The competency gap nobody names: who owns visual performance in schools?

Walk into any elementary school in the country and you will find a student who loses their place while reading, copies one letter at a time from the board, and has been called lazy at least once. Ask three adults on that student's team what is going on and you will usually get three different answers.

The general-education teacher notices attention and effort. The special-education teacher notices reading levels and IEP goals. The school-based occupational therapist — when they are consulted at all — notices posture, handwriting, and visual-motor breakdown. The developmental optometrist, if the family ever gets that referral, sees oculomotor and accommodative dysfunction. Four professionals. Four vocabularies. One student, still losing their place.

This is what the literature calls the identification gap in visual performance, and it is the through-line of an ongoing doctoral study at Valdosta State University (Foster, 2026, in progress). The gap is not caused by lack of care. It is caused by lack of shared language and lack of shared responsibility. General-education teachers are not trained to screen vision. Special-education teachers are trained to accommodate, not identify. School-based OTs have the training but are often over-scheduled and under-consulted. Families are told to "get their eyes checked" and come back with a 20/20 report — because 20/20 acuity is not the same thing as functional visual performance.

Closing the gap does not require a new specialist. It requires a shared framework that all four adults can use in the same room. That is the entire reason the Visual Performance Assessment (VPA™) exists, and it is the reason every classroom-facing tool on this site is built around a shared vocabulary rather than a private one. Give teachers a checklist. Give OTs a screen. Give families a one-pager. And name, out loud, the next adult and the next date. That is how gaps close.