For parents applying to the dual-language program at Rochester, New York’s public school No. 12, where students learn in both English and Spanish, the process can be both bureaucratic and baffling. After listing the program as a top choice, parents must schedule a testing appointment at the central office, where an instructor gauges such skills as whether each incoming kindergartener can hold a book properly and turn its pages, identify that a sentence is made up of words and spaces, use words to describe the scene in a picture, identify sounds in a word, and other pre-reading skills.

Families never receive a “score” on the test, which is available in both English or Spanish, or any information about how it is used in the admissions process — just word on whether their child made it in. (The district communications office did not respond to multiple queries about the process.)

After her 5-year-old son took the test several years ago, Rochester parent Llerena Searle was convinced that the news wouldn’t be good. He had a meltdown when asked to go with an unfamiliar instructor, acquiescing only when allowed to “test” from his mother’s lap. The boy was admitted, though, and is now in seventh grade; Searle believes he received a wonderful education at school No. 12. “I just wish it were more accessible,” she said. 

In some communities across the country, dual-language programs — one of the best means of ensuring equity for underserved groups, especially English learners — have taken an elitist turn. And with the Biden administration eager to help districts expand such programs, questions about who they help — and who gets left out — are becoming more urgent. 

In too many places, admissions processes send a message that dual-language learning is not for everyone (when research shows that actually it is). In Mamaroneck, New York, for instance, the local dual-language school at one point published information asking families to consider whether their child’s native language is developing within “normal” limits when deciding whether to apply. (After this article published, school officials reached out to say that has not been their practice for some time, and the program is open to all interested families.) In Boston, the dual-language programs significantly under-enroll students with disabilities, partly out of a misconception that learning in two languages isn’t appropriate for many students with special education needs.*

Related: A Spanish-English high school proves learning in two languages can boost graduation rates

In other districts, the sin is one of omission rather than commission: failure to market the dual-language programs sufficiently to newcomer families; failure to locate the programs in communities where newcomers actually live; time-consuming admissions processes that can seem labyrinthine and opaque — even if they don’t involve testing recalcitrant preschoolers. 

Most experts recommend reserving at least half of seats in dual-language programs for English learners, who benefit most from programs partly in their native language, and dividing the remainder through random lottery after aggressive outreach to underrepresented communities, including Black families, low-income students and those with disabilities. Yet English learner enrollment shares are shrinking in most dual-language schools in large cities including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to a report released last spring by The Century Foundation and the Children’s Equity Project. 

Meanwhile, the share of white student enrollment was up in several other cities, most noticeably Washington D.C. “Many dual-language programs are at risk of tilting toward language enrichment for English-dominant children, instead of advancing linguistic equity and expanding educational opportunity for ELs,” the report’s authors wrote. Overall, the number of dual-language schools in the country has nearly quadrupled since 2010, and currently numbers more than 3,600. 

“[P]rograms that were ostensibly created to help English learners have turned into an extracurricular for native English speakers.”

Alina Adams, parent

There’s no one solution to this troubling shift — dual-language programs are gentrifying in many cities partly because the cities themselves are gentrifying. In some communities, English learner enrollments are depressed because of the lingering effects of hypocritical policies in the U.S. banning bilingual education for non-English speaking newcomers. Many immigrant families absorbed the “English only” message, and remained hesitant to try dual language even after the policies changed.

But school districts need to be far more vigilant in designing admissions processes and programs that favor the least privileged rather than the most. Otherwise, one of the most proven ways to combat the achievement gap, particularly for English learners, is at risk of playing a perversely opposite role: expanding educational opportunity for the elite.

Dual-language programs have never been monolithic in their demographics or their goals. When they began to appear in significant numbers in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s, some opened with the intent of serving English learners and working-class Latino families. Others hoped to enroll a significant number of white, English-speaking families, and even deter white flight from urban areas. Some wanted to meet both goals. One-way language schools enroll predominantly students from a single language group, while most two-way programs try to enroll a roughly equivalent number of students from English-speaking households and the target language.

Widespread gentrification in the 1990s and early 2000s also brought many white and well-off families back to some urban neighborhoods where dual-language schools were taking root. That coincided with a growing recognition by privileged families of the economic and career benefits of bilingualism, and a particular interest in affluent communities in studying Spanish and Mandarin. Research shows that learning multiple languages early in life has cognitive benefits extending beyond language acquisition and helps children develop stronger social skills, including empathizing better with others. In sum, bilingualism is good for both the brain and the heart.

In New York City, meanwhile, some middle-class and affluent families have come to see dual-language programs as an alternative to gifted and talented education, particularly as the latter has become harder to access, said Alina Adams, a parent and creator of the website NYCSchoolSecrets.com. Over the last decade, “gifted and talented became more competitive every year and suddenly there were many more dual-language programs,” she said. Ambitious parents perceived it as a more rigorous, challenging curriculum. And at some locations, “programs that were ostensibly created to help English learners have turned into an extracurricular for native English speakers,” Adams added.

Related: Students with disabilities often left out of popular ‘dual-language’ programs

Yet recent decades have also brought a growing research base showing that it’s precisely the students least likely to seek out gifted and talented programming who can benefit most from well-designed, supportive dual language programs. “Dual language is the one program we’ve found that truly closes the [achievement] gap” between English learners and the rest of the student population, said Virginia Collier, an emeritus professor of education at George Mason University.  Her research, done over the course of four decades in collaboration with her husband and GMU colleague Wayne Thomas, also shows that dual-language learning can be particularly effective for Black students, low-income students, and those with special needs — three groups that are often underrepresented in the programs. 

There’s a misconception among some educators and parents that bilingual education is inappropriate for students with developmental delays, or those predisposed to fall behind in an English-only curriculum. Yet a 2021 study found that dual-language “education can benefit … even students who often struggle in school because of special education needs.” And a 2018 paper found “no credible evidence that bilingual education adds or creates burden for children. Yet it is “incontrovertible,” according to the paper, that bilingual learning comes with decided advantages.

Spanish dual-language programs, the most common kind in the U.S., can be especially beneficial for students who struggle with reading. That’s because the Spanish language is more phonetic than the English one, with much less variation in the sounds that letters make. But some programs send the message — whether intentional or accidental — that dual language schools aren’t appropriate for children without strong early literacy skills.

“You might hear a parent say, ‘My kid didn’t start talking until age three and a half. They are already struggling — it would be too confusing to be in a dual language program,’” said Emily Bivins, former principal of a dual-language school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina whose company provides professional development for dual-language programs. “We all know the research is counter to that. These are the students who absolutely need to be in our bilingual programs.”

Bivins’ own three children attended dual-language programs, and she said it was most helpful for the child with an attention deficit diagnosis and early reading struggles. “Learning to read in Spanish was much better for her … the rules were clearer,” Bivins said. That’s part of the reason it’s so frustrating when she hears from colleagues at dual-language schools that use reading screeners where, if students “don’t score high enough [they] don’t get in.”  

Widespread interest in dual-language schools, including among the affluent, is a good thing, say proponents of bilingual education. But it becomes problematic if students from underserved groups are neglected or squeezed out of programs. Many communities lack sufficient bilingual educators to meet the desire for dual language. “It’s an iron law of education policymaking: nothing exacerbates educational unfairness like scarcity,” wrote the authors of the report released last spring.

The history of the Amigos School, a dual-language program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shows that even seemingly minor changes to admissions processes can significantly shape how a school is perceived — and who applies — tilting preference toward privilege.

Thirty-five years ago, scores of first- and second-generation immigrant families from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, along with others, came to see Amigos as the place to send their kids. The school was located near subsidized public housing, where many of the families lived. And the school’s founder, Mary Cazabon, engaged in constant grassroots outreach, attending community events and churches, like Cambridge’s bilingual Saint Mary’s church, where she spread word about the school and the benefits of learning in two languages. “We wanted to make sure that we were going to address the needs of the students who were most vulnerable,” Cazabon says. “The priority was on them.” To that end, Spanish-speaking students designated as English learners were given priority in admissions, Cazabon says.

Then the biotech boom hit Cambridge in the 1990s, and a growing number of white and wealthier families began to take an interest in Amigos, drawn by the allure of raising bilingual children. At some point in the 2000s, the school district also made a pivotal switch: Instead of giving priority to English learners, as Cazabon had done, they introduced a system that awarded “Spanish points” to children who could show some knowledge of Spanish when applying to the school’s pre-K or kindergarten. 

Related: Once criticized, ‘Spanglish’ finds a place in the classroom 

The change opened the door to a much broader group of families gaining admissions preference: Families with some Hispanic heritage whose toddlers were exposed to both English and Spanish in the home, but also families with no Hispanic heritage who sent their children to a Spanish-language child care or hired Spanish-speaking nannies with the goal of getting a spot at Amigos. By 2010, the demographics of Amigos had shifted dramatically, and it enrolled fewer low-income students than almost all the schools in the district. Penn Loh, a lecturer at Tufts University, said that in his son’s class at that time, only two of 44 children qualified for free and reduced lunch.

In 2011, one mother filed a complaint with the Cambridge Human Rights Commission, alleging that Amigos no longer served the Hispanic community. And Loh and other parents at Amigos petitioned the school board to change the admissions process, worried that Amigos increasingly catered too much to the children of Cambridge’s elite. “The pool of Spanish-proficient applicants became more unbalanced, with more wealthy, privileged families having children qualify in this pool,” Loh said in a recent email.. “We heard that working class Latinx families, often in Cambridge for generations, were not … getting into the school.”

The school district changed the policy to give “points” to children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

The number of dual-language public schools in the U.S. has quadrupled since 2010, to more than 3,600. 

“We are on our way to being much more balanced,” said Sarah Bartels-Marrero, the school’s current principal. “To me, it’s very important that we have a very diverse group of Spanish-speaking students. That’s a core pillar of our school.” The Spanish points system helps ensure that, she added, although she acknowledged that some English-only parents have also employed it as a workaround. “Certain individuals with privilege and knowledge may look for a loophole,” she said. “That is a thing, but we work really hard to combat and mitigate that.” 

Amigos continues to enroll slightly fewer English learners and about 10 percent fewer low-income students than the district average. Although the current formula would virtually guarantee a low-income Spanish speaking student admission, only one such incoming kindergartener listed Amigos as their first choice in January 2022, according to data published by the district.  However, Bartels-Marrero pointed out that about 60 percent of families identify as Hispanic or Latino, a group that is incredibly diverse. “To me it’s fundamentally important that [Amigos] is an option and opportunity for every kid in Cambridge regardless of race or background,” she said. 

Some states and communities also suffer from a location problem when it comes to dual language. The predominantly white town of Maynard, Massachusetts created a Spanish dual-language school with its English speakers in mind — not its growing population of Portuguese-speaking students, for instance. But the thousands of Spanish-speaking English learner students in the much larger and heavily Hispanic city of Lawrence, located just 35 miles to the north, have for two decades lacked access to even a single dual-language Spanish program (two are slated to open in the next year or so). States and the federal government could, and should, incentivize districts to open programs where there is the most need, and discourage programs targeted mostly at English speakers.

But starting new programs takes time, and there are steps that school districts can take right now to help ensure that English learners, low-income students, Black students, and other underrepresented groups have equal, if not greater access, to dual-language programs. They should engage more in grassroots outreach and marketing of dual learning, tailoring the message as needed to different communities. They should make the admissions process as transparent and accessible as possible, avoiding complicated or burdensome steps that advantage those with flexible schedules and knowledge of school system bureaucracy.

And they should eschew any kind of elitist framing, intentional or not. 

Llerena Searle, the Rochester mother, liked the dual-language program at School No. 12 well enough to enroll her younger child there, too. This time, there was a pandemic going on and the child was tested over Zoom. Her daughter dutifully cooperated with the process. With little doubt of a successful outcome (the school also has an admissions preference for siblings) Searle was more relaxed this time, yet hardly sanguine about the admissions process. She never figured out exactly what district officials were trying to accomplish, but in the end worried that the test mostly measured privilege. 

*Clarification: This article was updated to reflect the fact that the dual language program in Mamaroneck, New York, is now open to all interested families, including those with disabilities.

This story about dual language programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter

The post How to keep dual-language programs from being gentrified by English speaking families appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Eighty-seven percent of states lack enough speech language pathologists to reach all the infants and toddlers in need. Eighty-two percent suffer from physical therapist shortages. And among the service coordinators who organize critical therapies for America’s youngest children, the turnover rate is a stunning 42 percent, according to information compiled by the IDEA Infant and Toddler Coordinators Association from a survey that had 45 state respondents. (The K-12 teacher turnover rate, by contrast, only reached a mere 10 percent during the pandemic.)

With all the attention recently to the teacher and child care worker shortages in communities across America, the sector facing the most severe crisis has received comparatively little notice from policy makers, the media or the general public: those providing critical early intervention therapies for children under age 3 with developmental delays.

Last March, I published a story for Hechinger and USA Today on longstanding racial inequities in terms of who can, and has, accessed these therapies. One Rhode Island mother, for instance, missed out on early intervention entirely for her daughter because the toddler’s speech delay was attributed to the family’s bilingualism. “We missed that window from 1 to 4, which is such a precious age,” the mother told me.

Quality early intervention is critical for millions of families — and significantly reduces the likelihood that a child will need special education services in kindergarten. Most of the challenges and inequities in the system connect back to workforce issues. Staffing shortages are most severe in predominantly low-income communities, meaning longer waitlists when services are even available at all. Meanwhile, there’s a striking lack of diversity among early intervention personnel. One recent survey found that nearly 90 percent of early childhood special education personnel are white, 97 percent are female, and only 6 percent speak Spanish, according to Mary Bruder, the director of the University of Connecticut Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities Education, Research, and Service.

Increased funding for early intervention — translated into increased pay for therapists and case managers — is essential yet insufficient on its own. Both Rhode Island and Illinois are among the states that have significantly upped pay rates for early intervention personnel in recent years and continue to lack critical staff. “There has been a big effort to raise wages and have sign-on bonuses but still it hasn’t been enough,” said Leanne Barrett, a senior policy analyst at Rhode Island Kids Count.

The workforce shortage “is at crisis proportions,” said Bruder.

In the last month, I interviewed a half dozen experts about potential strategies for expanding and diversifying the workforce. Here are some of the takeaways:

Expand mentoring and apprenticeships

Apprenticeships are underutilized throughout education, and could be especially helpful in the early intervention workforce, particularly for those from lower-income backgrounds who can’t afford to enter often pricey training programs without an income. “They would be getting funding while completing the credentials they need,” said Catherine Main, director of early childhood education at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Create a pipeline from related jobs

In communities facing teacher shortages, education officials have tried to increase the number of paraprofessionals and teachers’ aides certified to lead their own classrooms. The same pathway could and should exist in early special education services, with aides and others in lower-paid jobs in the field encouraged and offered financial support to get trained as therapists and service coordinators.

Offer perks to those already in the profession

Staff retention is key to meeting the needs of surging caseloads. States have talked about such incentives as repaying loan debt for early intervention professionals who make a commitment to stay in the field, and providing them with free child care (as Kentucky has done with child care workers). Barrett says there’s a need to “think creatively” and do more to make the jobs both appealing and sustainable.

Build in more culturally relevant curriculum and training

Many potential therapists, particularly people of color, don’t pursue or stay in training programs because the preparation is “very western and Eurocentric,” said Evandra Catherine, an assistant professor in the early childhood program at Arizona State University. Catherine added that both in academic and in-service training, there should be a focus on “affirming the identities of the families and communities they are servicing,” and the curriculum should feature research and literature by a more diverse array of scholars and practitioners. Among other things, there needs to be discussion of historic linkages between disability and race. “At one point in time, if you were Black you were considered disabled,” she said. To better relate to families today, providers need to understand that history, Catherine added.

Streamline higher education bureaucracy

The path to working in early intervention is not always easy or clear, with entirely different training programs and licensure requirements for a developmental therapist working with 2-year-olds vs. a special education teacher working with 3-year-olds — even though the training required is very similar, said Catherine Main. The different agencies that run early intervention and special education need to coordinate to better allow for staff crossover and sharing. That includes building more accessible pathways from community college programs into early intervention. “If our agencies came together to have a more uniform qualification system that would be really helpful,” Main said.

Support, support, support

Early intervention personnel and experts have told me of a surge in the number of toddlers trying to access the services, partly due to pandemic backlogs and delays. That’s been hard for providers, many of whom have seen their caseloads grow. “A lot are looking to leave the field because of stress due to growing caseloads,” said Bruder. We’re “seeing this dissatisfaction more than we have seen before.” Pay and benefits help but so does ongoing support, particularly in the form of mentorship and stability, for a job that even under the best of circumstances can bring unexpected challenges nearly every day.

More on early intervention

I found in my reporting that Black and Hispanic children not only receive less early intervention, but the services are lower in quality and less targeted to their specific needs. For instance, Spanish speaking children are more likely to get general speech services while English speaking ones receive help with specific articulation problems. That story is available in Spanish here.

Last month, in a similar piece, the Associated Press examined how the pandemic exacerbated early intervention staff shortages in Illinois and nationwide. 

This story about early intervention was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post Six ideas to ease the early intervention staffing crisis appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

It pains Tim Odegard that four decades after a misguided approach to diagnosing dyslexia kept him from getting help in school, thousands of children across the U.S. are needlessly suffering for the same reason.

During the initial weeks of first grade, Odegard’s struggles with reading went undetected as he memorized words that classmates read aloud before him. The strategy worked so well that his teacher moved him to the position of “first reader.” It then became apparent that the six-year-old not only wasn’t the strongest reader in the class—he couldn’t read at all. The teacher dispatched him to a low-skill group. “It just kind of went downhill from there,” Odegard, now 47, recalled.

Through sheer determination and reliance on his prodigious memory, Odegard eventually memorized enough words to get by and earned decent grades, although they would never come easily. “I compensated for my reading and spelling problems by staying up until 1 or 2 a.m. to get things done,” he said. He never received extra help or special education services from his Houston-area school district. Instead, a couple of teachers seemed to doubt his intelligence. When Odegard was the first student in his school to solve a complex murder mystery puzzle, one of them said he must have guessed.

It wasn’t until he was in his late 20s that Odegard came to understand why his teachers thought so poorly of his abilities. In 2004, as a new Ph.D., he told his mother that the National Institutes of Health had awarded him a postdoctoral fellowship to study dyslexia, a condition he’d long suspected he had. She shared that when he was in third grade, school officials had used a so-called discrepancy model that compared intelligence quotient (IQ) with reading performance to rule that he didn’t have a learning disability.

“I was thought to be too stupid to be dyslexic,” said Odegard, now editor in chief of the Annals of Dyslexia and chair of excellence in dyslexic studies at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Up to around 20 percent of the U.S. population has dyslexia, a neurological condition that makes it difficult to decipher and spell written words. Someone with the disability might omit short words such as “and” and “the” while reading aloud, for example, or read “dog” as “god”—even if they speak normally in conversation. The condition impedes a person’s ability to process written information and can negatively affect their career and well-being. Yet only a fraction of affected students get a dyslexia diagnosis or the specialized assistance that can help them manage their difficulty reading.

One reason so many diagnoses are missed is that thousands of schools in the U.S. continue to use an iteration of the discrepancy model to test children for learning disabilities. Moreover, for a multitude of reasons, including biases in IQ tests, a disproportionate number of those diagnosed—and helped—have been white and middle- to upper-class.

“It’s unfair, it’s discriminatory, and it disadvantages already economically disadvantaged kids,” said Jack Fletcher, co-founder of the Texas Center for Learning Disabilities in Houston and one of the first scientists to question the discrepancy model’s validity.

The model has shaped decades of policy regarding whose literacy is considered vital and worthy of extra help and investment—and whose is not. It is rooted in long-standing misconceptions about dyslexia. Reforming how the condition is defined and diagnosed could help many more children learn to read.

Speaking comes naturally to most children, being a gift of human evolution, but reading and writing are inventions that must be consciously and painstakingly learned. No one is born with neural circuits for connecting the sounds of speech to squiggles on paper. Instead, when someone learns to read, their brain improvises, splicing and joining sections of preexisting circuits for processing vision and speech to form a new “reading circuit.” To read the (written) word “dog,” for example, a typical brain will disaggregate the word into its constituent letters, “d,” “o” and “g,” and then summon from memory the sound fragments, or phonemes, associated with each letter. It aggregates these phonemes into the sound “dog” and retrieves the meaning of the word that matches that sound. Most brains eventually learn to do all these steps so fast that the action seems automatic. Some written words become so familiar that the speech circuit eventually gets bypassed, so that there is a direct association between the word as seen on paper or on a screen and its meaning.

Because human brains are organized in diverse ways, some people’s reading circuits end up being inefficient. Dyslexia is the most common reading disability. People with the condition, which is partly linked to genetics, often have less gray matter and brain activity in the parietotemporal region of the brain’s left hemisphere, associated with connecting the sounds of speech to the shapes of printed text.

The severity and manifestations of dyslexia can vary from person to person, but children with the learning disability benefit most from early help with explications of the sound structures underlying words. For those who continue to struggle in school, the ideal instruction is one-on-one or in a small group with a trained teacher who provides intensive and systematic assistance in making connections between written words and sounds. Learning the rules—and the many, many exceptions—of the English language is particularly important, because children with dyslexia are typically unable to pick them up through mere exposure to text. The letter “a” can be pronounced five different ways in English, whereas in Spanish, for instance, vowels almost always have the same pronunciation.

With the right kind of instruction, most children with dyslexia can learn how to read. In part because of an accident of scientific history, however, this essential assistance has been far more available to kids who score higher on IQ and other cognitive tests. An early case report of dyslexia, published in the British Medical Journal in 1896, helped to define the disorder as an unexpected deficit in otherwise “bright” children. The study described a 14-year-old referred to as Percy F. “He has always been a bright and intelligent boy, quick at games, and in no way inferior to others,” wrote the doctor who examined Percy, “yet in writing from dictation he comes to grief over any but the simplest words.”

Related: While white students get specialists, struggling Black and Latino readers often get left on their own

That incipient definition characterized a lot of early thinking about dyslexia. It was inadvertently codified in school systems through influential studies led by British psychiatrists Michael Rutter and William Yule on the Isle of Wight in the 1960s and early 1970s.

 Rutter and Yule are well regarded for being among the first in the field to focus deeply on children and for their groundbreaking work in autism and post-traumatic stress disorder. When devising a definition of “reading disability” based on the population of nine- to 11-year-olds on the island, the researchers distinguished between poor readers who read at levels predicted by their IQs and those who did not, looking for evidence of dyslexia only in those in the latter group.

The studies came just as the U.S. was creating its own special education categories and definitions to prepare for the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975. When it came to learning disabilities, experts relied heavily on the idea that for a learning disability to be present, reading performance had to fall short of IQ.

Guidelines put out by the U.S. government in 1977 asked that schools look for a “severe discrepancy between levels of ability and achievement” when screening children for learning disabilities. Thus, a child’s IQ scores, which rank cognitive abilities such as reasoning, began to play an outsize role in determining countless students’ educational fates. Specifically, if the IQ score wasn’t high enough and, in consequence, the gap wasn’t big enough, the child wasn’t diagnosed with a reading disability. Despite the fact that most youngsters can learn to read regardless of their IQ score, those with lower scores were often assumed to lack the “smarts” to read well.

An IQ test kept Sandra Chittenden’s daughter from getting the right help for years. The girl learned new words slowly and struggled to pronounce them correctly, mixing up similar-sounding words. In kindergarten she had no interest in letters and sounds, and she couldn’t easily see the similarities and differences across words on a page. Having a mild form of dyslexia herself and with an older son who is severely dyslexic, Chittenden, who is a special education advocate in Vermont, asked the school district to evaluate the girl for a reading disability.

The five-year-old was promptly given an IQ test. She posted an average overall score and a below-average score on a reading achievement test. But the gap between the two scores didn’t meet the cutoff of 15 points, so the girl was not given appropriate reading services in her school. The same thing happened when Chittenden requested another evaluation when her daughter was in first grade.

For the child, the results were wounding. During her first couple of years of elementary school “her nervous system was like a pressure cooker because she wasn’t being given appropriate help,” Chittenden said. “She held it together all day at school and then would explode.”

In third grade, the girl was diagnosed with a learning disability in math, and the school added a dyslexia diagnosis because of her continued struggles with both arithmetic and reading. But for years, Chittenden says, “I remember it being really frustrating knowing my child had dyslexia and not being able to get the right help.” As of this year, partly in response to parental concerns, Vermont is no longer using the discrepancy model to diagnose learning disabilities.

Researchers pointed out problems with the discrepancy model even before its use became prevalent in the U.S. Fletcher, an early critic, noted a methodological issue in the Isle of Wight studies: they did not exclude children with intellectual disabilities or brain injuries. Yet by some accounts there was an unusually large number of neurologically impaired subjects on the island at the time, resulting in a skewed sample.

It has also long been clear that IQ tests can be biased against Black or low-income students, as well as many others, because they contain language and content that is more familiar to white middle- and upper-income students. Researchers began to observe inequitable results in the late 1970s as American public schools began evaluating more children to comply with the mandates of the federal special education law, since renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

 As a research assistant at the University of Minnesota, Mark Shinn said he saw how the discrepancy model disproportionately prevented children from low-income families, English learners and students of color from getting help. “You had all these kids in high-poverty schools with [below average] cognitive ability of 90 and 80, and the schools could throw up their hands and say, ‘They are too “slow” to benefit [from services],’” recalled Shinn, now a professor emeritus of school psychology at National Louis University in Chicago. Yet “it was well known that poor kids…earned low scores on cognitive tests largely because of a lack of opportunities and experiences.”

In the 1980s, educational psychologist Linda Siegel, now an emeritus professor at the University of British Columbia, began investigating some of these anecdotal suspicions. In an influential 1994 publication, she noted that the main distinction between children with a reading disability and those without was not their IQs, but the way their minds processed written words.

“The basic assumption that underlies decades of classification in research and educational practice regarding reading disabilities is becoming increasingly untenable,” she and her co-author wrote. In the same issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology, Fletcher and his colleagues observed that the “cognitive profiles” of poor readers who met the discrepancy definition and of those who didn’t were more similar than different. The key to diagnosing reading disabilities, they wrote, would be to instead measure “deficiencies in phonological awareness,” the ability to recognize and work with phonemes in spoken language.

Related: NAACP targets a new civil rights issue—reading

Since then, the scientific consensus against the discrepancy model has grown. One study found that regardless of their IQ, poor readers benefit from specialized reading instruction and support at statistically identical levels. Another used magnetic resonance imaging to show the same reduced brain-activation patterns in the left hemisphere (compared with those of typical readers) in weak school-age readers who were asked whether two written words rhymed—regardless of whether the weak readers met discrepancy criteria. Neuroscientist Fumiko Hoeft, who supervised the study at Stanford University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research, says it bolsters the idea that the discrepancy method makes an arbitrary distinction among different groups of poor readers. In fact, “dyslexia can occur in people of high, middle and low cognitive abilities,” noted Nadine Gaab, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

By the 2000s, ample scientific evidence indicated the arbitrariness of IQ’s use as a basis for a dyslexia diagnosis. And there were mounting concerns that the discrepancy model was fundamentally racist and classist: it disproportionately prevented low-income children and children of color from getting help with learning disabilities. In 2004, the federal government reversed course on its 1970s guidance, strongly recommending that states consider alternatives.

 “I would…encourage this commission to drive a stake through the heart of this overreliance on the discrepancy model for determining the kinds of children that need services,” psychologist Wade Horn, then U.S. assistant secretary for children and families, told a panel of experts tasked with revising special education law in the early 2000s. “I’ve wondered for 25 years why it is that we continue to use it.”

But a 2018 study found that about one third of school psychologists were still using the discrepancy model to screen students for learning disabilities. And although most contemporary specialists concur that dyslexia is unrelated to intelligence, many of the most widely used definitions still refer to it as an “unexpected” disorder.

“These definitional issues are not trivial, because they drive research, they drive funding, they drive assessment, they drive everything,” said Julie Washington, a professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, whose research focuses on the intersection of language, literacy and poverty in African American children.

Even as more states and school districts move away from the discrepancy model, many researchers are concerned that they too often are replacing it with an equally problematic system. Often referred to as patterns of strengths and weaknesses or by Odegard as “discrepancy 2.0,” this method continues to rely heavily on cognitive tests and still calls for significant gaps between ability and performance for a student to qualify as having a learning disability. “Schools still want simple formulas and put way too much emphasis on the testing,” Fletcher said.

Twice in elementary school, Texas student Marcelo Ruiz, who lives just north of Houston, was denied a dyslexia diagnosis because of “discrepancy 2.0.” He had high cognitive scores, but evaluators said he did not show skill gaps in the areas he needed to qualify as dyslexic. School got harder and harder for Ruiz, and in high school he was still inverting letters and having trouble with reading. In the fall of 2022, his senior year, the teenager finally got a dyslexia diagnosis, but by then it was far too late to give him the help he had long craved. Because of his mediocre grades, Ruiz says, he had difficulty getting admitted into four-year colleges; he is currently at a community college and hoping to transfer. “Growing up, I felt stupid,” the 18-year-old says. “My grades kept going down, and I didn’t know what was wrong with me. It was really demotivating not knowing what I had and what you could do for it, not being able to get help.”

Texas mother Kodie Bates fought a similar battle on behalf of her sons—with the district reversing its opinion on whether the children had dyslexia. Both boys were diagnosed at the age of 7 with dyslexia using a method that still relied on testing and principles similar to the discrepancy model. However, the district did not provide any special education services. So in 2019, Bates began to push for an individualized education program, or IEP, that would delineate specific reading supports for her older son.

The district fought back, and a year ago, when her older son was 12, tried to reverse its own dyslexia diagnoses.

In a 34-page report provided by Bates and a special education advocate, the diagnostician for the Hooks Independent School District in northeastern Texas cited low cognitive scores in most areas for the older boy, arguing that the family’s decision to homeschool him may have impaired his cognitive abilities. “He does not have an unexpected (deficit)… Everything is in the below average range—to have dyslexia there has to be an unexpected (deficit) and I did not find one,” the diagnostician said, according to a transcript of a meeting held to discuss the report.”

“First they didn’t want to give him the services, and now they want to say that he is not even dyslexic—he’s just not smart,” Bates says. “It’s just not fair to take away a disability.” Last spring, an independent evaluator paid for by the district determined that her sons were, in fact, dyslexic as the district originally had found. Bates said she was grateful that the school is now offering services but has decided to keep homeschooling her sons with the support of online reading specialists.            

“The boys are old enough now to be uncomfortable in such an environment and I don’t blame them one bit,” she said in an email.

They “are hesitant,” she added, “and let down.”

According to several researchers, a better—though hardly perfect—approach to assessing children for learning disabilities is “response to intervention,” or RTI. In this method, teachers intervene early with struggling readers and monitor how they respond to help, making a referral for special education services after what one research paper dubbed a “student’s failure to respond to treatment.”

Some states already require exclusive use of RTI, although it can be hard to implement because teachers have to be well trained in what interventions to administer and how to determine whether they are working. When teachers do make a referral for special education services, there’s often still a question of how—and whether—to make a learning disability determination.

For this reason, some experts in the field say they would like to see more no-cost or low-cost access to the kind of testing that qualified neuropsychologists do: assessing a child’s capacity for and speed at the many components that make up successful reading. (One bill pending in New York State would mandate that private health-care plans pay for neuropsychological exams focused on dyslexia.) The specifics can look quite different for a seven-year-old than for a high school student, Gaab explained. But generally, experts say testing should be used to gauge such skills as a child’s ability to recognize “sight words” (common words that often come up in reading), to sound out “nonsense” words that follow the rules of the English language but are not actual words, and to read under timed conditions and spell words correctly in their writing.

Related: Want your child to receive better reading help in public school? It might cost $7,500

It isn’t out of the question for school districts to do this type of testing on their own—and some of the best-resourced ones already do, or they contract with an outside neuropsychologist. But for most school psychologists, it would represent a departure from decades of training and practice focused on the administration of IQ and cognitive tests. The discrepancy model is “easier” because a child either meets the cutoff or doesn’t.

“It reminds me of leeching blood,” said Tiffany Hogan, a professor and director of the Speech & Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston. “They did that for a long time knowing it wasn’t the best way, but there was no replacement.”

Another largely overlooked reason for the continued prevalence of discrepancy-based testing may be that the families most hurt by it are the least powerful in terms of their influence over public school practice and policy. Many schools feel pressure, both covert and overt, to not identify children with dyslexia because there aren’t enough specialists or teachers trained to work with them. Families with money, power and privilege can negotiate with the district more effectively to meet their child’s needs or hire an advocate or lawyer to lobby on their behalf. If diagnosis and help still remain elusive, they can pay for private neuropsychological exams, which can cost thousands of dollars. They also can, and often do, circumvent the public system entirely by hiring private reading tutors or sending their children to private schools focused on reading remediation. (Often these schools also use the discrepancy model to determine whom to admit.) For all these reasons, as well as the discrepancy model’s bias favoring high IQ scores, dyslexia has long had a reputation as a “privileged” diagnosis.

The dyslexia advocacy community has in some states also been predominantly white and financially privileged, with low-income families and parents of color more likely to fear the stigma of a disability diagnosis. “Historically, we don’t talk about learning disabilities and mental health in the Black community because there’s a stigma and shame attached to it,” said Winifred Winston, a Baltimore mother who hosts the Black and Dyslexic podcast. “Enslaved people could not show any sign of weakness or perceived weakness. So we have a history of being ‘okay’…(even) when we are in fact not okay or do require assistance.”

Partly through the leadership of parents such as Winston, that’s changing as more families learn about reading disabilities and the extra support a diagnosis can bring.

Now 71 and 81, respectively, Jack Fletcher and Linda Siegel are still fighting to get children equal access to essential help in learning how to read. They are part of a broad-based effort seeking to strengthen access to general reading instruction for all so that fewer students get held back by learning disabilities or need intensive reading remediation. Many states are doing just that, with a growing number passing legislation promoting the “science of reading,” which emphasizes explicit and systematic instruction in phonics. Early screening for language challenges in the youngest grades is also key.

Still, Odegard said he regularly hears from families frustrated that their kids were disqualified from reading services for the same reason he was testing determined that they are not “smart” enough to be dyslexic. Odegard isn’t surprised that his own IQ was below average, given the correlation to socioeconomic status. His parents had modest-paying jobs in retail and neither had a college education. 

The idea of distributing limited, extra help to students with high cognitive scores has deep roots in an American psyche “built off a mindset that somehow there are people who are chosen to move forward and some that are not,” Odegard added. It’s not dissimilar to “gifted” programs for children with high IQs or dual language programs that are only accessible to students with above average reading abilities. It’s the early, often irreversible, accrual of opportunity based on a limited, highly fallible notion of human potential.

Over the years, Odegard says, some colleagues and friends have remarked that, given his success, the experience must have made him stronger—a characterization he resents. “It wasn’t a gift,” he said. “I don’t see any of those challenges of having to stay up later and work five times harder as helpful.” Growing up, “I had a huge chip on my shoulder.”

On reflection, though, Odegard says there was perhaps one benefit to his early educational struggles. “If there was any gift I got from dyslexia, it was to have a lot of compassion and empathy,” he asserted, “because I could never hide in school that I couldn’t read and spell.” 

Reporting on this piece was supported by the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University and the Russell Sage Visiting Journalist Fellowship.

This story about the discrepancy model was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

About 20 years ago, I had a transformative reporting experience when I was assigned to “shadow” a 4-year-old named Jaylen at a Milwaukee preschool. I mistakenly assumed the day would bring mostly cuteness and little substance, and I remember being struck by how much these young students learned, virtually every second of the school day. And because I could not interview the kids in quite the same way as older ones, I was forced to be a much closer observer of how that learning, and associated teaching, happened, from the way the children explored blocks of different geometric shapes to the way the teacher habitually explained the meaning of different words as she spoke.

Over the years, I’ve gravitated back to early childhood stories again and again: writing a magazine feature on the power of a holistic model of early childhood care that considers the families’ needs as much as the children’s; editing and contributing to a project on the critical, often neglected 2-year-old year; and, most recently, probing racial disparities in access to reading help in the early elementary years. This academic year, I’m thrilled to be contributing regularly to Hechinger’s early childhood newsletter and coverage.

If you take all the vast human potential and the vast inequities endemic to the K-12 education system and magnify them, you have the stuff of the early childhood education beat. Ninety percent of a child’s brain develops by the age of 5, yet in many communities we pay and treat those entrusted with their care and development like fast food workers (and I’m not defending the low pay and poor treatment of fast food workers here).

Over the last three years, most of my reporting for Hechinger has focused on racial inequities in our “system” of care and education for infants, toddlers and early elementary students. In Boston, I reported on how the racist and sexist roots of the child care system, stretching back to free child care provided by enslaved people since 1619, continue to shape the deplorable conditions workers face today. And earlier this year, I spent several months investigating why Black and Latino infants and toddlers are so severely under enrolled in early intervention in some communities.

I’ll be continuing to look into these and related issues, and would love to hear from you. Some topics I know I’ll likely be reporting on include: challenges and innovations in early childhood education math instruction; the latest data and trends on exclusionary discipline of pre-K children; strategies for addressing the therapist shortage in early intervention; the child care crisis and potential solutions being explored at the state level; the use, and misuse, of cognitive testing in the early years; and forms of academic tracking in elementary school.

Please reach out about any of these topics – and more. My email is sec2002@columbia.edu. I look forward to hearing from you!

This story about Sarah Carr was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Back on the beat: A reporter’s view of early education appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Para cuando su hija cumplió 3 años, Ramona Santos Torres notó que había algo que no estaba del todo bien en su habla. La niña pequeña balbuceaba, pero nada de lo que decía era inteligible. Rara vez hacía contacto visual con otras personas. Santos Torres sabía que la mayoría de los bebés comienzan a decir algunas palabras reconocibles antes de que cumplan los 2 años. “Simplemente no podíamos entender lo que estaba diciendo”, recordó Santos Torres.

La madre, que vive en Providence, Rhode Island, se lo mencionó al pediatra de su hija. Él rápidamente descartó la preocupación, diciendo que el retraso del habla se debía a que la familia hablaba español e inglés en casa. “Fue tan frustrante lo poco que me escuchaba”, dijo Santos Torres. (Los estudios han demostrado que el bilingüismo temprano puede, de hecho, conferir beneficios sociales y cognitivos.)

Cuando a la niña la diagnosticaron con autismo y retrasos cognitivos un par de años después, no se sentía como una reivindicación, porque Santos Torres sabía que su hija había perdido una ayuda crucial durante los años críticos del desarrollo del cerebro. Ella ahora es una adolescente.

“Nos perdimos el periodo de 1 a 4, que es una edad tan preciosa”, dijo Santos Torres.

En 1986, el gobierno federal exigió que los estados proveyeran terapia a recién nacidos y niños pequeños con retrasos en el desarrollo y con discapacidades. Pero desde su inicio el programa ha sido afectado por graves brechas raciales en el acceso y la calidad. Según un estudio de investigadores de la salud pública de Boston University, para cuando cumplen 2 años, es cinco veces menos probable que niños afroamericanos elegibles con retrasos en el desarrollo reciban servicios de “intervención temprana” (el nombre de las terapias ofrecidas desde el nacimiento hasta los 3 años), en comparación con niños blancos similares. Además, datos federales recientes muestran que más de 15 estados, incluyendo Rhode Island, atienden a menos de 200 niños afroamericanos con intervención temprana en todo el estado—una fracción del número que los expertos dicen que necesita ese apoyo, la cual puede incluir fisioterapia y terapia del habla.

Sin embargo, hay niños afroamericanos y latinos sobrerrepresentados en algunos lugares y subrepresentados en otros. Pero investigaciones muestran que incluso donde los niños afroamericanos y latinos se matriculan en grandes cantidades, tienen experiencias peores que sus contrapartes blancas. Eso puede incluir más largas demoras para encontrar terapeutas y menos acceso a las terapias más útiles, incluidas las sesiones en persona.Por ejemplo, en el estado de Nueva York, los niños blancos fueron referidos a intervención temprana a edades más tempranas que los niños afroamericanos e hispanos, según una auditoría reciente. El reporte también informó que los niños afroamericanos tenían menos probabilidad de recibir terapia dentro de 30 días, que es el periodo requerido, que los niños blancos.

“Una de las cosas que vemos constantemente en la pediatría es que los niños de color reciben menos de todo”, dijo Katharine Zuckerman, profesora asociada de la pediatría en Oregon Health & Science University (la Universidad de Salud y Ciencia de Oregon), quien ha estudiado las disparidades raciales en los diagnósticos del autismo y otras condiciones. “Ellos reciben menos antibióticos. Ellos reciben menos intervención temprana”.

Related: Derechos civiles en riesgo: Estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos son suspendidos más por faltar a clase.

En los últimos años, un número creciente de padres, investigadores y políticos han enfocado su atención en estas brechas persistentes. Según ellos argumentan, las brechas juegan un papel fundamental—y uno que ha sido ignorado por mucho tiempo—en la formación de las desigualdades educativas años y décadas después de que los niños comienzan la escuela. Zuckerman relaciona esto a la ley de rendimientos decrecientes: Los cerebros de los niños se desarrollan mucho más rápidamente entre el nacimiento y los 5 años que en cualquier otro período de su vida. Entonces, un año de terapia del habla de alta calidad, por ejemplo, puede rendir mucho más para un niño de 2 años que para uno de 10 años. Un estudio encontró que la mitad de los niños terminan la intervención temprana con un nivel de funcionamiento apropiado para su edad y no requieren servicios de educación especial en el kínder.

De hecho, las desigualdades en la intervención temprana contribuyen a grandes brechas en la matriculación en educación especial. Los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos están sobrerrepresentados en muchas categorías, dicen los expertos, en parte porque es mucho menos probable que obtengan el tipo de ayuda adecuado antes de que empiecen en la escuela. Considere Washington D.C.: Los niños afroamericanos de ahí representaron menos de la mitad de los niños que recibieron intervención temprana en 2021, pero representaron el 76 por ciento de los que recibieron educación especial para niños de edad escolar. En Maryland, esas cifras fueron 31 por ciento y 41 por ciento, respectivamente.

La creciente ola de defensa tiene como objetivo combatir las disparidades de maneras diferentes. En Providence, una nueva organización comunitaria cofundada por Santos Torres ayudó a liderar una campaña exitosa para aumentar los fondos para la intervención temprana, reconociendo que las familias latinas y afroamericanas suelen sufrir más cuando haya escasez de proveedores y servicios. En Denver, las clínicas pediátricas están probando una nueva guía de comunicación que intenta proveer a los padres de grupos históricamente marginalizados con más información sobre sus hijos y sus opciones—y más apoyo en sobre cómo seguir adelante.

La administración de Biden ha redactado varias propuestas de presupuesto que aumentarían sustancialmente los fondos federales para los servicios de intervención temprana, con un enfoque en expandir el acceso para las comunidades históricamente subrepresentadas.

“Si dependiera de nosotros, todos los niños que pudieran beneficiarse de intervención temprana serían elegibles”, dijo Katherine Neas, subsecretaria adjunta del Departamento de Educación de los EE.UU. “Esa es nuestra meta”.

No obstante, aún las propuestas anteriores que habrían casi duplicado los fondos federales, no satisficieran todas las necesidades sin más inversiones a nivel estatal, dijo Neas.

“Las necesidades, y lo que podemos proporcionar, no están alineados—aún con los aumentos importantes que esta administración ha presentado”, dijo Neas. En marzo, la administración de Biden propuso un aumento de casi $400 millones para intervención temprana. El año pasado propuso un aumento aún más grande, pero al final el Congreso aprobó un aumento mucho menor de $43,7 millones.

“Demasiadas comunidades tienen expectativas muy bajas para las familias de bajos ingresos en general, y para las familias de bajos ingresos que tienen niños con discapacidades, las expectativas son más bajas aún”, dijo Neas. Agregó que eso es a pesar del hecho de que “las investigaciones en términos de lo que significa para la vida de un niño si recibe servicios de intervención temprana son bastante profundas”.

Cuando el Congreso aprobó la ley federal para la intervención temprana, conocida como la Parte C de la Ley de Educación para Individuos con Discapacidades (IDEA), otorgó a los estados un gran nivel de autonomía. Por ejemplo, algunos estados operan el programa a través de sus departamentos de salud, mientras en otros estados es una rama de sus departamentos de educación. Y algunos estados dependen más fuertemente de Medicaid como fuente de financiamiento que otros.

Por lo general, intervención temprana está proveyendo mucho menos servicios que debe. En un estudio, unos expertos estimaron que el 13 por ciento de los bebés y niños pequeños tienen retrasos en el desarrollo que les daría derecho a intervención temprana, pero encontraron que cuando tenían 2 años, solo un 10 por ciento de aquellos niños con retrasos en el desarrollo habían recibido servicios.

Los bebés más pequeños a veces son los más desatendidos: Muchas familias, e incluso sus médicos, no se dan cuenta de que los niños que nacen con condiciones como el síndrome Down y la espina bífida califican automáticamente para una intervención temprana, igual que la mayoría de los bebés ingresados en las unidades de cuidados intensivos neonatales de los hospitales. Y aquellos que si lo saben a menudo se enfrentan a una grave escasez de terapeutas. “He oído a médicos decir que no se sienten cómodos refiriendo a servicios que no están disponibles”, dijo Karen Berman, directora sénior de política de Illinois en Start Early en Chicago, que aboga por asuntos de la primera infancia. En Illinois, una encuesta en un hospital encontró que alrededor del 85 por ciento de los bebés que fueron referidos a intervención temprana en la unidad de cuidados intensivos neonatales no habían sido conectados con los servicios antes de su chequeo de 3 meses.

En Illinois ni en otros lugares, la pandemia no ha ayudado con la situación. En muchas comunidades, provocó una gran renuncia de los terapeutas de intervención temprana, muchos de los cuales perdieron sus salarios cuando la pandemia cerró los servicios temporalmente. Según información compilada en una reunión el año pasado de coordinadores estatales de intervención temprana, ese éxodo, combinado con una acumulación de niños que necesitaban terapia una vez que terminaran las restricciones de Covid, dejó a aproximadamente 75 por ciento de los estados con listas de espera para terapias tempranas críticas.

Related: Escasean los fondos y la capacitación cuando quienes cuidan a tus hijos son amigos y vecinos

Desde los primeros días de la infancia hasta la niñez temprana —cuando la mayoría de los niños comienzan a hablar, caminar y comer alimentos sólidos— pueden estar marcados por las disparidades raciales en el acceso a la intervención temprana. No hay respuesta sencilla ni única al porqué. En algunos casos, el personal médico o educativo puede tener prejuicios raciales o ser culturalmente ignorante. En otros casos, las familias pueden dudar de aceptar la ayuda de desconocidos, o de reconocer que su hijo o hija tenga una discapacidad. Además, las familias afroamericanas y latinas, en promedio, suelen tener más probabilidad de ser de bajos ingresos que las familias blancas, y los padres y guardianes que trabajan muchas horas en trabajos de bajos salarios a menudo les falta tiempo y flexibilidad para navegar una burocracia desmoralizante a conectarse con apoyo frecuentemente difícil de alcanzar.

Todos estos problemas estaban en juego para Santos Torres, quien no sabía nada de la intervención temprana cuando hace años le preguntó al pediatra sobre el retraso del habla de su hija. Santos Torres dijo que provenía de una familia escéptica y desconfiada sobre la idea misma de las discapacidades. “Hay un estigma sobre eso que puede ser enorme”, ella dijo. “La mentalidad era, ‘Ella lo va a dejar atrás. No es nada. Está bien’. Le tomó años a mi propia familia aceptar su discapacidad”.

Aproximadamente un año después, cuando quedó claro que no estaba “dejando atrás” sus problemas, la niña finalmente fue referida para una evaluación. Cuando comenzó las terapias en el hogar a los 5 años, cambió radicalmente la vida de su madre. Santos Torres tuvo que dejar su trabajo en un almacén para coordinar los servicios y estar en casa para la terapia de su hija. La pérdida de ingresos hizo que la familia tuviera que mudarse a una vivienda pública. “No había otra opción”, dijo Santos Torres. Después de haber perdido la intervención temprana, “fue una carrera contra el tiempo”.

Numerosos estudios han demostrado que la desconfianza en los médicos, educadores y terapeutas, la mayoría de los cuales son blancos, es una gran barrera para acceder a la intervención temprana que enfrentan muchas familias afroamericanas en particular.

“Hay un temor de confiar en una fuerza laboral abrumadoramente blanca y monolingüe junto al asunto de que las familias de color ven las discapacidades y los retrasos de maneras muy diferentes”, dijo Evandra Catherine, profesora asistente en el programa de primera infancia en Arizona State University.

Un estudio que incluía en su mayoría familias afroamericanas y familias de bajos ingresos encontró que muchos padres creen que los retrasos en el desarrollo desaparecerán por sí solos y muchas veces prefieren ayudar a sus hijos por su cuenta. El estudio también encontró que el personal de las agencias de intervención temprana reportó que algunos padres confundían los servicios de intervención temprana con los servicios de protección infantil, percibiendo la intervención no solo como una intrusión, sino como una amenaza real.

Micaiah Young, que vive en un suburbio de Milwaukee, dijo que tuvo que superar su desconfianza hacia el administrador escolar blanco de un programa Montessori que le dijo hace unos años que su hijo preescolar tenía un retraso del habla. El personal de la escuela predominantemente blanca había hecho comentarios negativos sobre su hijo en varias ocasiones. Él recuerda una conferencia en la que un maestro solo dijo cosas negativas sobre el niño, quien solo tenía 3 años en ese entonces. “Sabía que estaba lidiando con el racismo contra mi hijo”, dijo Young. “Pero por alguna razón, cuando hizo el comentario sobre los retrasos del habla, me di cuenta: Esto es probablemente cierto”.

Aunque 13 por ciento de los bebés y niños pequeños tienen retrasos en el desarrollo que les daría derecho a intervención temprana, solo un 10 por ciento de aquellos niños habían recibido servicios antes de cumplir 2 años.

El padre tomó un acto de fe para seguir el consejo del administrador—

uno que está contento de haber tomado, ya que su hijo se benefició enormemente de la ayuda temprana e individualizada. Pero Young comprende la reticencia de muchas familias afroamericanas a participar en la intervención temprana y la educación especial. Les preocupa que, sin personal y comunicación más diversos y culturalmente sensibles, “muchos niños afroamericanos seguirán pasando desapercibidos”.

Otros padres encuentran un obstáculo opuesto: Desesperadamente quieren ayuda para sus hijos pequeños discapacitados y enfrentan tratos despectivos o parciales cuando la intentan obtener.

Catherine dijo que puede ser que los médicos blancos están menos preocupados cuando los niños afroamericanos no alcanzan los hitos del desarrollo debido a amplios “estereotipos y prejuicios de que las personas afroamericanas son menos inteligentes”. Ella comparó tales rechazos con “médicos que no creen a las personas afroamericanas cuando están sufriendo dolor”.

“No se trata solamente de la intervención temprana, sino de remisiones para servicios preventivos o el manejo del dolor. Existe mucho prejuicio implícito”.

Naiommy Baret, una madre de Providence, Rhode Island, dijo que durante los últimos años a veces se sentía desestimada e infravalorada cuando interactuaba con médicos mientras ella intentaba conseguir que su hijo fuera diagnosticado y tratado por un retraso del habla y epilepsia. “Una de las cosas por las que realmente abogo es elevar las voces de los padres y llevar sus recomendaciones a la práctica”, dijo ella. “A veces, los médicos proveen información que puede ser muy inquietante para las familias. Y tienen que combinar la humildad cultural con comprensión sobre lo difícil que puede haber sido el proceso para las familias”.

Sanaa Sharrieff, una madre de North Carolina, dijo que encontró una forma de prejuicio implícito hace unos años cuando intentó obtener servicios de intervención temprana para su hijo pequeño, el cual ella sospechaba que tenía autismo.

Algunos maestros y otras personas que trabajaban con él “presumían que él tenía problemas de la conducta” y resistían a que lo evaluaran sobre autismo, dijo la madre. Ella tuvo que esforzarse durante años para obtener una evaluación psicológica completa. Cuando finalmente lo logró, su hijo ya tenía 7 años. La evaluación confirmó que él tenía autismo, pero llegó demasiado tarde para recibir terapias ocupacionales, físicas, del habla y de otros tipos en un momento en que quizás podrían haber sido más beneficiosas.

“Es mi firme creencia”, dijo Sharrieff, “que mi estatus socioeconómico, mi raza y mi estatus de aseguranza fueron barreras patentes a obtener esos servicios para mi hijo”.

Cuando se trata de la intervención temprana, los obstáculos no se acaban con el acceso básico. Zuckerman, de Oregon Health & Science University, dijo que enfocarse simplemente en las disparidades raciales en la participación oscurece un problema aún mayor en algunas comunidades: La experiencia desigual que muchas familias de color experimentan una vez que ingresan al programa. Un estudio que ella coescribió, por ejemplo, encontró que los niños pequeños latinos de familias hispanohablantes eran tan propensos como los de habla inglesa a ser diagnosticados con retrasos del habla, si no más. Pero sus diagnósticos eran menos específicos—en vez de identificar un desafío de articulación particular, los niños latinos solían recibir la designación general de “retraso del lenguaje”—y por lo tanto menos útiles para conectar a las familias con las terapias más beneficiosas. “El personal de intervención temprana no está bien equipado para evaluar a niños de diversos orígenes”, ella dijo. 

Related: ​​Por qué los estudiantes blancos tienen 250% más probabilidad de graduación en universidades públicas en comparación a los estudiantes afroamericanos   

También, para las familias latinas y afroamericanas, frecuentemente es más difícil encontrar terapeutas. Tatyana Pacheco, una madre de Brooklyn, no tuvo problema en obtener la aprobación para los servicios de intervención temprana hace casi un año. Su hijo, que entonces tenía 1 año, no estaba alcanzando los hitos del desarrollo: seguir una orden de un paso o jugar apropiadamente con juguetes.

Pero le tomó meses, ella dijo, encontrar un terapeuta dispuesto a ir en persona a su apartamento. Habían pocos disponibles para terapia en persona en su vecindario predominantemente afroamericano en Brooklyn, dijo Pacheco, mientras que los vecindarios más blancos y ricos tenían listas de terapeutas mucho más largas. De hecho, los niños afroamericanos y latinos de bajos ingresos en la ciudad de Nueva York tienen mucha menos probabilidad de recibir servicios oportunos de intervención temprana—o en absoluto, según un reporte de 2019 de Defensores de Niños de Nueva York. Pacheco sospecha que algunos terapeutas no quieren ir a su barrio debido a creencias erróneas sobre las altas tasas de crímenes. “A muchos de nosotros, los padres, nos gusta que sea en persona, pero muchos de estos terapeutas no quieren salir a los vecindarios”, ella dijo.

Eventualmente, la familia encontró un terapeuta dispuesto a venir en persona para ayudar al niño que ahora tiene 2 años, ayudándolo con habilidades motrices y cognitivas. Pero después de meses de búsqueda, a principios de enero no habían encontrado un segundo terapeuta para ayudar al niño con los retrasos del habla. Sintiéndose desesperada, a fines del año pasado Pacheco accedió a probar una sesión de terapia del habla virtual con su niño pequeño. A su hijo le fue difícil concentrarse en los videos de YouTube de “alguien leyendo un libro”, dijo su madre. La terapeuta es una “señora amable”, dijo Pacheco, pero una lección genérica por computadora no captó el interés de su niño de 2 años.

“No funcionó en lo absoluto”, dijo su madre.

No es poco común que los padres que se han sentido mal atendidos—o completamente descuidados—por intervención temprana se conviertan en líderes para abogar por una expansión del acceso. Para Santos Torres, fue una evolución paulatina. Después de que renunció a su trabajo y se mudó a la vivienda pública, se volvió más segura de si misma y de su conocimiento sobre cómo navegar el sistema de educación especial de Providence.

A la larga, ella se dio cuenta de que quería dedicar su carrera a apoyar a padres con desafíos similares—o incluso mayores, ya que ella, a diferencia de muchos de sus iguales, habla inglés con fluidez. Santos Torres regresó a estudiar trabajo social, y durante casi una década ha trabajado como defensor de los padres. Hace cinco años, ella cofundó Padres Lideres por la Equidad Educativa, que en 2021 enfocó parte de sus esfuerzos en fortalecer el sistema de intervención temprana del estado.

“Mi experiencia con mi hija fue hace 15 años”, ella dijo, “y, a pesar de eso, hoy oigo que suceden las mismas cosas”.

Durante más de un año, Santos Torres ha convocado grupos de trabajo de padres —la mayoría, como ella, mujeres de clase trabajadora con hijos con discapacidades— para diseñar recomendaciones para fortalecer la intervención temprana en Rhode Island. Entre sus prioridades: aumentar la diversidad entre los proveedores de intervención temprana, ofrecer terapias en horarios no tradicionales, y crear una línea de ayuda estatal multilingüe para las familias que necesitan ayuda con cualquier parte del proceso.

El objetivo es crear un sistema de intervención temprana diseñado y moldeado más directamente por las familias a las que sirve, dijo Santos Torres. “Estamos pidiendo a los proveedores y a los responsables que compartan el poder con las familias”, ella dijo.

“Una de las cosas que vemos constantemente en la pediatría es que los niños de color reciben menos de todo”.

Katharine Zuckerman, profesora asociada de la pediatría en Oregon Health & Science University

El pasado junio, los esfuerzos del grupo ayudaron a impulsar a los legisladores estatales a aumentar sustancialmente los fondos para los proveedores de servicios de intervención temprana—aumentando las tasas de reembolso un 45 por ciento, el primer aumento de cualquier tipo en 20 años. En Rhode Island, los reembolsos se realizan principalmente a través de Medicaid, que atiende a las personas con bajos ingresos o discapacidades.

Padres Lideres por la Equidad Educativa también ha convocado a padres, líderes de agencias estatales y superintendentes para intercambiar ideas sobre prioridades para servir mejor a los niños pequeños con discapacidades. Y están trabajando en obtener más datos sobre el número y la demografía de las familias en la lista de espera para servicios de intervención temprana del estado.

En Denver, varias familias ayudaron a crear una nueva herramienta de comunicación dirigida a mejorar la forma en que los médicos y otros proveedores hablan con los padres y guardianes sobre los retrasos en el desarrollo, dijo Dawn Magnusson, una fisioterapeuta que encabezó el esfuerzo. Magnusson es profesor asistente en University of Colorado’s School of Medicine (la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Colorado) y ha realizado amplias investigaciones sobre las disparidades raciales en la intervención temprana.

“Lo diseñamos para facilitar una conversación cuando haya una preocupación sobre el desarrollo de un niño, particularmente cuando hay una desconexión o discordancia entre el proveedor y los padres o guardianes”, dijo Magnusson.

“A pesar de un mayor conocimiento, estamos en una de las crisis más agudas jamás vistas para la intervención temprana”.

Karen Berman, directora sénior de política de Illinois en Start Early en Chicago

La guía de comunicación, que se está probando en cuatro clínicas pediátricas en el área de Denver, tiene como objetivo “ralentizar” la conversación para que tanto los médicos como los padres o tutores comprendan mejor la perspectiva del otro. Incluye apuntes de muestra y también preguntas que los médicos y otros proveedores pueden consultar, como: Suena que a [nombre del niño] le gusta __ y le cuesta un poco de trabajo con __. ¿Qué ve usted que serían los próximos pasos para apoyar el desarrollo de su hijo? O, Cuénteme sobre cualquier servicio o programa en el que esté participando para ayudar a apoyar el desarrollo de su hijo. ¿Qué está sucediendo ya para apoyar el desarrollo de su hijo?

La guía anima a los proveedores a ser curiosos, pero no intrusivos en determinar por qué una familia pueda desconfiar de la intervención temprana. Puede ser que una madre prefiera confiar en el consejo y el apoyo de su familia, por ejemplo. O puede ser que a una inmigrante indocumentada le preocupe que un desconocido visite su casa. Estas dos preocupaciones tendrían que ser tratadas—

y posiblemente abordadas—de maneras muy diferentes.

“La confianza y la comprensión no son inherentes a estas relaciones”, dijo Magnusson, “y necesitamos construirlas y desarrollarlas con las familias”.

En algunas comunidades, el acceso equitativo a los servicios de intervención temprana se ha convertido en una prioridad de derechos civiles para los líderes afroamericanos. En Illinois, por ejemplo, hace más de dos años Start Early habló en las audiencias del Illinois Legislative Black Caucus (el grupo afroamericano de la asamblea legislativa de Illinois) sobre varios desafíos que enfrentan los niños pequeños y sus familias en el estado. Los legisladores se apresuraron a expandir el acceso a intervención temprana como una prioridad para la primera infancia, citando el mayor número de bebés y niños pequeños afroamericanos y latinos que languidecen en las listas de espera para recibir servicios en el estado. “Es inmensamente útil cuando haya legisladores exigiendo acción”, dijo Berman.

En 2021, el Black Caucus impulsó una serie de cambios para ampliar el acceso a la intervención temprana, incluida la creación de proyectos de demostración en dos unidades de cuidados intensivos neonatales en hospitales, con la intención de modelar cómo conectar más rápidamente a las familias con los servicios.

A pesar del progreso en Illinois, Rhode Island y otros estados, las listas de espera para los servicios siguen siendo largas en la mayoría de los estados. Los expertos dicen que el sistema ha sido infradotado durante tanto tiempo, con los terapeutas con frecuencia ganando solo una fracción de la tarifa por hora que podrían ganar en el sector privado, que las reformas podrían tardar muchos años en tener un impacto profundo. “A pesar de un mayor conocimiento, estamos en una de las crisis más agudas jamás vistas para la intervención temprana”, dijo Berman.

Santos Torres planea seguir abogando hasta que haya disminuido el riesgo de que otra familia sufra lo que sufrió ella. Su hija ahora tiene casi 18 años y asiste a una pequeña escuela secundaria privada en Rhode Island enfocada en niños con necesidades especiales. La adolescente ha progresado considerablemente, pero aún le toma más tiempo cosas como atar los cordones de sus zapatos. Ella también todavía tiene dificultad en pronunciar ciertas palabras correctamente. Santos Torres sabe que será un reto para su hija obtener un título universitario. “Todavía no está preparada para la universidad”, dijo la madre.

Santos Torres está segura de que las necesidades de su hija no serían tan graves si hubieran podido acceder a ayuda antes. “Tengo que creer que en cuanto al habla y algunas de las habilidades motrices, hubiera sido diferente si hubiera recibido los servicios antes”, dijo la madre. “¿Pudo la intervención temprana haber resuelto todos estos problemas con los que todavía se enfrenta? No sé. Es una pregunta que ninguna familia debería tener que hacerse”.

El reportaje de Carr para este artículo fue apoyado por el Dart Center on Trauma and Journalism’s Early Childhood Global Reporting Fellowship, una beca.

The post Los bebés y niños pequeños afroamericanos y latinos a menudo pierden las terapias tempranas que necesitan appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

By the time her daughter turned 3, Ramona Santos Torres noticed something not quite right about the child’s speech. The toddler babbled, but nothing she said was intelligible. She rarely made eye contact with other people. Most babies, Santos Torres knew, start to utter some recognizable words before they reach the age of 2. “We just couldn’t make out what she was saying,” Santos Torres recalled.

The mother, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, mentioned it to her daughter’s pediatrician, who quickly dismissed the concern, saying the speech delay was because the family spoke both Spanish and English at home. “It was so frustrating how little he listened to me,” Santos Torres said. (Studies have shown that early bilingualism can in fact confer social and cognitive benefits.)

When the girl was diagnosed with autism and cognitive delays a couple of years later, it hardly felt like vindication, because Santos Torres knew that her daughter had missed crucial help during critical years of brain development. She’s now a teenager.

“We missed that window from 1 to 4, which is such a precious age,” she said. 

In 1986, the federal government mandated that states provide therapy for newborns and toddlers with developmental delays and disabilities, but the program has been dogged by severe racial gaps in access and quality since its inception. By the time they turn 2, eligible Black toddlers with developmental delays are five times less likely than similar white children to receive “early intervention” services (the name for the therapies offered from infancy to the age of 3), according to a study from public health researchers at Boston University. Moreover, recent federal data shows that more than 15 states, including Rhode Island, serve fewer than 200 Black children statewide through early intervention — a fraction of the number that experts say need the support, which can include physical and speech therapy.

The picture is mixed depending on the community, however, with Black and Latino children overrepresented in some places and underrepresented in others. But research shows that even where Black and Latino children enroll in high numbers, they have worse experiences than their white peers. That can include longer delays in finding therapists and less access to the most helpful therapies, including in-person sessions.For example, in New York state, white children were referred to early intervention at younger ages than Black and Hispanic children, according to a recent audit. The report also said Black children were less likely than white children to receive therapy in the required 30-day timeframe. 

“One of the things we consistently see in pediatrics is that children of color get less of everything,” said Katharine Zuckerman, an associate professor of pediatrics at Oregon Health & Science University who has studied racial disparities in diagnoses of autism and other disorders. “They get less antibiotics. They get less early intervention.” 

“One of the things we consistently see in pediatrics is that children of color get less of everything,”

Katharine Zuckerman, associate professor of pediatrics, Oregon Health & Science University

A growing number of parents, researchers and politicians have in recent years turned their attention to these persistent gaps, which they argue play a pivotal — and long-overlooked — role in shaping educational inequities years, even decades, after children start school. Zuckerman likens it to the law of diminishing returns: Children’s brains develop much more rapidly between birth and 5 than in any other period in their life. So a year of high-quality speech therapy, for instance, can mean much more for a 2-year-old than a 10-year-old. One study found that half of children leave early intervention functioning at a level appropriate for their age and do not require special education services in kindergarten.

Indeed, the disparities in early intervention contribute to large gaps in special education enrollment. Black and Latino students are overrepresented in many categories, experts say, partly because they are so much less likely to get the right kind of help before they start school. Consider Washington D.C.: Black children made up less than half of children receiving early intervention in 2021, but represented 76 percent of those receiving special education for school-age children. In Maryland, those figures were 31 percent and 41 percent, respectively.

Related: Online therapy for babies and toddlers with delays often works well, but the funding isn’t keeping up with the need

The growing wave of advocacy aims to combat the disparities in different ways. In Providence, a new grassroots organization co-founded by Santos Torres helped lead a successful campaign to increase funding for early intervention, recognizing that Latino and Black families often suffer more when there’s a shortage of providers and services. In Denver, pediatric clinics are trying out a new communication guide that aims to give parents from historically marginalized backgrounds more information about their child and their options — and greater input in how to move forward.

The Biden administration has drafted several budget proposals that would substantially increase federal funding for early intervention services, with a focus on expanding access for historically underrepresented communities.

 “If it was up to us every child who could benefit from early intervention would be eligible,” said Katherine Neas, deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education. “This is the goal we are going for.”

A study found that 13 percent of infants and toddlers qualify for early intervention services, but only 10 percent of those children receive them by age 2.

Yet even past proposals that would have nearly doubled federal funding will not meet all the need without some greater investment at the state level, Neas said.

“The need, and what we are able to provide, are not in alignment—even with the significant increases that this administration has put forward,” she said. Last year, the Biden administration proposed an increase of more than $400 million for early intervention, with Congress ultimately approving a much smaller bump of $43.7 million. This year’s budget proposal will be presented to Congress March 9.

“Too many communities have very low expectations for low-income families in general, and for low-income families that have kids with disabilities the expectations are even lower,” Neas said. That’s despite the fact, she added, that the “research is quite profound in terms of what it means for a child’s life if they get early intervention services.”   

When Congress passed the federal law for early intervention, known as Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it gave states a great deal of autonomy. Some states operate the program through their health departments, for instance, while in other states it’s an offshoot of their education departments. And some rely more heavily on Medicaid as a funding source than others.

Across the board, early intervention is severely underenrolled. Experts estimated in a study that 13 percent of infants and toddlers have developmental delays that would qualify them for early intervention, but found that only 10 percent of those children with developmental delays received services by age 2.

The youngest babies are sometimes the most underserved: Many families, and even doctors, don’t realize that children born with conditions like Down syndrome and spina bifida automatically qualify for early intervention, as do most babies who spend time in hospital neonatal intensive care units. And those who are aware often face acute shortages of therapists. “I’ve heard doctors say they are not comfortable referring for services that aren’t available,” said Karen Berman, the senior director for Illinois policy at Start Early in Chicago, which advocates on early childhood issues. In Illinois, a survey at one hospital found that about 85 percent of babies referred for early intervention at the neonatal intensive care unit hadn’t connected with services by their 3-month checkup.

The pandemic has hardly helped the situation, in Illinois or elsewhere. In many communities, it caused a great resignation of early intervention therapists, scores of whom lost pay when the pandemic temporarily shut services. That exodus, combined with a backlog of children in need of therapy once Covid restrictions ended, left an estimated 75 percent of states with wait lists for the critical early therapies, according to information compiled at a meeting last year of state early intervention coordinators.

Related: Stark inequalities start early—with babies, toddlers, report says

From the earliest days of infancy through toddlerhood — when most children begin to talk, walk and eat solid foods — the racial disparities in access to early intervention can be pronounced. There is no simple or single answer as to why. In some instances, medical or educational staff might be racially biased or culturally ignorant. In other cases, families may be hesitant to accept help from strangers, or to admit their child has a disability. Moreover, Black and Latino families are, on average, more likely to be low-income than white families, and caregivers working long hours at low-wage jobs often have little time and flexibility to navigate a daunting bureaucracy to connect with often-elusive support.

All of these issues were at play for Santos Torres, who knew nothing of early intervention when she asked her daughter’s pediatrician years ago about the speech delay. Santos Torres said she came from a family that was skeptical and suspicious of the very idea of disability. “There is a stigma around it that can be huge,” she said. “The mentality was, ‘She is going to outgrow that. It’s nothing. It’s fine.’ It took years for my own family to accept her disability.”

About a year later, the girl finally got referred for an evaluation when it became clear that she was not “outgrowing” her challenges. When she started home-based therapies at the age of 5, it upended her mother’s life. Santos Torres had to quit her job at a warehouse to coordinate the services and be home for her daughter’s therapy. The loss in income caused the family to move into public housing. “There was no other choice,” Santos Torres said. Having missed early intervention, “it was this race against time.”

Numerous studies have shown that distrust of doctors, educators and therapists, most of whom are white, is a huge barrier many Black families in particular face in accessing early intervention.

“There’s a fear of trusting an overwhelmingly white and monolingual workforce alongside the issue that families of color view disabilities and delays very differently,” said Evandra Catherine, an assistant professor in the early childhood program at Arizona State University.

One study  encompassing predominantly Black and low-income families, found that many parents believe that developmental delays will go away on their own and often prefer to help their children on their own. The study also found that staff at early intervention agencies reported that some parents confused early intervention services with child protective services, perceiving the outreach as not only an intrusion, but a real threat.

Micaiah Young, who lives in a Milwaukee suburb, said he had to push past his mistrust of the white school administrator at a Montessori program who told him a few years ago that his preschool-age son had a speech delay. Staff at the child’s predominantly white school had made negative comments about his son several times. He recalls one conference where a teacher had only negative things to say about the child, then just 3. “I knew I was dealing with racism against my son,” Young said. “But for some reason when she made the comment about speech delays, it struck me: This is probably true.”

It took a leap of faith for the father to act on the advice of the administrator — one that he’s glad he took, since his son benefited greatly from the early, individualized help. But Young understands many Black families’ reluctance to engage in early intervention and special education. He worries that without more diverse and culturally sensitive staff and communication, “a lot of Black children will continue to slip through the cracks.”

Related: Preschool for children with disabilities works, but federal funding for it is plummeting

Other parents face the opposite hurdle: They desperately want help for their young children with disabilities and face dismissive or biased treatment when they try to get it.

Catherine said white physicians may be less concerned when Black children aren’t meeting developmental milestones because of broader “stereotypes and biases that Black people are less intelligent.” She compared such dismissals to “physicians not believing Black people when they are in pain.”

“It’s not just early intervention but referrals for preventative services or pain management. There’s a lot of implicit bias.”

“Despite greater awareness, we are in one of the most acute crises ever seen for early intervention,”

Karen Berman, senior director of Illinois policy for Start Early

Naiommy Baret, a mother in Providence, Rhode Island, said she’s at times felt dismissed and undervalued when dealing with doctors over the past few years as she was trying to get her son diagnosed and treated for both a speech delay and epilepsy. “One of the things that I really advocate for is to elevate parent voices and take their recommendations into practice as well,” she said. “At times, doctors are providing information that can be very triggering for families. And they need to mix cultural humility with an understanding of how hard of a process it may have been for families.”

North Carolina mother Sanaa Sharrieff said she encountered a form of implicit bias when she tried a few years ago to get early intervention services for her young son, who she suspected had autism.

Some teachers and others who worked with him “assumed he had behavioral issues,” and were reluctant to test him for autism, said the mother. She had to push over years for a full psychological evaluation. When that finally happened, Sharrieff’s son was already 7 years old. The evaluation confirmed that he had autism, but it came too late for him to receive occupational, physical, speech and other therapies at a time when they could, perhaps, have been most beneficial. 

“It is my firm belief,” Sharrieff said, “that my socioeconomic status, my race and my insurance status were glaring barriers to getting those services for my son.”

When it comes to early intervention, the hurdles don’t end with basic access. Oregon Health & Science University’s Zuckerman said focusing solely on racial disparities in participation masks an even bigger problem in some communities: The unequal experience that many families of color have once they enter the program. One study she co-wrote, for instance, found that young Latino children from Spanish-speaking homes were just as likely as English speakers to be diagnosed with speech delays, if not more so. But the diagnoses were less specific—instead of pinpointing a particular articulation challenge the Latino children tended to get the general “language delay” designation—and therefore less helpful in connecting families with the most beneficial therapies. “Early intervention staff are not well equipped to evaluate children from diverse backgrounds,” she said.  

Latino and Black families also frequently struggle more to find therapists. Tatyana Pacheco, a Brooklyn mother, had no problem getting approved for early intervention services nearly a year ago. Her then 1-year-old son wasn’t hitting developmental milestones: following a one-step command or playing appropriately with toys.

But it took months, she said, to find a therapist willing to come in person to her apartment. Few were available for in-person therapy in the family’s predominantly Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, Pacheco said, while whiter, wealthier neighborhoods had much longer lists of therapists. Indeed, low-income Black and Latino children in New York City are much less likely to get timely early intervention services — or at all, according to a 2019 report from Advocates for Children of New York. Pacheco suspects that some therapists don’t want to come to her neighborhood because of inaccurate beliefs about high crime rates. “A lot of us parents like it to be in person, but a lot of these therapists don’t want to come out to the neighborhoods,” she said. 

Eventually, the family found a therapist willing to come in person to help the now 2-year-old, coaching him on motor and cognitive skills. But after months of looking, they had not as of early January found a second therapist who can help the child with speech delays. Feeling desperate, late last year Pacheco agreed to try a virtual speech session with the toddler. Her son struggled to focus on YouTube videos of “someone reading a book,” his mother said. The therapist is a “nice lady,” Pacheco said, but a boilerplate lesson over the computer did not engage the 2-year-old.

“It was not working at all,” his mother said.

It’s not uncommon for parents who have felt ill-served — or neglected entirely — by early intervention to become leaders in the push to expand access. For Santos Torres, it was a gradual evolution. After she quit her job and moved into public housing, she grew more confident and knowledgeable about navigating Providence’s special education system.

Ultimately, she realized she wanted to devote her career to supporting parents with similar challenges — or even greater challenges since she, unlike many of her peers, speaks fluent English. Santos Torres returned to school to study social work, and for nearly a decade has worked as a parent advocate. Five years ago, she co-founded Parents Leading for Educational Equity, which in 2021 focused part of its efforts on strengthening the state’s early intervention system.

“My experience with my daughter was 15 years ago,” she said, “and, still, today I hear of some of the same things happening.”

For over a year, Santos Torres has convened working groups of parents — most, like her, women from working-class backgrounds who had children with disabilities — to devise recommendations for strengthening early intervention in Rhode Island. Among their priorities: increasing diversity among early intervention providers, offering therapies during nontraditional hours, and creating a multilingual state help line for families who need help with any part of the process.

The goal is to create an early intervention system that’s designed and shaped more directly by the families it serves, said Santos Torres. “We’re asking providers and decision makers to share power with families,” she said.

Related: Home visiting is proven to help moms and babies. So why aren’t we investing in it more?

Last June, the group’s efforts helped spur state lawmakers to increase funding substantially for providers of early intervention services — boosting reimbursement rates by 45 percent, the first increase of any kind in 20 years. In Rhode Island, reimbursement is done largely through Medicaid, which serves people with low incomes or disabilities.

 Parents Leading for Educational Equity has also convened parents, state agency leaders and superintendents to brainstorm priorities for better serving young children with disabilities. And they are working to get more data on the number and demographics of families on the state’s waiting list for early intervention services. 

In Denver, several families helped create a new communication tool aimed at improving the way doctors and other providers talk with caregivers about developmental delays, said Dawn Magnusson, a physical therapist who spearheaded the effort. Magnusson is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine who has done extensive research on racial disparities in early intervention.

“It’s meant to facilitate a conversation when there’s a concern about a child’s development, particularly when there’s a disconnect or discordance between provider and caregiver,” said Magnusson.

The communication guide, which is being piloted in four pediatric clinics in the Denver area, aims to “slow down” the conversation so that both doctors and caregivers have a better understanding of where the other person is coming from. It includes sample prompts and questions doctors and other providers can turn to, like: It sounds like [child’s name] enjoys __ and struggles a bit with __. What do you see as next steps in supporting your child’s development? Or, Tell me about any services or programs that you’re participating in to help support your child’s development. What’s already happening to support your child’s development?

The guide encourages providers to be curious but not intrusive in determining why a family might be wary of early intervention. It could be that a mother prefers to rely on family advice and support, for instance. Or it could be that an undocumented immigrant worries about a stranger visiting her home. These two concerns would need to be discussed — and potentially addressed — very differently.

“Trust and understanding isn’t inherent in these relationships,” said Magnusson, “and we need to build that and develop it with families.”

In some communities, equitable access to early intervention services has emerged as a civil rights priority for Black leaders. In Illinois, for instance, Start Early spoke more than two years ago at Illinois Legislative Black Caucus hearings about various challenges young children and their families face in the state. The lawmakers jumped on expanding access to early intervention as a priority for early childhood, citing the higher numbers of Black and Latino infants and toddlers languishing on wait lists for services in the state. “It’s immensely helpful when you have legislators calling for action,” said Berman.

In 2021, the Black Caucus pushed through a series of changes to expand access to early intervention, including the creation of demonstration projects at two neonatal intensive care units in hospitals, intended to model how to more quickly connect families to services.

Despite the progress in Illinois, Rhode Island and other states, waiting lists for services remain long in most states. Experts say the system had been underfunded for so long, with therapists frequently earning only a fraction of the hourly rate they could make in the private sector, that it could take many years for reforms to make a deep impact. “Despite greater awareness, we are in one of the most acute crises ever seen for early intervention,” said Berman.

Santos Torres plans to keep agitating until there’s little risk of another family enduring what she did. Her daughter is now nearly 18 and attending a small private high school in Rhode Island focused on children with special needs. The teen has made considerable progress, but it still takes her extra time to do things like tying her shoes. She also still struggles to pronounce certain words correctly. Santos Torres knows that it will be a challenge for her daughter to get a college diploma. “She is not yet prepared for college,” the mother said.

Santos Torres is sure that her daughter’s needs would not be so severe if she had been helped sooner. “I have to believe as far as speech and some of the motor skills struggles, it would have been different if she had received services earlier,” the mother said. “Could early intervention have solved all of these issues she still deals with? I don’t know. It’s a question no family should have to ask.”

Carr’s reporting for this story was supported by the Dart Center on Trauma and Journalism’s Early Childhood Global Reporting Fellowship.

This story about early intervention was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Black and Latino infants and toddlers often miss out on early therapies they need appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

FAIRFAX, Va. — For years, the Fairfax County NAACP’s small education committee devoted itself mostly to fights over Confederate school names and acts of racism against individual students. It waged battles that mattered for some, “but rarely made us feel like we were having a profound impact on the system,” said Sujatha Hampton, who became chair of the committee in 2019.

That changed in the summer of 2020. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, committee membership exploded. By 2021, it had committed to its most ambitious goal yet: overhauling the way Fairfax County Public Schools teaches students to read and supports struggling readers. The performance gap in reading pass rates between Black and white students was nearly 20 percentage points—virtually unchanged since the district had first made “minority achievement” a priority in 1984.

In a virtual meeting that March with Fairfax’s school district leaders, Hampton said the NAACP would “flood the Internet with your poor reading scores for Black and brown students if you don’t take this seriously.” The cause, as activists saw it, was partly “the absence of systematic, cumulative, phonics-based reading instruction in the early elementary classroom,” they later wrote in an open letter. “All the research suggests that this shift would have the most immediate and profound impact on closing the achievement gap.” Some teachers had always incorporated phonics—intentionally sequenced lessons in how to sound out words from letters—but the district had not made it a requirement.

School district leaders committed to radical and swift change. And this past school year, dozens of elementary school administrators started training in LETRS, or Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, which teaches them the “science of reading,” including how students learn to decode letters on the page and form meaning from words. The district gave all kindergarten through second-grade teachers scripted lesson plans featuring phonics. They were told to implement them immediately.

The NAACP provided the “catalyst” for rapid change, said Noel Klimenko, assistant superintendent for instructional services for FCPS. “It has been controversial,” she added, “and non-optional.”

The Fairfax group, and its neighboring chapter in Arlington, Virginia, are among a growing number of NAACP organizations that have in recent years turned their attention to how reading is taught in school. They are part of a nationwide movement to embrace what cognitive science shows us about how students learn to read, particularly about the role of phonics—and they see this as a path toward social justice.

The line separating “secure v insecure, access v exclusion, captive v free” is a modern Mason-Dixon line, argues Kareem Weaver, an Oakland-based educator and the education lead of the city’s NAACP chapter. He and a growing number of other activists and parents see reading as a defining civil rights priority of the 21st century.

Related: While white students get specialists, struggling Black and Latino readers often get left on their own

In Emily VanDerhoff’s first-grade classroom this fall, Fairfax students have mastered consonant-vowel-consonant words: cat, bed, dog. It is the second year that VanDerhoff feels like she is fully incorporating “evidence-based” practices.

A few years ago, she taught reading skills very differently. For example, she might have read a book like “What Is at the Zoo,” in which each page follows a predictable pattern: Are there elephants at the zoo? Yes, there are. Are there giraffes at the zoo? Yes, there are. The students wouldn’t have learned enough phonics to be able to read words like “giraffe” and “elephant,” so they were expected to rely on the picture and the first letter to recognize or guess the words.

Some learned phonics partly on their own—or simply memorized different letter patterns. But “those that didn’t learn to recognize longer and more complex patterns fell off a cliff in third grade,” VanDerhoff said. “There aren’t pictures anymore then.”

Inequities were visible in which children sought outside (and usually expensive) help. The teacher, a member of the NAACP’s education committee, altered her approach even before the district announced its change.

Nobody in Hampton’s family struggled to read. Her son learned on his own by the age of 2, and Hampton, who is Indian American and whose husband is Black, made sure her daughter could read fluently before the child started preschool. “I was not going to have a Black child going to school without knowing how to read,” she said. “I could not take the risk that the school would not see her as smart enough—or not smart at all.” She said she feels fortunate that it was a relatively easy path for both her kids.

Still, while she worked toward her master’s degree in special education, Hampton taught many youth labelled “emotionally disturbed”—almost all of whom, she said, were Black and struggled with reading. So, Hampton taught herself how to teach phonics, and devoted much of her time to tutoring her students in reading. “As soon as they learned to read, a lot of troubling behaviors disappeared,” she said.

When Hampton took the helm of the NAACP’s education committee over three years ago, she wanted to focus on structural inequality, not just incidents of racism. The committee pushed to change the admissions system for the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology magnet school, for instance, to broaden access for Black and Hispanic students.

In 2020, after committee membership reached an all-time high, a white Fairfax mother spoke up at one of the Zoom meetings. Her family had spent more than $20,000 on private language therapy to help her son, who is dyslexic, learn to read. She worried about the disproportionate impact felt by Black and Hispanic children, noting that universal access to stronger reading instruction might be the most effective way to narrow the yawning racial achievement gap in reading results.

“She was a white woman with white children but framed it in racial equity terms,” Hampton said. “We felt like we could get behind it and know that we were taking care of our kids.” (The mother did not want to be identified to protect the privacy of her son.)

The NAACP linked up with two other organizations—Decoding Dyslexia Virginia and the Fairfax County Special Education PTA—to push for change. The three groups spent the late fall and early winter of 2020 coordinating their efforts, strategizing on messaging and plotting a heavy-handed appeal to the district. (They followed up on the NAACP’s literacy letter in spring of 2021 with a joint missive to the district.) “We really picked up steam when the organizations joined forces,” said Diane Cooper-Gould, a founder and advocacy co-chair of the Special Education PTA and a parent of a student with dyslexia. Before that, “we were making very, very slow headway,” she said.

Hampton knew that the opportunity to effect change probably would be limited, since school district leaders would ultimately shift their focus away from racial justice issues. “We had a window of interest,” she said, “and we tried to make sure we capitalized on it.”

Related: States’ urgent push to overhaul reading instruction

The FCPS superintendent at the time, Scott Brabrand, who left the school district this past summer and now serves as executive director of the Virginia Association of School Superintendents, declined to comment. But other district officials say the combined pressure from the groups, and particularly the NAACP, was critical to engendering change.

“I don’t think that without the outside push and the NAACP letter we would have made as rapid a shift,” said Carrie Leestma,an education specialist for the district who until recently focused entirely on dyslexia.

As a onetime special education teacher, Leestma had regularly encountered teenagers who struggled to read. She recalls one 15-year-old who had been held back and was reading at a second-grade level in eighth grade. Looking at his file, she worried about his options in life. “Within a couple of months, he was arrested, and he’s still in jail now,” she said.

“We shouldn’t be able to look at a group of kindergarteners and know in six years who is not going to be reading, based on race,” Leestma added.

Symone Walker, co-chair of Arlington’s NAACP education committee, sent a similar letter to Arlington Public Schools as the one that engendered change in Fairfax. Walker became an advocate after travails in getting her own son, Jackson, help with reading in the county’s schools. Despite persistent struggles, Jackson, now 17, did not get diagnosed with dyslexia until the summer before 8th grade. (Jackson is being referred to by his middle name to protect his privacy.)

“I’m a lawyer, and I’m educated,” Walker said. “But when it came to my own child, I felt vulnerable and lost and overwhelmed.”

Jackson’s teachers blamed his early difficulties with reading on his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She treated it with medication, but he continued to struggle with reading. “If a teacher asked me to read something on the board, I wouldn’t want to because I knew that I struggled more than other kids,” Jackson said.

Throughout elementary school, Jackson’s teachers repeatedly dismissed the family’s concerns, a nonchalance that Walker at least partly attributes to the fact that “there are lower expectations for Black kids and what they are capable of doing. So, they weren’t alarmed that he couldn’t read in first or second grade.” In fourth grade, Jackson started getting some individual help, but the school refused to specify in his individualized education program what reading remediation program they were using, despite his mother’s repeated requests. “I don’t think I got the proper help I actually needed,” Jackson said.

As the years progressed, teachers passed Jackson along, and he received mostly good grades but still floundered with reading. He struggled to sound out and recognize words, and he frequently had to guess based on context. By middle school, Jackson said, he started to despair of ever catching up. “It felt like I wasn’t progressing,” he said.

Seventh grade was pivotal. Toward the end of the year, educators told his mother they no longer thought he needed special education services—“they literally congratulated me,” she said—even though he couldn’t read well. That summer, Walker arranged to have Jackson evaluated independently. “It was bleak,” Walker said of the diagnosis. Jackson read several years behind his grade level; he was severely dyslexic and required intensive help that he had never received in the public schools.

Related: Want your child to receive better reading help in public school? It might cost $7,500

Although Walker accepted the diagnosis, she notes that other relatives, including Jackson’s father, were more resistant initially—a hesitancy she and several others say is common in Black communities. “I see a reluctance in a lot of Black families in not wanting to acknowledge or talk about learning disabilities,” she said. “There’s a hesitation to take on the additional stigma. … Daily, we fight microaggressions and negative stereotypes that we are not ‘good enough’ and not ‘smart enough.’”

In eighth grade, still lacking sufficient academic help, Jackson began to act out, throwing paper and stalking around the classroom. “I started to get emails about disruptive behavior,” Walker said. Jackson said he was frustrated academically but also was “naturally a class clown.”

“You weren’t born a class clown. You became a class clown,” his mother replied.

Jackson thought this over; he mostly agreed. “I think a lot of it had to do with the reading. I do,” he said.

Walker knew that the odds of Jackson getting referred to the police or criminal justice system were much higher than for white students with similar behaviors in school. “The school-to-prison pipeline became real for me,” she said. As Jackson finished eighth grade, Walker, along with education committee co-chair Sherrice Kerns, sent the NAACP letter to Arlington, hoping that it might help prevent other families, and particularly families of color, from experiencing the despair and frustration she felt over her son’s struggles in school.

She also took out a home equity loan so she could afford to send Jackson to the Siena School, a private program in Silver Spring, Maryland, focused on kids with dyslexia—even though it meant a 90-mile round-trip drive each weekday.

Superintendent Francisco Durán, new to Arlington Public Schools in the spring of 2020, was “open and willing” to embrace reading reforms, but Walker knew any changes would be too late to help her now high school-age son. At Siena, in contrast, Jackson said, he felt like “every single teacher was helpful,” and he began to progress. For the first time, he began talking about graduating high school and someday attending college.

The decision hasn’t been an easy one financially, Walker said. But “I thought it was a matter of saving my son’s life.”

However well done, phonics alone is insufficient. More than 20 years ago, the National Reading Panel endorsed the efficacy of phonics if taught in a systemic way and combined with other key elements of teaching literacy, including an emphasis on understanding spoken language. Put together, all these elements are referred to as the “science of reading.”

But for many years, a few literacy experts and authors who downplayed the importance of explicit phonics instruction held sway over both teachers’ colleges and the curricula classrooms used for millions of kids. Some educators have long been among the main opponents to reading reform, reluctant to go against their own training and ingrained practice.

One reason for the enduring resistance is that many children learn how to read without extensive phonics instruction. And some key leaders in the field are just becoming aware of how many children struggle without it—including the vast inequities that can result.

That growing awareness is leading to change. A new Virginia state law, for instance, will require all school districts to adopt curriculums aligned with the science of reading, among other changes. Many other states have made similar reforms, including Mississippi, Delaware and North Carolina.

Related: Retraining an entire state’s elementary teachers in the science of reading

In Fairfax County, Klimenko says the district faced reluctance from several teachers and administrators who were accustomed to other methods, but that’s diminishing—especially as educators realize they are by no means shifting to a phonics-only approach. VanDerhoff, the teacher, said some resistance comes from teachers “needing time and support to adjust to the changes, and not having enough of it.”

“It can be a shock for people who first come across the science of reading,” she added. “It takes everything you’ve been doing and said, ‘That’s not what science supports.’”

“Those kids who are like my son that got failed up to high school and moved along semiliterate, there is no easy path for them.”

Symone Walker, education committee co-chair, Arlington, Virginia NAACP

VanDerhoff is in a group of teachers participating in the LETRS training, which can take up to 180 hours. Last school year, more than 300 Fairfax administrators and teachers received LETRS training, with upwards of 200 more expected to do so this year. More than 1,000 teachers have also had training in Orton-Gillingham, which is popular for struggling readers because of the explicit instruction on the connection between letters and sounds.

Yet Fairfax schools employs more than 6,500 elementary teachers (and that’s not including ones who teach subjects like art, music and gym), meaning the training has reached just a fraction. Still, 98 percent of school literacy specialists, who provide support and expertise to classroom teachers, have been trained or will be this year, according to the district.

Arlington, a much smaller district, has been following a similar path. Superintendent Durán arrived in 2020 already in favor of transforming reading instruction. Over the next two years, the district focused on kindergarten through third grade, training reading specialists in LETRS and providing early-elementary-school teachers with a curriculum that emphasizes phonics. More recently, the work extended to fourth- and fifth-grade teachers, according to Durán.

“Students who are struggling with reading need very explicit phonics instruction,” Durán said. When that’s not present, “it’s our students of color, our English learners, and our students with disabilities who get most lost,” he added.

In Arlington, early results have been positive, with a 20 percent decrease in the number of students needing intensive reading intervention in the early elementary grades, according to Durán. In Fairfax, Klimenko said, the district does not yet have any quantitative evidence of the reforms’ impact, but anecdotal reports have been positive.

Black students scored 17 percentage points lower than white students on state reading tests in Fairfax County, Virginia during the 2021-22 school year.

In both districts, the plan is to eventually touch every grade—kindergarten through high school—with a changed approach to literacy. Part of that work will be swooping in to help high school students who are not reading at grade level, Durán said. He acknowledges that “we haven’t gotten there yet.”

And until they do, Walker said, the NAACP will not be taking literacy reform off its list of priorities. “Those kids who are like my son that got failed up to high school and moved along semiliterate, there is no easy path for them,” she said.

Her son’s success at Siena is bittersweet: Jackson is happy there, but the family wishes he could go to a more diverse high school. The teen had long dreamed of attending a large neighborhood high school where he could play sports and participate in an array of extracurriculars.

His restored confidence has been worth the sacrifice, however. Walker’s main regret now is that she didn’t know more—and therefore do more—earlier in Jackson’s education. She will work for as long as it takes to ensure other families, and particularly families of color, aren’t left playing catch-up. “I’m doing this for my grandkids,” she said of the right to read. “I see it as basic as a right to clean water.”

Carr reported this story, part of ongoing coverage on equity in access to reading supports, as an O’Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University in 2021-22.

This story about literacy instruction was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post NAACP targets a new civil rights issue—reading appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BOSTON—The worry nagged at Roxann Harvey from the time her children were in kindergarten. They couldn’t name all their letters, much less equate them with sounds. Teachers offered tepid assurances (some kids take longer than others) and frustrating advice (you should expose them to books).

But Harvey worked in a library, so both there and at home, each child had shelves full of books. Teachers insisted, “‘They will catch up,’” Harvey recalls. “I started to wonder if I was being irrational.”

Yet as kindergarten and then first grade passed by, her children, a girl and her younger brother, two grades apart, never caught up. The gap only grew. For years, Harvey pushed the school to provide her children with help from a specialist trained in a multisensory reading program that helps struggling readers make connections between words and sounds—a scarce resource in many Boston public schools. The entreaties went nowhere. “Let’s give it time,” the teachers told her.

For both of her children, it wasn’t until second grade that teachers finally grew concerned. For her son, the blithe assurances gave way to ominous warnings: “We’ll all be lucky if one day he’s able to read an article in the newspaper,” one teacher told her.

Harvey had already dropped out of her neuroscience doctorate to advocate for her children. Now she took a new job closer to home, too. “Our whole life had to change just to be focused on school and making sure my kids learned how to read.”

An estimated 5 to 15 percent of the population has dyslexia, a disorder that hinders a person’s ability to read efficiently. 

An estimated 5 to 15 percent of the population has dyslexia, the most common language disability, which hinders a person’s ability to read words correctly and efficiently. But in Boston and countless other communities, Black and Latino families have a much harder time than their white peers accessing two key tools to literacy: an instructor trained in how best to teach struggling readers the connections between letters and sounds, or a private school focused on children with language disabilities. Nationally, these teachers and schools are scarce and coveted commodities, generally accessible only to those with time, money and experience navigating complicated, sometimes intransigent bureaucracies.

In recent years, some dyslexia activists across the country have joined forces with Black and Latino leaders distraught over unequal access—jointly positioning “the right to read” as a revived civil rights movement.

“A lot of people have started talking about dyslexia as a social justice issue,” said Nicole Patton-Terry, director of the Florida Center for Reading Research. “And you’re seeing them stand next to Black and brown folks who just want high quality education for their kids.”

Related: Want to help your child to receive better reading help in public school? It might cost $7,500

In Boston, data show that both in the city’s private and public schools, white students have greater access than Black or Latino students to the most intensive, effective reading supports. In the public system, campuses with larger white student populations tend to employ significantly more teachers trained in programs designed specifically for students having difficulty learning to read, according to a Washington Post/Hechinger Report analysis of previously unreleased data obtained through an open records request last spring.

At the handful of schools with a majority white population, there’s an average of 3.5 such specialists. Schools with between 15 and 50 percent white students have two specialists, on average. And schools where fewer than 15 percent of students are white — the district average — employ just one such trained professional on average.

“Our whole life had to change just to be focused on school and making sure my kids learned how to read.”

Roxann Harvey, Boston parent

Overall, 82 percent of white students (excluding those attending schools that don’t have any elementary grades) have access to at least one specialist at their school, compared to 70 percent of Latino students and 61 percent of Black students. More than half of white students attend schools with two specialists, compared to 36 percent of Black and Latino students.

Boston public school students who struggle with reading are hugely reliant on these specialists because the district, unlike many others, has no known language-based programs or schools focused on reading remediation, said Elizabeth McIntyre, senior counsel at the EdLaw Project in Boston. The district does, however, have many separate classrooms for kids with behavior or emotional issues.

“I think the system is set up to identify kids of color who struggle to read as having emotional impairments instead of getting the academic support they need,” McIntyre said.

Dozens of Boston public school educators are currently receiving training in a specialized approach to reading instruction, known as Orton-Gillingham, according to a written statement from a district spokesperson. The goal is that one educator from each school building complete the training, with the district allocating about $1.5 million to pay the full cost and provide a stipend. The district concedes that “this is still a goal” but added that most schools have at least identified an educator to complete the process.

The district declined to make officials available for interviews, but provided information in written statements. In a statement, new superintendent Mary Skipper said, “We’re responding to the need of the moment. One thing the pandemic revealed, in particular, is the further disparities in literacy achievement, which requires that we provide much more explicit evidence-based reading support for all students in every school.”

The focus is on shoring up capacity at “high-needs” schools, according to a district spokesperson. “Over the past two years, the district has been executing on a plan to dramatically improve the delivery of literacy instruction with an emphasis on racial equity,” the district said in a statement.

Nationally, there are persistent racial and socioeconomic gaps in reading performance. White eighth graders outperformed Black ones by 24 points and Hispanic eighth graders by 17 points, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, scores released in October. The reasons are multifaceted: Black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend schools with fewer resources and higher teacher turnover. They are more likely to come from low-income homes where getting basic needs met can interfere with school and learning. And they are less likely to have teachers from their racial and ethnic background, which numerous studies have shown depresses academic achievement.

In recent years, a growing number of experts, advocates and parents have argued that educators are often too quick to blame poor reading outcomes on families, particularly low-income ones, overlooking schools’ own complicity in perpetuating unequal access.

In a May report pushing for stronger reading curricula in New York City schools, as well as an amped-up safety net for those who struggle, leaders of Advocates for Children of New York said that for too long it has been left up to families to ensure their children become literate. “Blame for low literacy rates is placed not on the system itself, but on individual students and their families,” the report stated.

Boston’s uneven safety net reflects a pervasive national problem, said Resha Conroy, founder of the New York-based Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children. “We’ve long talked about book deserts — geographic locations where there isn’t a lot of access to books,” she said. “We can apply this to structured literacy desserts — places where if your child needs a reading intervention or support it’s very difficult to find. You have to go outside of your community.” (Structured literacy includes methodical and explicit instruction in how to build words out of letter combinations.)

The Bronx, with a larger share of Black and Latino residents than any other New York City borough, is one example of a structured literacy desert, she said. It’s the lone borough without an entire school focused on children with language-based learning disabilities. Conroy could find only one private tutor in the Bronx advertising expertise in an evidence-based program for helping struggling readers, compared to scores of such tutors in the other four boroughs.

Conroy became involved in racial equity in literacy after witnessing the treatment of her son, a Black male with dyslexia, by the public schools in New York’s Westchester County. “I saw low education expectations for my son, and I heard loaded language suggesting that it was OK for him not to read,” she said during a 2022 conference focused on literacy. “I saw the stage being set to make the failure to teach him to read acceptable.”

“A lot of people have started talking about dyslexia as a social justice issue.”

Nicole Patton-Terry, director, Florida Center for Reading Research

In Boston public schools, several forces contribute to the uneven distribution of reading specialists. Research has shown that white students are more likely than Black students to be classified as dyslexic, even after controlling for literacy skills and socioeconomic status. That diagnosis typically makes it easier to obtain school-based supports. White teachers may be less likely to suspect dyslexia or another reading problem in Black students because, on average, they hold lower expectations of Black students’ academic potential. When assessing the same Black student, white teachers put their odds of graduating from high school as significantly lower than Black teachers do, according to a 2016 study from Johns Hopkins University researchers. (In Boston public schools, about 59 percent of the teachers are white, compared to about 15 percent of students.)

Moreover, schools that enroll predominantly Black and Hispanic students often face multiple, simultaneous challenges that can make it harder to identify the children who need the most specialized reading help, said Tim Odegard, Chair of Excellence in Dyslexic Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. “You don’t have a context to find those kids who would need the most support, because you don’t have a good base system,” he said. In many of these schools, it’s “not exceptional to fail to read and spell, it’s the norm.”

Related: Leading dyslexia treatment isn’t a magic bullet, studies find, while other options show promise

Boston’s special education system is much more effective at assigning and attempting to remediate behavioral and emotional disabilities than reading problems, according to several special education advocates. “I would see everything addressed for some students except for what really needed to be addressed—which is the reading disability,” said Edith Bazile, who worked as a special education teacher and administrator in the district for 32 years. (The district does have a network of separate classrooms or strands, for students with learning disabilities, some of whom have dyslexia; “many teachers” in these classrooms have training in specialized reading approaches, according to the district spokesperson. But unlike many other districts, Boston does not advertise any of these programs as having an explicit focus on language and reading disabilities.)

District officials have vowed to improve reading instruction across the board. The district has been committed to phonics and the science of reading for years, it said in a statement, including investing since 2014 in Fundations, “an explicit and systemic phonics program” for students in kindergarten through third grade.

The district said it has also significantly expanded professional development in the science of reading, including training over 800 educators in LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) which, among other things, shows educators how students learn to “decode” letters on the page and form meaning from words.

Roxann Harvey suspects that multiple factors influenced how long it took her to get reading help for her children. Her daughter’s second-grade teacher finally endorsed time with a reading specialist, and the girl began 45 minutes of small group instruction with the specialist each day. Her son, however, had behavioral challenges in addition to academic ones, and the school focused overwhelmingly on the behavior. Small for his age, with consistently high energy, he would run out of classrooms and hide under tables or inside recycling bins. Nearly every day, school staff called Harvey, asking her to come pick him up early.

In second grade, school officials recommended transferring the boy, who has both autism and dyslexia, to a program exclusively for kids with disabilities — one which Harvey knew would be more focused on behavior than reading because that’s what exists in Boston public schools. (A state audit chastised the system for sending too many boys of color into such programs.) “By second grade, there was a really strong drive to push him out of [regular] school,” Harvey said. They complained that he wasn’t motivated to learn. “They were trying to build a track record of a ‘problem child.’”

She believed her son’s behavior would improve if he got some help with his reading. But the school, she said, refused to give him the same kind of extra help that her daughter now received. One time, Harvey rewrote the plan the school had produced outlining her son’s special needs and services (called an individualized education program), irate over inaccuracies and language that “blamed the child.”

None of her son’s evaluations suggested that he lacked the intellectual capacity to learn to read. The boy, a Pokémon aficionado, has an unusually strong curiosity and memory, reciting at request the backstory and special powers of the show’s creatures and amassing 600 of the show’s cards.

In the middle of that school year, Harvey’s efforts finally paid off. The same reading specialist who worked with her daughter volunteered to work with the boy during her lunch hour. To Harvey, it wasn’t a coincidence that the woman was one of few Black teachers at the school. She saw the child’s potential in a way that other teachers failed to. With the help of the sessions, Harvey’s son began to progress, learning new letters and sounds every week.

In Boston, families of color also have dramatically less access to private schools focused on reading remediation — and not just because they are less likely to be able to afford the tuition. The Carroll School and the Landmark School, the two largest and best known programs for Boston-area children with language disabilities, enroll just a handful of Black students, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Both schools are in predominantly white Boston suburbs, though they enroll children from all over. At Carroll, 3 percent of the school’s 442 students were Black in the 2019-20 school year, and at Landmark, 4 percent of its students were Black that same year. Hispanic students constituted 7 percent and 3 percent of the schools’ populations, respectively. (Landmark said 16 percent of students identified as people of color last school year. Carroll said that in recent years, a quarter of the school’s new families have identified as people of color.)

Many of the students who attend Landmark get public assistance with tuition. They participate in what’s known as private placement: a federal guarantee that school districts must pay costs at a private school if they can’t meet the needs of a child with a disability. Families often have to spend thousands — even tens of thousands — on private evaluations to prove their child has a disability and then lawyers who can help build a case that the school district has failed to meet their needs.

Jonathan Reovan and his husband have spent more than $50,000 over the last 18 months to get their two Black adopted children—a 9-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy who both have dyslexia, among other special needs—access to private placement and stronger reading services in Boston. The money has paid for a lawyer, an advocate who charges $150 per hour, neuropsychologists, and an intensive tutoring program for their daughter. The couple hopes to recoup some of it from the school district. But they’ve felt the financial strain in the meantime, especially since Reovan left his job as a financial analyst at Harvard four years ago in order to advocate full time for the children.

“We’ve drained the retirement funds — there’s practically nothing left,” he said. “It’s a terrible equity issue,” said Reovan. When it comes to private placement, “you have to pay to play.”

Even when a school district agrees to private placement, families often discover that they hardly have their pick of private schools. One Boston mother spent years fighting for private placement for her 11-year-old daughter, who is dyslexic, only to learn that the girl “didn’t fit the profile” at Landmark, according to the mother and McIntyre, who represented the family. School officials told the mother that her daughter had spatial reasoning challenges that they could not address but provided no other details, they added.

The parent eventually found a spot for her daughter last winter at Dearborn Academy, a school in a Boston suburb that serves children with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and other challenges. It’s been going well. But the mother described the search as a “horror show” — rife with the same inequities that Black families like hers face in the public system.

Related: Sent home early: lost learning in special education

Josh Clark, Landmark’s head of school, said it’s true that there’s “a specific profile of students that we think we serve well” at his school, and that includes many students with not just a language-based disability but ADHD. Black and Latino students are more likely on average, he added, to get diagnosed with multiple disabilities due to “an inherent bias in the referral and screening process.” And they are less likely on average to have the resources to access private placement. Both of those factors contribute to the racial disparities in enrollment. “I think that Landmark is earnest in its efforts, and we know that we should do more and will do more to address the vast need across the community.” Landmark is working with more than 50 public school districts, he said, to strengthen their language-based programs.

Reovan has experienced consistent challenges in finding language-focused private schools that will accept his kids. He applied last February for his daughter to attend the Carroll School, planning to pay the $59,000 tuition out of pocket initially, and then sue the school district to get reimbursed. But Carroll officials said the girl’s “cognitive profile” did not align with her peers and refused her admission, he said.

“They are very picky,” he said. “If you have anything beyond simple dyslexia, they tend to reject you.”

Carroll’s chief enrollment and financial assistance officer, Stacey Daniels, said student diversity is a top priority, but she added that the school groups students in cohorts with comparable cognitive, academic, and social-emotional backgrounds. For some applicants, they don’t have an appropriate cohort to put them in. “For the last six years, we have been truly, deeply focused on compositionally changing the student body,” she said. That includes allocating $3.6 million this year in financial aid and training the school’s educators on cultural bias in testing

In October, the Reovans made the difficult decision for Jonathan to move with the children to the family’s second home in rural New Hampshire. “We exhausted so many options for (our son) and we were met with such fierce resistance to helping (our daughter) just learn to read in Boston Public Schools,” Reovan wrote in an email. In Boston, both the public and private systems tried to steer the boy toward a school focused on behavior rather than reading, Reovan said. Meanwhile, the school district denied the family’s request for tutoring reimbursement for the girl, and Reovan has appealed to the Massachusetts Bureau of Special Education Appeals.

“Reading services are very hard to come by, and I’m not sure why,” he said. “Regardless of intentions, there is a lot of unconscious bias and a tendency to write kids off.”

Both of Harvey’s children made steady progress once they got specialized, small group help. Yet the struggle hardly ended. Harvey, who now serves as chair of the Boston Special Education Parent Advisory Council, has had to push back several times against attempts to curtail her kids’ services. “At points in meetings, I heard, ‘They seem to be doing well. I don’t think we need this anymore.’ And I had to be very clear about the fact that they still weren’t reading on grade level.” 

Last school year, Harvey’s daughter passed out of the final level in the Wilson Reading System program, and she’s closing in on grade level reading skills: As a starting ninth grader, she tests at the seventh-grade level. And she loves it: Harvey said she sometimes reminds her daughter not to read while she walks, so she doesn’t trip.

Although she never had the money to pay for private tutoring for her children, Harvey considers herself lucky. She came into her battle with the city’s education bureaucracy with assets that not every Boston public school parent possesses: an extensive education herself, and the flexibility to advocate several hours a day when she needed to. And although, at 12, her son prefers the Dog Man books, he could read a newspaper if he wanted to.

Carr reported this story, part of ongoing coverage on equity in access to reading supports, as an O’Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University in 2021-22.

This story about dyslexia was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post While white students get specialists, struggling Black and Latino readers often get left on their own appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When Ann Civitareale’s father passed away in 2009, she little fathomed that she would spend thousands of her inheritance on medical and educational testing for her two sons. 

Yet the boys, 12 and 14, have struggled with multiple disabilities — including developmental and speech delays and profound challenges learning to read — that she did not feel the schools could sufficiently diagnose.

“Usually when you get a report back from the school, it’s just a few pages, not a comprehensive report,” she says. “I’ve always gotten them more than what the school offers. … I want them to have the best possible start in life.” 

Over the last decade, Civitareale, who lives in the Boston suburb of Medford, estimates she has spent upwards of $20,000 on the independent testing. Each of her sons has had five evaluations each, with insurance covering the base rate of $5,000. Yet Civitareale has paid an average of $2,500 out of pocket each time for “extras” not covered by her family’s already expensive insurance, including classroom observations and expert testimony at school meetings. One dyslexia evaluation with an expert who didn’t accept insurance cost her family $5,000 alone.

“It’s asking parents to know a lot. They don’t have the time; they don’t have the experience in this space; they don’t have the language. It is intimidating.”

Cassandra Archie, Advocates for Educational Equity & Excellence

Costly independent evaluations have come to play an outsize role in the diagnosis and treatment of numerous disabilities, from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to autism to dyslexia. Depending on the scope, the evaluations can involve up to two days of testing, interviews and observation with up to a dozen doctors and experts. And that’s even for disabilities that are relatively common: An estimated 9% of American kids have ADHD. Dyslexia hinders a person’s ability to read words correctly and efficiently, with between 5% and 15% of the population likely affected.

The costs can make it more complicated and expensive for whole swaths of Americans — particularly families with lower incomes and those living in rural areas — to access desperately-needed special education services.

Related: Sent home early: Lost learning in special education

“Dyslexia is not for poor kids, because you don’t get the diagnosis. You don’t get the treatment,” says Maureen Ronayne, another Medford parent. She and her husband, a carpenter, have struggled to afford repeated independent evaluations for two of their six children. She said there’s an oft-recited maxim: “This is a rich man’s game.” 

In some school districts, a specific diagnosis — and even the first-hand testimony of a neuropsychologist — can be crucial for accessing the best services. Those can range from occupational and speech therapy to small group time with a teacher to a publicly funded spot in a specialized private school. 

The system designed to support struggling students is broken—in ways that extend far beyond evaluations, says Nadine Gaab, an associate professor and reading expert at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

“Why are we not making assessments in the schools better and more comprehensive?” Speaking of reading in particular, she says: “We need to move from a reactive model to a proactive model, where we are trying to find the people who will most likely develop problems and help them before they struggle so much.” 

The independent evaluations many families find so costly and hard to access originated in a well-intended provision of federal law: the guarantee that families have the right to a second opinion.

Thousands of families each year seek out a medical exam known as a neuropsych, which looks closely at the connection between brain function and learning, and has become a critical part of diagnosing some disabilities. With many neuropsychologists temporarily suspending in-person appointments during the first year of the pandemic, and countless students struggling more than ever due to school shutdowns, the bottleneck has worsened in many communities.

Any students with more “complex” learning disabilities or developmental disabilities could benefit from a neuropysch, says Katherine Gamble, president of the Massachusetts Neuropsychological Society. “If anyone is on the autism spectrum, there is no question those kids need it.”  

“Dyslexia is not for poor kids, because you don’t get the diagnosis. You don’t get the treatment.”

Maureen Ronayne, a Medford parent

A limited number of school districts have neuropsychologists on staff or on contract, but that’s more the exception than the rule, Gamble says. “I don’t think they have the funding,” she says. Neuropsychologists “aren’t needed all the time, and there’s this question: ‘Why would we spend this money on someone who doesn’t need to see all of our kids?’”

Many families pay out of pocket for the exam — and its many “add ons.” Some, like Civitareale, a stay-at-home parent whose husband is a kitchen supervisor at a hospital, seek out deluxe health insurance plans partially because they cover neuropsych exams. Her family’s cost $1,800 a month for several years.

Others cobble together whatever money they can. One Boston parent relied on relatives who cashed in retirement savings to fund her daughter’s $4,200 independent evaluation for dyslexia and other disabilities.

Federal law requires school districts to foot the bill for independent evaluations if a family can prove one is warranted. “That’s a battle school districts do often win because the parent has to show that the evaluation was flawed,” wrote Ellen Saideman, an attorney based in Rhode Island who focuses on special education.

Related: Preschool for children with disabilities works, but federal funding for it is plummeting

In Massachusetts, the state actually requires districts to pay for independent evaluations for lower-income families regardless — yet at a rate well below what most evaluators typically charge. Moreover, most families don’t realize that’s an option unless they are working with an advocate or lawyer.

“It’s asking parents to know a lot,” says Cassandra Archie, founder and CEO at Advocates for Educational Equity & Excellence. “They don’t have the time; they don’t have the experience in this space; they don’t have the language. It is intimidating.” Many parents of color also worry about stigma and prejudice from a potential disability diagnosis, Archie adds, and may hesitate to seek outside testing for that reason. 

Even when parents do know, they can encounter years-long wait lists at providers willing to accept a payment well below market rate. In Massachusetts, for instance, a neuropsych often costs at least $5,000, yet the state reimbursement rate typically works out to less than $3,000 – even after a recent increase, according to Helene Busby, an attorney at Community Legal Aid in Springfield, who works on a lot of special education cases.

“Ninety-nine percent of the work around independent evaluations involves talking on the phone to a million people, asking who has an opening in the shortest amount of time, will do a good job and will take the state rate,” says Elizabeth McIntyre, senior counsel at the EdLaw Project in Boston, which provides advocacy for underserved student communities in Massachusetts.

Sometimes districts put up hurdles to that effort — whether by accident or intent. Two Massachusetts parents interviewed for this piece said their school district’s list of “approved” independent evaluators included psychologists who actually weren’t licensed to work in the state. And Ronayne and Gamble say the Medford school district at one point asked neuropsychologists to provide not only a resume, tax form, professional license and liability insurance, but also to drive to Medford for a criminal records check and get fingerprinted. “I believe that this is a way to slow the (independent evaluations) down,” Ronayne says.

Those requirements rarely slowed down the process, says Joan Bowen, director of pupil services for Medford Public Schools. (The requirements, Bowen said, were instituted before she assumed her current position.) Yet earlier this school year, the district changed course after conversations with attorneys and other special education directors. “We stopped it right then and there,” she says. 

The district’s biggest challenge, she said, has been finding evaluators who take the state rate.

It’s not that school districts never diagnose learning disabilities, but their evaluations are typically less extensive than an independent neuropsych exam.

Apart from the capacity issues highlighted by Gamble, school districts may fear, sometimes legitimately, that a neuropsychologist will ask for services they are unable to provide. That can cause a family to ask to send their child to a private school with better services at the school district’s expense, a right families have under federal law.  

 “Not unlike most things in life, it boils down to money,” says Tiffany Hogan, a professor and director of the Speech & Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions.

She completely understands the frustration of many parents. Still, she says, “sometimes the expectations parents have around the progress kids should make in school is too high. Schools have to work under resource limitations. … The school is sometimes left in the position of deciding who to give treatment to — and who not to.” 

For families who don’t have the money to pay out of pocket for an independent evaluation, the wait for a publicly-funded one can be excruciating. Busby worked recently with one financially struggling mother in the Springfield area who realized in the fall of 2019 she wanted a fresh perspective on her son’s disabilities and classroom needs. Over several years, the school district’s evaluations had focused much more heavily on behavioral issues than academic ones. Yet the child’s mother, Sara, who asked to be identified by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, wanted desperately to understand how the boy, now 11, could “learn better.”

It took a year and a half to get some answers. 

Since the family could not afford to pay for independent testing on their own, they needed to find an evaluator who would accept the public rate. They quickly found someone local with availability that September, according to Busby. But before the family could schedule an appointment, the woman wrote to say she was taking an indefinite leave of absence from her practice. Over the course of the fall, Busby and an intern reached out to dozens of potential evaluators; none of them took the state rate or had openings within the next three months. 

Finally, in early 2020, Busby found a provider in Amherst, less than an hour away, who would accept payment only modestly above the state rate. But before the school district and the center finalized the contract, COVID-19 shut down in-person evaluations. In late September 2020, the Amherst center still had not resumed bringing in patients. Busby began the hunt again. The school district balked at one provider who charged well above the state rate, according to Busby; but in early 2021, after repeated inquiries from Busby, school officials offered up an alternative. In February, the pre-teen traveled to the Boston area for two days of psychological evaluations, including a thorough reading assessment. In March, a doctor followed up by observing the boy at school.

The diagnosis — dyslexia, plus ADHD and disruptive mood disorder — enabled Sara’s son to receive much more intensive and tailored reading supports than he had previously, including small-group instruction in a science-based reading program.

For Sara, the long and at times frustrating wait for an independent evaluation was worth it.

“It was such a relief to finally have it put into his (individual education plan) that his issues are not just behavioral but about learning as well,” Sara says. “It confirmed to me that I wasn’t wrong as a mom.”

Her son’s reading struggles are hardly over, but Sara says her son is willing to spend more time with books at home. “There is less of a fight,” she says. 

It shouldn’t take families thousands of dollars — or the resourcefulness and tenacity of a team of lawyers — to secure a disability diagnosis that might bring a child more educational support, many experts say. “What’s happening is that we are withholding the necessary treatments as if they are chemotherapy, until (families) can absolutely prove that they are disabled,” says Steve Dykstra, a Milwaukee-based youth psychologist who serves as an advisor to the International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction. “We should be treating it like vitamins, like brushing your teeth.”

One necessary change is to work toward better screening for all students so independent evaluations become far less important, Gaab says. That would enable students struggling with reading, including those who might not meet the diagnostic criteria of dyslexia, to get help earlier. “The reading scores in this country haven’t changed substantially since 1992,” Gaab says. “If you look at all the policy implementations, none of this has moved the needle. What may move the needle is moving from a reactive to a proactive model.”

 Many families have learned the hard way that even a costly diagnosis doesn’t necessarily translate into appropriate educational supports. 

“There are a lot of times the neuropsych will recommend things,” says Ann Civitareale in Medford, “and the school will say, ‘We don’t agree with that. We don’t want to put this accommodation in.’” 

For instance, one evaluator recommended Civitareale’s older son, then in third grade, receive a specialized reading program. The district disagreed, maintaining its own reading program was sufficient. 

So the family opted to hire a private tutor to work with the child. Like the independent evaluations, the expenses quickly added up, yet Civitareale didn’t feel like she had any other choice. “They are already behind,” she says, “and I don’t want them to fall further behind.” 

Sarah Carr, an independent journalist, is examining gaps in access to reading supports during a nine-month O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University. Lelah Byron and Aimee Galaszewski, who are students at Marquette, contributed reporting.

This story was published by USA TODAY and reprinted with permission.

The post Want your child to receive better reading help in public school? It might cost $7,500 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW ORLEANS—Before the 2020-21 school year, Christa Talbott, a 20-year veteran of New Orleans schools, had never considered leaving the profession she loved this early.

But then came a dispiriting spring trying to stay connected to her students while Covid-19’s first wave ravaged her hometown. George Floyd’s murder that May left her reeling, exhausted and eager for racial reckoning on her home turf. Talbott, who is Black, began to push for change at a school that, despite its reputation for progressive politics, bore the last name of a Confederate official and dedicated proponent of school segregation, Robert Mills Lusher.

In the summer of 2020, Talbott and her colleagues asked for a meeting with the charter school’s leaders to discuss racial justice at Lusher, one of the city’s most coveted for families and teachers alike; they also created an antiracism group for teachers. It did not go over well. By the end of 2020, the 44-year-old was agonizing over whether the school year might be her last teaching there.

“I was tired of being quiet,” she says. “I was tired of sitting back so that white people could feel comfortable.”

Lusher, like America, has long had a teacher diversity problem: Slightly more than 20 percent of public school teachers—who include those at charter schools— in the U.S. identify as people of color, compared with more than half of students. Only 7 percent of teachers identify as Black. At Lusher, in 2020, 13 percent of teachers were Black compared with 22 percent of the students.

The research has been clear for years that many of our schools struggle less with recruiting diverse educators than retaining them: between 1988 and 2018, the number of teachers of color hired by the country’s schools increased at a faster rate than the number of white teachers, yet those diverse educators also left their positions much more quickly, on average.

Now, as Talbott’s story underscores, the problem could be poised to get worse, with Black teachers in particular feeling increased strain.

Into a burning house

Black teachers were more than twice as likely as other teachers in the winter of 2021 to say they planned to leave their jobs at the end of the 2020-21 school year, according to a report released by the RAND Corporation. And a slightly higher percentage of nonwhite teachers than white ones—45 percent vs. 42 percent—said that they were considering leaving their position last school year, researchers at the University of Arkansas’ College of Education & Health Professions found. (The gap was 30 percent vs. 22 percent, when teachers were asked if they were considering leaving because of reasons related to Covid-19.)

Despite all the recent and increasingly dire warnings of a teacher shortage in some parts of the country, we have too often failed to clarify who is most at risk from the departures: Black and Latino educators and the students of color who rely on them. Students of color perform better academically, and are more likely to stay in school, when they are exposed to teachers of their race or ethnicity. Meanwhile, many districts and schools continue to believe they can hire their way out of the teacher diversity problem—if they acknowledge it’s a problem at all—and fail to take on the hard work of transforming school culture.

“I think my voice was heard at Lusher—until it was something they didn’t want to hear.”

Christa Talbott, a 20-year veteran of New Orleans schools

“A lot of school and district leaders take the approach, ‘We don’t care how messy or untidy or oppressive our house is—just come in anyway,’” says Sharif El-Mekki, CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, whose organization last fall co-released with the teacher leadership and advocacy organization Teach Plus a report that lays out steps school leaders should take to retain more Black educators.

“They have not spent a second thinking about what kind of environment they are recruiting people to,” says El-Mekki, who invokes Martin Luther King Jr.’s worry, expressed shortly before his death, that he had integrated Black Americans “into a burning house.” “That could stand for teachers of color entering racially hostile school environments today,” El-Mekki says.

Related: Black teachers ground down by racial battle fatigue after a year like no other

Starting several decades ago, several powerhouse groups and individuals invested in recruiting a more diverse teacher workforce, says Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education and policy at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and an expert on teacher demographics. In the 1980s, the Ford Foundation partnered with other organizations to recruit and prepare more teachers of color. About a decade ago, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan set out to recruit 80,000 Black male teachers. And more recently the Kellogg Foundation partnered with several historically Black colleges and universities to boost the numbers of Black male educators.

Partly because of these and related efforts, the number of teachers from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups more than doubled over the last 30 years—from about 327,000 in the late 1980s to 810,000 in the 2017-18 school year. Yet research by Ingersoll and others has shown that teachers of color disproportionately serve in some of the most challenging schools, including those with high poverty rates and lower academic performance overall. And they leave at higher rates largely because of poor working conditions—including a lack of input in key decisions affecting their classrooms—not because of dissatisfaction with teaching more broadly.

“Recruitment is great,” says Ingersoll. “But if you don’t keep them, it’s like putting water in a bucket with holes in the bottom.” Federal and state data on teacher departures lag by a year or more, meaning we won’t have a conclusive picture of the pandemic’s impact on teacher diversity for years to come. Yet early data suggests that the pandemic is aggravating the leaky bucket problem.

The RAND study was based on surveys completed in early 2021—nearly one year into the pandemic—by more than 1,000 teachers across the country. Teachers of all racial groups reported high rates of frequent job-related stress (ongoing stress for teachers was far higher than that of the general population—78 percent compared with 40 percent).

Racial stress fatigue

For all the attention paid to teacher stress and shortages during the pandemic—perceived and real—too few people are talking about the special strains on teachers of color, says El-Mekki, including pushback against the teaching of racism in America. “So many are speaking of Covid-related stress, but we should strongly consider the ramifications of Covid-related stress on top of racial stress fatigue for teachers of color,” he says.

According to the RAND study, nearly half of Black teachers reported in the winter of 2021 that they were likely to leave their jobs at the end of the school year, compared with 23 percent of teachers overall. “That is concerning from a workforce diversity perspective,” says Elizabeth Steiner, the co-author of the report. “It’s crucial that school and district leaders address it.”

Prior to the pandemic, Talbott had spent a dozen mostly satisfied years teaching at Lusher. She arrived as an elementary teacher in 2008, drawn by the school’s racial diversity and stellar record in academics and the arts. Lusher enrolls students in kindergarten through 12th grade across its two buildings.

Sometimes, Talbott says, she was the first Black teacher her students had had at Lusher, even after she began teaching sixth-grade social studies in 2013; it meant a lot to her to provide students with that self-recognition and affirmation. She started the Black Student Union at the middle school and formed enduring friendships with several colleagues and Lusher families. One of Talbott’s daughters graduated from Lusher in 2021; the other still attends the high school.

Talbott experienced microaggressions at times. When teachers expressed concerns nearly a decade ago about a new textbook they’d been told to use, Talbott says an administrator told her, “I just feel like you like being difficult and contentious.” (Among other things, Talbott says the book contained grammatical errors and introduced instructional ideas that teachers did not think supported students’ needs.) Teaching during a pandemic was exhausting and frustrating, particularly during the stretches when Talbott had to do it remotely.

“I’m a teacher who thrives on connection,” she says. “The camera didn’t allow me to make the connections like I’m used to. That did something to my teaching spirit.”

Related: To increase and maintain teacher diversity, listen to teachers of color

Yet she never contemplated leaving the classroom until the summer of 2020. Not long after the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, Talbott and colleagues began pushing for a meeting with administrators to discuss the need for more dialogue about race at Lusher, where the share of white students has inched up in recent years, to nearly 60 percent. White students account for less than 10 percent of the city’s public school population overall, and they are concentrated at a handful of selective admissions schools like Lusher.

The teachers wanted to discuss the need for more anti-racist professional development at Lusher and the possibility of increasing diversity among Lusher’s leadership, including on the board of directors, whose seven members include two people of color, according to school administrators. They also wanted school officials to send a clear message to the community that Lusher supported Black Lives Matter.

They encountered mostly silence. Officials told us “they were not there to talk but only to listen,” according to Talbott. “They sat there stone-faced. It wasn’t a conversation—it was more us trying to encourage a conversation.” Over the next several weeks, the teachers tried to follow up but say they were stonewalled.

“They didn’t think we deserved an explanation,” says Jake Gleghorn, 33, who is Asian American and worked alongside Talbott. “They didn’t think we deserved a conversation. They didn’t think we knew anything they didn’t know.”

Talbott and Gleghorn say they believe some administrators were sympathetic to their concerns but ultimately took direction from the school’s long-time CEO, Kathy Riedlinger. (Riedlinger did not reply to a request for comment on Talbott and Gleghorn’s statement.)

Not long after the meeting, Talbott, Gleghorn and other colleagues created an anti-racist working group aimed at helping the school’s teachers become more knowledgeable on subjects of race and equity. Administrators called it secretive, according to Talbott, and told the teachers not to communicate about the working group using Lusher email.

“I think my voice was heard at Lusher—until it was something they didn’t want to hear,” Talbott says.

At the same time, many in the school community were pushing for change, including abandonment of the school name. Robert Mills Lusher had been a tax collector for the Confederacy and had resigned as state superintendent of schools in Louisiana rather than oversee a system that would not remain 100 percent segregated. (In the fall of 2021, Lusher’s board agreed to change the name, although a new one has not yet been selected.)

As the school year continued, the situation grew increasingly tense. Throughout the fall and early winter, Talbott thought more and more about resigning, even though she did not have another job lined up. “Ultimately it boiled down to me being a Black woman who had a voice and things to say that could make us stronger, and that not being valued and appreciated,” she says.

Talbott was not the only teacher of color questioning their future at the school. After agitating for change, Gleghorn found himself removed from leadership positions on two key school committees, focused on learning and diversity. “I was told they didn’t trust me,” he says, “which I’ve since interpreted as them not thinking I was loyal.”

“Because I was speaking my mind—and not white—they didn’t know how to work with me in a way that made them feel comfortable,” Gleghorn adds. “Had I been a white teacher, I think that there would have been more direct communication.”

A principal weighs in

Several of Talbott’s and Gleghorn’s concerns were corroborated in a grievance letter to the board sent by former Lusher High principal Steve Corbett, which was obtained by the The Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate.

The letter, written in December, 2020, said Riedlinger told administrators to “not engage in any dialogue” when teachers, including Talbott and Gleghorn, brought forward their concerns in the wake of Floyd’s death. It also says that Riedlinger at one point instructed administrators to stop speaking with the Anti-Defamation League; told Corbett to cancel a staff book club meeting to discuss White Fragility, about white people’s discomfort discussing race; and expressed concern that Lusher had provided teachers with a resource library of antiracist materials.

A Lusher spokeswoman did not address specific statements regarding Riedlinger but detailed several steps she said the school has taken toward racial equity over the last year and a half. “Corbett’s allegations were fully investigated by an independent firm and found not to merit any action by the school,” a Lusher spokeswoman said in a written statement.

Corbett has since left Lusher and now serves as CEO of New Orleans’ Audubon Schools.

Gleghorn and Talbott, too, are gone.

Up until the 2020-21 school year, Gleghorn says he had been in the pipeline for an administrative position at Lusher. “The events of the summer and fall of 2020 really cleared up for me that I didn’t want to work for these people,” he says. In the spring of 2021, Gleghorn accepted a job at the New Orleans Career Center, a nonprofit that provides high school students and adults access to career and technical training, as well as academic coursework.

Related: New Orleans’ uphill battle for more black and homegrown teachers

In April, Talbott announced at a community meeting that she would leave at the end of the school year. She made the specifics public—particularly the fact that she had no new job lined up—because she didn’t want school leaders to dismiss the departure by implying she left for something “bigger” or “better.”

“Real change would be open and honest conversations with all of the stakeholders in our school,” Talbott said at the meeting, reading from a prepared statement. “Real change would be immediate feedback to our students that have the courage to share their experiences. Real change would be me feeling that my voice, as a Black woman, is important.”

In a written statement, a Lusher spokeswoman, Cheron Brylski, described Talbott and Gleghorn as “quality and valued teachers” and said both had expressed a desire to leave for other opportunities before the pandemic. (Talbott denied this, as did Gleghorn. “There was no plan prior to the pandemic, prior to George Floyd,” she said. “I had talked to no one about leaving Lusher, period.”) Gleghorn and Talbott had numerous leadership opportunities, the statement said, but it did not address Gleghorn’s concern that he was removed with little explanation from leading the learning and diversity committees.

“I was tired of being quiet. I was tired of sitting back so that white people could feel comfortable.”

Christa Talbott, a 20-year veteran of New Orleans schools

Brylski denied that Lusher leaders obstructed teachers’ efforts at open conversation of race at the school in the months after George Floyd’s murder. “Our administration listened with respect and consideration, and no follow-up conversations were stonewalled,” she said, portraying the teachers as demanding “immediate action” while Lusher leadership adhered to a slower, “well-established and proven process.”

As a result of that process, administrators sent a school-wide communication in July 2020, which read, in part: “We affirm that Black lives matter (sic).To that end, we have defined an initial set of target concerns and action steps…We will continue to refine these as we hear and learn more.”

Takeru Nagayoshi, the 2020 Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, says it’s not surprising that teachers of color are feeling especially strained these days. They have long faced an “invisible tax” that for many has steepened over the last two years, says Nagayoshi, who’s known to friends as TK. “When you work or navigate predominantly white spaces, you feel the need to unpack race and racism,” he says. “If I’m not going to be the one who brings up DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) or center conversations on George Floyd or Stop Asian Hate, no one else is going to do it.”

Nagayoshi, 30, decided in August to leave his job teaching Advanced Placement English in the city of New Bedford for a job at an education technology company. He continues to love many parts of the teaching profession but cited burnout stemming from different factors: increased work hours and responsibilities; coping with decreased morale and a traumatized community; low pay; and a rigid schedule that made it difficult to find sufficient time for exercise or personal relationships.

“The balance of what was acceptable wasn’t there for me anymore,” Nagayoshi says.

Finding a better way forward

Schools may be struggling more than ever to retain teachers of color, but in some places, recruitment of diverse candidates has gone up during the pandemic. Mississippi, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are among states that, fearful of teacher shortages and facing hiring challenges due to the pandemic, temporarily removed or changed some barriers to entering the field—such as extending emergency licenses or adjusting test score thresholds—that often disproportionately hurt Black candidates, who are more likely to face barriers such as less access to college prep curriculum at their high schools.

A year and a half ago, officials in Mississippi temporarily waived many of the licensure exam requirements for new teachers, as well as test score requirements for students entering teacher preparation programs. The changes enabled Mari Williams, who is Black, to enter a teacher-preparation program for the first time. She has worked in Mississippi for years, first as a tutor and then as an assistant teacher. Yet her ACT score fell one point short of the minimum required to train for a teacher job. The waiver reignited her dream of running her own classroom.

“One of the things that convinced me to go back is that we have such a low number of African American educators across the board,” she says. “This is something I can do to bring diversity to the classroom.”

“If I’m not going to be the one who … centers conversations on George Floyd or Stop Asian Hate, no one else is going to do it.”

Takeru Nagayoshi, the 2020 Massachusetts Teacher of the Year

Preliminary data show that the waivers, which were due to end in 2022, have significantly boosted the diversity of teacher candidates in Mississippi. Between 2018 and 2020, the number of people of color entering educator preparation programs jumped by more than 500 percent. (The growth in the number of white candidates was about 44 percent.)

“We were already looking at a huge teacher shortage and we did not need to compound that crisis more with COVID,” says Debra Burson, the director of educator preparation at the Mississippi Department of Education. “We opened the gate rather than closed the gate.”

Related: Tears, sleepless nights and small victories: How first-year teachers are weathering the crisis

Yet without a plan to support the new teachers coming in, teacher diversity is unlikely to improve significantly in the long term. “We talk about cultural competence, and many Black educators are trying to navigate their colleagues’ and supervisors’ cultural incompetence on top of everything else,” says El-Mekki.

White educators and school leaders, as well as school-district and state policy-makers must do more to support teachers of color, according to the report released in the fall of 2021. They “are not expecting perfection, but they are expecting a commitment and plans to do better—and that it’s not just on them,” El-Mekki says.

The report advises putting in place curriculum rooted in students’ cultures and life experiences, and ensuring that Black teachers have access to affinity groups and mentorship. Schools have long been held accountable for all manner of data—everything from student test scores to suspension rates and number of hot school lunches served. They must now also be held publicly accountable for recruitment and retention of teachers of color, the report concludes. That includes school districts’ establishing, and publishing, clear goals when it comes to teacher diversity, and releasing school-climate and teacher-exit surveys, with results broken down by race.

“Very few districts have goals as it relates to teacher diversity,” says El-Mekki. “You can’t move forward if you don’t know where you want to go.”

In July, Lusher families sent the school’s board a letter—now signed by more than 250 parents—pushing for the exact things that El-Mekki encourages. “We are dismayed with the administration and board’s response to student and faculty calls to confront racism within our school community,” it said in part.

Lusher, through its spokeswoman, has repeatedly insisted on the school’s commitment to diversity, equity, and staff well-being. Fewer than 9 percent of Lusher’s academic staff has left since the start of the pandemic, Brylski said in her statement. And the departures include just two of 33 African American educators. More than half of new hires are people of color, as are two out of three principals. Lusher’s recent efforts, according to the statement, include the adoption of a K-8 antibias curriculum, development of a “micro-aggression reporting system”and a partnership with a Louisiana State University professor to shore up the school’s approach to diversity and wellness.

When it comes to the recent teacher departures—including Talbott’s and Gleghorn’s—the school says it “encourages all staff to pursue career advancement.”

Both Gleghorn and Talbott are happy in their new jobs but say it wasn’t career advancement that precipitated their decision to leave.

After she gave notice, Talbott began overhauling her résumé, which hadn’t been updated in 20 years, and she met with a job coach. Early in the summer of 2021, she started a job with a company working to build a new social studies curriculum for public schools and districts. “My hope is to center the voices of the indigenous, of women, of Black people,” Talbott says. “Normally, when you are looking at history, the voices that are centered are those of landowning white men.”

Talbott has no regrets about the job move. “It’s a selfless profession, but I had to be selfish,” she says. “I didn’t want to be in a job where I dreaded getting up every day and going to work.”

Yet she cried on the first day of the 2021-22 school year last August while watching students across New Orleans returning to school. She missed the kids. Her departure had never been about them. It had been about following her mother’s lifelong advice: Go where you feel valued.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Learn more at hechingerreport.org.

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