San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Gaps persist in helping dyslexic students
Few teachers have been trained properly, parents, experts and officials say
Hundreds of thousands of people in San Diego County likely have a neurological disorder that makes reading difficult — a disorder called dyslexia.
Some experts estimate as many as 5 percent to 15 percent of the general population has it to some degree, but many have never been diagnosed.
Dyslexia is unrelated to intelligence, but it hampers people’s ability to learn to read.
Yet staff at many schools will not use the word dyslexia, and some don’t know what it is, according to parents, dyslexia experts and school officials. Few teachers have been trained how to teach dyslexic students effectively.
Jose Cruz, CEO of the San Diego Council on Literacy, said he believes many of the 560,000 adults in San Diego County who can’t read or write at higher than a fifth-grade level have unidentified or unaddressed dyslexia as a contributing factor.
“It’s a real shame that these are brilliant people in every other regard ... but when it comes to decoding print, they struggle,” Cruz said. “The shame with that is we know how to respond to their particular situation, except we don’t always have the resources. We don’t act early on to address the
challenges.”
Experts say dyslexia is likely one reason why only 16 percent of California’s students with identified disabilities met reading standards in state tests last year and only 55 percent of students without identified disabilities met the standards.
Several California school systems, including San Diego Unified, don’t screen all children for dyslexia and don’t train teachers in the “structured literacy” approaches that are shown to work for dyslexic students, even though both strategies were recommended by the California Department of Education in dyslexia guidelines it adopted in 2017.
Meanwhile, colleges and universities that produce many of California’s teachers say they are not teaching these approaches, either.
Reading for dyslexia
Anyone who has been a student in English class has likely had to do word searches, fill-in-the-blank worksheets or vocabulary tests.
Experts say these common assignments disadvantage people with dyslexia, and those people are more likely to have trouble with memorization and decoding print on a page.
Rather than being able to learn to read by simply memorizing words or letters in what’s called a “whole language” approach, dyslexic students learn to read better with a “structured literacy” approach, where they dissect words by syllables, letters or sounds in a sequential, explicit and multi-sensory way.
With structured literacy approaches such as Ortongillingham and structured word inquiry, students don’t just learn a word and what it means, but why a word sounds and is spelled the way it is.
Structured literacy can help all students learn to read, not just students with dyslexia, said Steve Mayo, president of the San Diego chapter of the International Dyslexia Association.
Yet it’s common for schools to rely on elements of the “whole language” approach to teach reading or what’s called the “balanced literacy” approach, which focuses on a little bit of everything — vocabulary, reading comprehension, phonics and fluency.
But some say balanced literacy isn’t effective for dyslexic students.
“I think with some of the balanced literacy ... we do a little of this, a little of that, and it’s not systemic anymore; it’s not sequential, and so it results in gaps,” said Greg Mizel, associate superintendent of student support services for Poway Unified School District. “And when you don’t have universal screening (for dyslexia), you have students with those gaps who you may not catch up to for many years.”
Falling through the cracks
Just because a student is dyslexic doesn’t mean they need special education. For students who qualify for special education, experts say
ideally they would be identified and receive services early on, allowing them to transition out of special education before high school.
But parents and dyslexia experts say many students aren’t identified early or don’t get the services they need in school.
San Diego Unified, California’s second-largest school district with 14,000 students with disabilities, does not universally screen for dyslexia, said Kristin Makena, head of San Diego Unified’s school psychologist department.
Such screenings are not a complete assessment, she said. Instead the district administers universal tests to measure students’ reading progress in general.
She said the district doesn’t want to label a student for special education if they don’t need it. A student may struggle in reading for any number of reasons besides dyslexia, she said.
“We’re looking very broadly at all students; that’s why we don’t narrow it down to just dyslexia,” she said.
The district uses “coaching cycles” and workshops to train teachers on how to better teach reading. The district’s overall reading scores have been among the best of large urban districts in national tests.
When a student is struggling in reading, San Diego Unified schools provide various levels of reading intervention, Makena said.
But dyslexia advocates say schools often wait too long for students to improve, without using reading approaches proven to work for dyslexia.
“(Schools) like to push that off, especially for kids with dyslexia,” said Kelli Sandman-hurley, who has been a special education advocate for parents in eight San Diego County districts. “They just want them to catch up or hold them back (a grade), which is just really bad.”
Sandman-hurley cofounded the San Diegobased Dyslexia Training Institute, which trains teachers across the country.
She said when schools avoid identifying a student’s dyslexia, they often waste time giving the student services that aren’t tailored to their needs.
“If the school is going to identify a specific learning disability, but they’re not going to use the word dyslexia, they’ll just continue to throw everything at the kid,” Sandman-hurley said. “They don’t realize the damage they’re doing.”
That’s why she recommends parents get a private assessment or diagnosis if they can. Assessments often cost thousands of dollars.
Even if a parent gets an outside assessment to confirm dyslexia, schools won’t always agree or offer services, she said.
A question of equity
Parents who say they failed to get school services that helped their children read say their only other option was to go private. Then it becomes a question of equity, experts say, when parents get effective services only if they can afford them or can afford to advocate for their child.
Some parents of dyslexic children have flocked to Newbridge, San Diego County’s only school dedicated specifically to addressing dyslexia. The private school is at capacity and costs $21,500 a year.
Other parents have hired tutors.
Sue Brophy, a San Diego parent who has a seventhgrade daughter with significant dyslexia, said she started asking her daughter’s charter school for special education services in third grade, when her daughter wrote a letter at Christmas that said: “Dear God, please help me to read, it’s really hard for me.”
Brophy has paid $250 to $1,000 a month for private tutoring. Her daughter’s school at the time did not have a teacher who could teach structured literacy. The school tried to give her daughter a “whole language” reading curriculum and initially refused to fund tutoring.
Brophy said she challenged the school’s decision by filing for due process, and the school agreed to pay for 250 hours of tutoring. When those hours ran out and the school did not promise more, Brophy transferred her daughter.
“I think they just wanted us to go away,” Brophy said.
Since then, Brophy has enrolled her daughter in two more local charter schools, including one that placed her daughter into a virtual tutoring program for dyslexia.
Reading is still difficult for her daughter, Brophy said, but her spelling is “amazing,” thanks to her private tutors, she said.
“If I only relied on the resources of the school, I can’t even imagine where she would be right now,” she said.
Teaching the teachers
One of the biggest reasons dyslexia experts say schools are ill-equipped to teach dyslexic students is that teachers aren’t being taught how.
Sandman-hurley said she doesn’t know of any California colleges or universities that teach Orton-gillingham or other structured literacy approaches to budding teachers.
Only 11 states have a college or a university that is accredited by the International Dyslexia Association and meets the association’s standards for teaching reading to all students. California doesn’t have one.
“Professors need to acknowledge it ... they need to infuse it into their teacher training programs,” Sandman-hurley said. “But until they do that, we’re going to keep getting teachers who constantly come to our classes and our trainings like, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t learn this ... I have all these kids that can’t read, I don’t know what to do.’”
National University produces more California teachers than any other private institution. In the past year, the university rewrote its teacher preparation programs to include how to detect signs of dyslexia, how to assess for it and how to work with other school staff in crafting a student plan for dyslexia, said Susan Porter, special education department chair at the university’s college of education.
But National University says it doesn’t teach educators on how to use structured literacy approaches like Orton-gillingham. That’s because school districts across California have adopted a wide range of reading programs, Porter said.
“Our students are going into districts throughout the state, so there’s dozens, if not hundreds, of programs that have a good research base, and we just can’t prepare them for all of them,” Porter said.
Without universities to teach teachers, it’s up to schools or teachers to get training.
Structured literacy approaches take several days of training from qualified trainers; the quality and length of training can vary.
It’s also not cheap. At a time when most California districts are facing budget shortfalls, a five-day training in Orton-gillingham can cost $1,175 per person.
One district’s approach
Local dyslexia advocates say Poway Unified is likely doing the most in the county to address dyslexia.
Poway started rolling out district-wide dyslexia efforts a few years ago, partly because of the 2017 state dyslexia guidelines and partly because of upset parents.
“We had some parents who were not happy with some of the results we were achieving,” the district’s Mizel said. “Some of our kids weren’t making progress to goals, so we started to deep dive: How can we improve the student experience?”
Poway implemented universal dyslexia screenings for first-graders in 2018.
Mizel said the district has put 72 of its special-education teachers through weeklong Orton-gillingham training and more than 120 teachers and staff were trained in the Barton reading program, which is based on Orton-gillingham.
The goal was to have at least one trained staff member at every school, Mizel said.
The district wanted to revamp reading for all its students, not just those with dyslexia. All of its kindergarten through second-grade teachers trained for multiple days in the science of reading and how to teach reading with a heavy focus on phonics, Mizel said.
Poway’s special-education and pension costs are rising, like every other school district. Its fund balance is expected to dwindle by 60 percent in two years.
But it’s important, Mizel said, to invest in this training: “You can’t exclude students, especially with something as fundamental as reading.”