A group of parents is reported to want a special public school set aside for their children with dyslexia, a common reading problem requiring specialized instructional intervention. As many as one in five children are estimated to have the condition and, as highlighted in another recent City Limits opinion column, the NYC Department of Education has long struggled to adequately serve this population.
We share these parents’ concern. But a single – or dozens – of specialized schools for students with a common disability will do little to solve the problem and will likely lead in time to an under-resourced shadow system established with good intentions but overwhelmed by unintended consequences of erroneous referrals and difficulty returning to the mainstream.
History shows that beneath the veneer of apparent structural and educational improvement lies a frayed foundation of shameful conduct toward children labelled “special.” As late as the 1970’s, “600 Schools” were dumping grounds for emotionally disturbed students until phased out under court order. The Department of Education daily violates the 40-year-old Jose P. consent decree that special education advocates hoped would affirm rights guaranteed by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Moreover, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza is currently coping with withering federal and state findings of widespread failure to meet accessibility and instructional standards for students with special needs. The City news website reported last May that “complaints filed against the city Department of Education by parents of special education students have skyrocketed since 2014 — sparking a “crisis” that leaves some kids without essential service for months on end, a state-commissioned report found.”
A different view:
Opinion: The Devastating Impact of NYC’s Failure to Deal With Dyslexia
A school for students with dyslexia bodes more segregative failure. Things look rosy now, with big bucks promised by the widow of Steve Jobs and the Robin Hood Foundation under the DOE’s Imagine Schools initiative, to plan and implement the program in its early years. But down the road, the school or schools will have to get by on tax-levy budgets despite their desire for low class sizes, specialized teaching, and technology. And for how many kids when thousands, maybe tens of thousands, need these services?
The answer is not to isolate kids in a separate school to deliver a reading program. Evidence-based instruction does not need to have its own separate school. The literacy crisis is a mainstream crisis and will not solved by isolating and segregating kids by label into separately labelled schools. The reading crisis and its solution does not belong to special education.
Needed is a re-doubling, or whatever multiple is needed, to assure that phonics instruction with specialized remediation is available in all public Early Childhood and Childhood programs in the city. The Wall Street Journal reports that less than a third of New York’s fourth graders are deemed proficient in reading, yet the DOE doesn’t know how many of our almost 800 elementary schools employ “robust” phonics teaching. Research is clear that phonics-based teaching is crucial for all children but especially for those who struggle to make sense of letters on a page or screen.
Marginalizing children with dyslexia and creating a safety valve for the DOE to claim it has solved the problem will not dent the reading deficits that plague our schools. This “solution” will only stall real reform. As the catchphrase goes, “Reading is fundamental.” But as such it needs a fundamentally restructured approach to teaching all our children, not segregation-by-label that history shows will serve neither its intended beneficiaries nor others in need of help.
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David C. Bloomfield is Professor of Education Leadership, Law, and Policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. Mark M. Alter, a special education expert, is Professor of Educational Psychology in the Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University.
6 thoughts on “Opinion: Segregating Kids with Dyslexia is a Bad Idea”
Hello David and Hello Mark,
I couldn’t agree more about the isolation for many reasons, including the social transition the kids have to make, away from friends and trusted families of friends, is hard. My son had to do that. The reason for a good public dyslexia school is to be a model so other schools can see successful literacy programs and adopt them in every public school. Right now the private dyslexia schools aren’t considered models that can be replicated. I hope this one can be an excellent model.
Hello David and Hello Mark,
I couldn’t agree more about the isolation for many reasons, including the social transition the kids have to make, away from friends and trusted families of friends, is hard. My son had to do that. The reason for a good public dyslexia school is to be a model so other schools can see successful literacy programs and adopt them in every public school. Right now the private dyslexia schools aren’t considered models that can be replicated. We have to show these kids can be taught to read and should not be left behind. I hope this one can be an excellent model.
I go back to this idea over and over: Special education is good education. Humans were not wried to learn to read, and naming this is hard for parents/districts with high expectations and high-achieving parents. Teaching students with dyslexia requires a wide base of reading (and visual-motor development) strategies that combat what our schools currently do. This is a systemic problem stemming from the lack of literacy-specific (not to mention developmental) training in teacher preparation programs has compounded. In addition to this, our mentor teachers aren’t assessed or trained or questioned about their literacy approaches. This is more complicated than asking if all skilled teachers should join one location for students with dyslexia.
A child with dyslexia does not struggle during reading period. They struggle in science when they can’t read the instructions. They struggle in math when faced with word problems. They struggle with executive functioning because they can’t make sense of poorly designed interfaces, chaotically scribbled white boards, and unorganized labels around the classroom. Dyslexia is all-encompassing and all consuming.
Unless every standard school is ready to train every teacher in an Orton-Gillingham structured literacy approach, reduce class sizes, remove timed tests, restructure classroom environments and provide social-emotional support, then a specialized school for kids with dyslexia sounds amazing. Not because these kids need to be isolated, but because they are fully capable of achieving as much, or more than, any other child. In an environment that supports their needs, they will do so.
My guess is these will turn into the best schools in the district, and hopefully the standardized schools will follow suit. It’s unfortunate that children need to get a “diagnosis” in order to get the kind of education they deserve.
Edit: A child with dyslexia does not just struggle during reading period.
Many SWD’s have severe issues with early literacy, reading comprehension, and fluency. ADD/ADHD students for one. If literacy intervention and programming is being outsourced to a small group in potentially only a handful of NYC segregated dyslexia-only schools, what happens to the rest of our SWD’s? This is a dangerous move for many reasons, and threatens to be a divisive policy within an already marginalized and underserved population.