If high quality pre-school teachers were available to assess young children's difficulty with letters early on, problems that grow out of proportion later on might be avoided, former New York City Deputy Chancellor Carmen Farina noted this week at Teachers College, Columbia University.

The book entitled "Why cant u teach me 2 read,'' by Berth Fertig, a radio journalist at WNYC, prompted moderator Farina and principals in TC's Cahn Fellows program to engage in a spirited roundtable discussion about what types of interventions work best.

The book is an excellent reminder of how students can get through school and still end up lost and unable to navigate signs on city subways and buses, an anecdote Fertig described in harrowing detail.

Fertig tells a true story of three students with learning disabilities who fought for the right to learn to read and legally challenged the New York City schools for failing to teach them. The city was ultimately compelled to pay for their private tutoring.

If these students, who had chaotic early childhood educations, had been enrolled in quality programs early on with teachers who noticed their difficulty, would they have ended up in such dire and dramatic circumstances?