the goal, I am beginning to wonder whether we need to entirely retool our public schools. We aren't serving children like my daughter in the inclusion classroom without stupendous amounts of support — and the dollars and the staff and the knowledge just aren't there, at least in the public system.

In the meantime, why are we not seeing more specialized public settings that can serve students with learning disabilities appropriately — especially given the prevalence of learning disabilities? Is it cost? Is the push for inclusion a bad idea with good intentions? Is it the apparent "normalcy" of many students with learning disabilities that allows for them to pass through the grades without actually learning the material?

I know many parents of students with disabilities want desperately to keep their kids in traditional (public) schools, in inclusion classrooms. But I wonder whether that instinct is always a good one — at least until public schools do a good job in really serving students with learning disabilities.

Perhaps affluent parents who find the perfect private setting for their children are on to something: Don't fight the system; opt out, opt for better. There's no time to waste.

But that approach is limited to the wealthy, and those who know how to evaluate and understand their options, and perhaps to ultimately bring the law to bear in achieving a positive outcome for their child. It angers me that the many students with learning disabilities in our public schools seem to have little chance of getting what they really need.