#Confirmed case of purchasing parents refusing a child with disabilities

[coochiequeens]

If 100 couples seek surrogacy services in Thailand, they will likely spend 100 million baht here.” - Dr. Sura Wisedsak

Well if commercial surrogacy can pump money into the nations economy who gives a fuck about women and the babies that would be born through this? Apparently not Doctor Wisedsak.

The idea of legalizing surrogacy services for foreign couples, including LGBTQ partners, promises rich benefits for Thailand’s medical industry – but has also triggered grave concerns about human trafficking risks.

“I am not against attracting the flow of foreign currency. But I would urge caution and also demand assurances that it [surrogacy for foreigners] will not leave Thailand labeled as a human-trafficking country,” said Prof. Dr. Kamthorn Pruksananonda, a lecturer in Obstetrics & Gynecology at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Medicine.

Prof. Dr. Kamthorn Pruksananonda

The medical lecturer pointed out that the concern about the sale and exploitation of children born from surrogacy arrangements were so prominent that they often feature in reports to the United Nations General Assembly.

“Such arrangements may be connected to child pornography,” he said, highlighting one aspect of the dangers associated with surrogacy.

Kamthorn said Thai authorities teamed up with United States’ Homeland Security Investigations to crack down on an illegal multinational surrogacy gang in Thailand several months ago. Foreign security agencies see Thailand as a base for human traffickers exploiting surrogacy services, he added.

“Lax legal enforcement means illegal surrogacy services are still able to operate here,” he said.

Efforts to protect kids

In 2015, Thailand passed a law to protect children born through assisted reproductive technologies, to prevent foreigners from hiring Thai women to serve as surrogate mothers. Prior to the law’s enactment, such surrogacy services were widely available in Thailand.

“We drafted the Children Born through Assisted Reproductive Technologies Protection Act to plug legal loopholes. With so many foreigners coming to Thailand for surrogacy services, there was a risk of human trafficking,” Kamthorn said.

The medical expert sits on the committee for the protection of children born through assisted reproductive services, and also the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ committee on Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility.

During the passage of the new law, a scandal erupted over a Thai surrogate mother who was left struggling with the burden of raising a Down Syndrome baby – named Gammy – after the infant was abandoned by his biological Australian parents. The foreign couple left Thailand with only Gammy’s twin sister after medical tests confirmed she was healthy and did not have Downs.

The scandal deepened after an investigation revealed that the Australian father had been convicted twice of molesting girls. This new finding also raised questions about the ethics of gestational surrogacy.

Under Thailand’s current law, only Thai heterosexual couples married for more than three years can hire a surrogate to have their child. Commercial surrogacy serving foreign clients and LGBTQs is currently banned.

Penalties for illegal surrogacy under the new law are severe.

A surrogate mother faces up to 10 years in jail and a maximum fine of 200,000 baht if she joins an illegal surrogacy service. Those caught selling sperm or eggs are punishable by up to three years in jail and/or a fine of 60,000 baht. And an agent for illegal surrogacy services faces five years in jail and/or a fine of 100,00 baht.

Proposed changes

According to Dr. Sura Wisedsak, director-general of the Department of Health Service Support (DHSS), the scope of the law is set to be expanded so that Thai surrogacy services also cover foreign and LGBTQ couples.

Dr. Sura Wisedsak

He pointed to the financial benefits of this move.

“If 100 couples seek surrogacy services in Thailand, they will likely spend 100 million baht here.”

Sura said Thai services and expertise in surrogacy are second to none, so would attract plenty of foreigners.

“Our service fees are also cheaper,” he added.

Thailand currently has 115 providers of services related to infertility. Of these, 17 are state hospitals, 31 are private hospitals and 67 are private clinics.

Each year, they provide around 12,000 artificial insemination procedures and around 20,000 in vitro fertilization services. These form part of a growing surrogacy sector serving couples who are unable to conceive naturally. Authorities have so far approved 754 surrogacy applications – accounting for 97.2% of total requests. The success rate of these services is currently 48.53% – up from 46%.

Dr. Olarik Musigavong, a reproductive medicine specialist, is an enthusiastic supporter of legalizing surrogacy services for foreigners, explaining that it will generate income for Thailand and enrich the skills of Thais working in the field.

“The government could also use tax revenue from the expanded surrogacy sector to subsidize assisted reproduction for Thais who need but cannot afford such services,” he said.

Asked about the potential dangers of commercial surrogacy, Olarik said that if proper control measures were in place, human trafficking would not be a risk.

“If we legalize the services, illegal practices will fade. And with a legal process and clear registration, those involved won’t be able to abandon kids either,” he said.

In some countries, the commercial system is so well-established that there are even sperm/egg banks that pay donors, Olarik said.

DHSS deputy director-general Arkom Praditsuwan said to prevent human trafficking, couples seeking surrogacy services may be asked to prove their good financial status.

Dr. Olarik Musigavong

‘Illegal practices put surrogate moms at risk’

Kamthorn said numerous Thai women who volunteered to serve as surrogate mothers for underground operations have ended up receiving substandard care. They have been crowded together in condo apartments and sometimes medicated to produce more eggs than they should.

“A few months ago, a teenager ended up in an intensive care unit due to the practice of overdosing with medication. She nearly died,” he said, “Agents don’t give a damn. They just try to lower costs to maximize their profits.”

Thai advertisements looking for surrogate moms are easily found on the internet.

They typically offer 500,000 baht plus monthly allowances during the surrogacy period. The monthly pay usually ranges between 10,000 and 20,000 baht.

Underground surrogacy rings usually divide their operations into several parts, each handled by different units, making it difficult for authorities to investigate and prosecute.

The Department of Special Investigation says a recent case involved Chinese customers hiring an underground ring operating in Thailand and neighboring countries.

In Thailand, they used three clinics for prenatal care and child-delivery services. Investigators found the gang had well over 100 million baht in cash flow at the time they were arrested.

By Thai PBS World’s General Desk

[scripttorture]

HeyIm writing a story when when my characters older brother is drafted he goes instead and he’s around 14 but can pass as 18. He was forced to do this by his parents because his older brother has a learning disability (that they refuse to diagnose) but he still feels betrayed. While he’s at war all his mates are violent with eachother and rough house so he mostly sticks with himself and never really talks. He ends getting found out and having an anxiety attack. Do you have sources that couldhelp

Potentially yes. I think the best thing to do is treat this as what it is, a child soldier.

 I’ll start off by saying that while this is unusual it is possible for a 14 year old to pass themselves off as an 18 year old for a long period of time. Individuals hit age milestones at different points and we have yet to find a sure way of telling someone’s age.

 The tests that are often used to try and determine someone’s age are fallible. Especially since there’s some evidence to suggest that stress and trauma literally age people.

 I don’t think it’s a good idea to have the character get ‘found out’ because of a medical test or because someone looked at his teeth. Bad forgeries or discrepancies in the paperwork are probably a better idea.

 I’m going to start with first hand accounts and then go on to some more general sources. I think both of these will be helpful for you.

 I also think you’re probably better off looking at historical sources first hand accounts from child soldiers. A lot of child soldiers today are abused and coerced in ways that I don’t think fit with the story you’re trying to tell. And that abuse, coercion (in some cases kidnap) means that accounts from these kids are going to be very different to a child soldier in a situation more like the one in your story.

 Don’t get me wrong, some children do volunteer. But the more readily available accounts from child soldiers tend to be those that were abducted. I think this is probably because we prefer simplistic narratives

 Historical European military forces recruited children. Some of them started at 12 or younger.

 I found an account that’s supposed to be from a historical drummer boy here. There’s another here. I think this is also a non-fiction account but I’m finding it hard to confirm that.

 This one’s an account beginning in 1780s from someone who grew up as a sailor.

 I haven’t read any of these and keep in mind they’re all biased sources. Children who were taught what they were doing was glorious and right are less likely to stress the suffering they endured or their lasting symptoms. Read with a critical eye.

 I think you’d also find accounts of child soldiers from the first world war useful for this story.

 Claude Choules fought in World War One as a member of the royal navy having joined at 14. Momčilo Gavrić joined the Serbian army at either 7 or 8.

 Reginald St John Battersby was 14 when he signed up, was pressured by his father who he had a bad relationship with. Unfortunately I can’t find a book on him specifically or by him. However if you’re in the UK there are museum exhibits on him.

 The BBC produced a documentary on ‘Teenage Tommies’, child soldiers in the British army during World War One. I don’t know how widely available it is for viewing though.

 This book contains several accounts from veterans who were child soldiers.

 Honestly as a pacifist I find a lot of these historical accounts sickening. They tend to valorise and glorify the suffering of these children and over play any acts of violence as ‘heroism’ whatever the context.

 Now general modern sources on the effects of conflict on child soldiers (rather then first hand accounts) will probably be helpful for you.

 War Child is a good starting place.

 I recently purchased this book, but I haven’t managed to make much headway with it yet. It contains modern research and first hand accounts but (as is typical of academic writing) no useful goddamn chapter headings. There’s an index and you might be able to flip through and pick out things like long term effects on health, employment and psychological symptoms. But you’ll probably be better off reading the whole thing.

 This more recent but the price of £200 may go a way to explaining why that was not my first port of call for research.

 I’ve got a bigger list of modern sources here that you might find helpful.

 Wrapping up, I think this sounds like a good idea from the summary. There’s nothing that stands out to me as potentially problematic and it sounds as though you’re trying to do as much research as you can. :)

 This post on approaching research for difficult topic might be helpful.

 Take your time. Don’t be afraid to take breaks.

 I hope that helps. :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[marymosley]

“I Swear I Hit Them”: Wisconsin Doctor and Spouse Allegedly Executed By Boyfriend of Daughter

In any crisis, a strange array of crimes emerge that are shaped by the crisis. We have already discussed a variety of pandemic crimes from assaults over social distancing rules to coughing on vegetables to attempts to surpass purchasing rules. There have also been murder-suicides with people who feared that they had the virus. With business burglaries up 75 percent in New York, some crimes are merely opportunistic and predictable while others add a level of depravity that is especially shocking. Wisconsin now has a particularly sad and bizarre murder to add to this list. A doctor and her husband were apparently dragged from their home and executed in March. One of the two suspects is the boyfriend of their daughter. Dr. Beth Potter, 52, and husband Robin Carre, 57, had paid for their daughter, Miriam (“Mimi’) Carre, and her reported boyfriend to Khari Sanford, 18, (left) to live in a separate apartment to protect against the spread of coronavirus (due to an underlying health condition). Potter was a professor at the University of Wisconsin. Sanford and his friend, Ali’jah Larrue, 18, (right) are now charged in the murder and police say that the daughter’s account stands contradicted on Sanford’s whereabouts at the time of the crime.

One report says that the couple moved the daughter and Sanford to an apartment because they refused to do social distancing despite the risk to the older couple.

The two victims were found in a ditch. The motive appears to be a burglary but they were then kidnapped and taken to the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, near the Madison campus. Each was shot in the back of the head. Potter was wearing pajamas and socks while Carre was wearing only underwear.

Police have a witness in a high school friend of Sanford who said that he came to his house and called Larrue to say that he heard one of them survived and might implicate them. In reality, Potter died at the hospital. The witness said Sanford exclaimed “I swear I hit them, how did they survive.” He also alleged told the witness that he shot them both in the back of the head.

What is unclear is the role of the daughter. Police say that she told them that Sanford was with her the night of murder but, according to the State Journal, investigators say that her story was contradicted by text messages. Police are also looking at GPS and phone data. Police stated that Mimi remained extremely loyal to Sanford in their interviews.

Sanford has an arrest history. He previously lived with foster parents but was charged with felony auto theft last year Middleton near Madison. According to the criminal complaint, his foster parents went to Africa and disabled the home’s security camera and stole their car. He was later found sleeping in the car. He was allowed to enter the deferred prosecution program but later posted a picture on Facebook brandishing a gun.

Some of Sanford’s social postings could raise legal issues. In one posting, he wrote “we gon change this world, cause it’s time to let our diversity and youth shine over all oppressive systems and rebuild our democracy.” In yet another post, he wrote “Used to be a wild child I had to calm down…came from nothin.” Those postings are likely to cause a pre-trial fight over admissibility, if there is a trial as opposed to a plea. The first one is clearly immaterial to a trial in my view while the second one may be too prejudicial to pass pre-trial review.

Surveillance video showed a minivan similar to one owned by Carre with confirming GPS movements. That makes for a pretty devastating case. The question over the daughter’s possible culpability remains. If the police are correct, Mimi Carre could be charged as a co-conspirator or an accessory after the fact. It is also a crime to knowingly make false statements to police investigators or committing acts which impede a criminal investigation.

Potter worked at the Wingra Family Medical Center, run by the UW-Madison Department of Family Medicine and Community Health and Access Community Health Centers. She also was medical director of UW Health’s Employee Health Services. Carre was a consultant who was also the head of a Madison youth soccer club. They have three children in their teens and twenties. They were pillars of their community and both worked diligently on the improvement of youth health and wellbeing.

“I Swear I Hit Them”: Wisconsin Doctor and Spouse Allegedly Executed By Boyfriend of Daughter published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

[bisoroblog]

Why Getting Help for Kids with Dyslexia is Difficult

Dayne Guest graduated from high school in 2016. He had been working construction but quit, knowing that wasn’t what he wanted do with his life. Today Guest’s options are limited because he struggles to read. When he opens a book, he sees “just a whole bunch of words, a whole bunch of letters lined up.”

His mom, Pam Guest, knew something wasn’t right when Dayne was in kindergarten. “In the mornings when students came into the classroom, they would write that they’d brought their lunch or that they were going to purchase lunch in the cafeteria,” she said. “And Dayne always walked right past that board and sat down.”

Teachers said Dayne would catch up, but by the end of first grade, he still wasn’t reading.

Pam thought her son might have dyslexia. But the teachers said no. It went on like this for years: Pam suspecting Dayne was dyslexic, the schools saying no, and Pam believing them because they were the education experts.

Listen to families talk about their struggles to get reading helping for their dyslexic kids in the podcast version of this story available on Apple Podcasts or RadioPublic.

At the end of Dayne’s senior year in high school, Pam learned she had a legal right to an evaluation. The school tested him, and the report said Dayne had weaknesses “often seen in students diagnosed with reading disabilities including dyslexia.”

“But they would not say that he was dyslexic,” said Pam. “And I asked the psychologist why, and she said we would never say that a student is dyslexic. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘It is not in our realm of professionalism to say that a student is dyslexic.'”

The reluctance to confirm that a child is “dyslexic” goes beyond avoiding a label that could harm kids. Public schools nationwide have long refused to use the word, allowing many of them to avoid providing special education services as required by federal law. According to dozens of interviews with parents, students, researchers, lawyers and teachers across the country, many public schools are not identifying students with dyslexia and are ignoring their needs.

While scientists estimate that between 5 and 12 percent of children in the United States have dyslexia, just 4.5 percent of students in public schools are diagnosed with a “specific learning disability,” a category that includes dyslexia and other learning disabilities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In addition, while schools routinely screen children for hearing impairment, a problem that occurs much less frequently than dyslexia, screening for dyslexia is rare.

Moreover, most students who are diagnosed with dyslexia aren’t identified until at least third grade, according to Dr. Sally Shaywitz, co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity, and author of Overcoming Dyslexia. She says it is not unusual for dyslexics to go unrecognized until adolescence and beyond, a systemic shortcoming that effectively abandons struggling young readers during the most critical years of learning.

When children are identified with dyslexia, public schools often lack staff with the appropriate training to help, according to several studies and reports.

And yet, there are proven ways to teach people with dyslexia how to read that are not new or controversial. Research suggests that if all children were taught to read using approaches that work for students with dyslexia, reading achievement would improve overall.

According to the most recent federal data, more than 60 percent of fourth-graders in the United States are not proficient readers. Students who struggle to read are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty.

Students at or above proficient reading level

  Disagreements Over Reality 

When Billy Gibson, 18, was in elementary school, he couldn’t spell his own name. “I would get all the letters backwards,” he said. “The worst thing for me was figuring out between lower case ‘b’ and ‘d.’ I would always get those mixed up.”

He bombed all his spelling tests. He says his teacher would respond by sending him to the hall with the kid who did best on the test. “I remember her saying, like, ‘See if you can teach this kid how to spell these words.’ The teacher just didn’t have the time for me.”

Billy says he came to think of himself as the dumb kid who spent a lot of time in the hall. He didn’t know he was dyslexic. Neither did his parents.

“We knew something wasn’t right,” said Billy’s mom, Maggie Gibson.

“You can tell things are off, but you don’t know specifically what,” said Rob, Billy’s father.

In response to a formal complaint filed by parents, children in Upper Arlington, Ohio are now taught to read using a phonics-based approach. (APM Reports/Emily Hanford)

The Gibsons, from Baltimore County, Maryland, have five kids. All of them have dyslexia. They know, because they paid thousands of dollars for private testing.

But when the Gibsons showed the test results to their children’s schools, administrators didn’t buy it, says Rob. “The schools essentially said, ‘Yeah, we understand this is a test showing abnormalities from a reputed institution that recommends a child with dyslexia have this, that and the other. And, oh, we don’t agree with it.’ And when we got to that disagreement it was almost like we were disagreeing over reality.”

The Gibsons gave APM Reports an audio recording of the meeting where they discussed the test results with staff at their son Eddie’s school. In the recording, a staff member says, “We do not suspect a learning disability.”

The Gibsons wanted their children to have Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs. Those are the specialized education plans that students with disabilities who are behind in school are entitled to by federal law.

But in the recording, the school staff says Eddie can’t have a disability because he has passing grades and average standardized test scores.

More than a dozen families across the country interviewed by APM Reports reported getting into similar fights with their child’s school. Parents say their children figure out ways to compensate for their dyslexia and get by in school, but they aren’t being taught to read. Children with dyslexia need specialized reading instruction.

But specialized instruction is expensive. The average cost to educate a student in public school is about $12,500, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The cost to educate a child receiving special education services can be more than twice that. When the federal special education law first went into effect in 1975, Congress committed to covering 40 percent of the extra cost of educating children with disabilities. But the federal government is only covering slightly more than 15 percent. States and local districts pay for the rest.

That’s one reason schools have avoided using the word dyslexia, according to Fran Bowman, a former special education teacher who now runs an educational services company that works with school districts to train teachers. “They would say, ‘We don’t use the word dyslexia.’ Because once you open Pandora’s box, you have to serve those children.”

In other words, if schools acknowledge a student has dyslexia, they may be legally obligated to provide special education.

Six special education directors from around the country interviewed by APM Reports denied their schools were refusing to use the word dyslexia to keep students out of special ed.

Kevin Gorman, director of special education in Upper Arlington, Ohio, and a former school principal in another Ohio district, said schools were avoiding the word because it wasn’t a term used by the state on IEP forms. Instead, the state used the umbrella term “specific learning disability.” Gorman explained that schools are so concerned about adhering to the letter of the law that they are reluctant to use terms that do not appear on official paperwork.

Avoiding the word was such a problem in schools across the country that in 2015 the U.S. Department of Education issued a special letter reminding schools that not only can they use the word dyslexia, they should use the word if it can help them tailor an appropriate education plan for a student.

It’s a legal requirement for schools to identify all children who have disabilities and provide them an “appropriate” education. But many schools have resisted the approaches to reading instruction that students with dyslexia need — and that would help all children read better — because of a long-running dispute about how to teach children to read.

The reading wars

You can trace the debate in the United States about how to teach kids to read all the way back to Horace Mann, the father of the public schools movement. In the 1800s, Mann railed against the idea of teaching kids that letters represent sounds. He believed children would better understand what they were reading if they first learned to read whole words.

This came to be known as the “whole language” approach. On the other side of the debate are people who say children must be explicitly taught how sounds correlate with letters. This is commonly referred to as the “phonics” approach.

The argument over which approach is best has been intense and political, with phonics cast as a traditional, conservative approach. Think of children sitting in front of a blackboard, sounding out words as a teacher points to the letters that represent each sound.

Whole language, on the other hand, holds that learning to read is a natural process and that kids don’t need explicit instruction. Expose them to lots of good books and they will learn to read. That approach is seen as the more liberal, progressive way.

As with many ideas in education, there have been big pendulum shifts over the decades. Whole language was big in the 1920s, for example, as progressive education became influential. The pendulum swung back toward phonics in the 1960s. By the 1980s, whole language was popular again.

Bowman, the former special education teacher, got extensive training in phonics in the 1970s and used that approach early in her teaching career. But she says she soon got a supervisor who told her she wasn’t allowed to teach phonics. “You should be teaching by the entire word, instead of these little sounds,” she recalls the supervisor telling her.

Bowman says it’s easier to train teachers to use the whole language method than to train them to use phonics. She thinks that’s one reason whole language has been so attractive. “School districts were like ‘Wow! We can just give you a bunch of books!'”

Proponents of whole language say the approach is more than that. They promote a set of strategies that emphasize comprehension, engagement, and helping children to develop a love of literature.

But by the late 1990s, there was rising panic in the United States that too many kids were not reading well. Scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress showed most students were not reading proficiently.

In 1997, Congress called for a National Reading Panel to determine how best to teach reading. It reviewed more than 100,000 studies and in 2000, the panel published a 449-page report that was a crushing blow to the whole language movement. There was no evidence to show whole language worked and lots of evidence that teaching children the relationship among sounds, letters and spelling patterns improves reading achievement.

This is for all kids, not just those with dyslexia.

Andrea Rowson was teaching in a public school in Ohio when the report was released, but she says she didn’t learn about the findings until years later. “What happens in public education is a lot of initiatives come through, a lot of information gets thrown at schools. New regulations, new this, new that,” she said. “And I think it was just one of those things where (schools) said ‘OK’ and didn’t really realize how huge it was.”

Maggie Gibson going through paperwork related to her children’s education. Getting proper help for a kid with dyslexia takes a lot of time and money, she says. (Emily Hanford, APM Reports)

In 2012 when the public schools in Baltimore County refused to give the Gibson children IEPs, Rob and Maggie decided to hire a lawyer. “All we wanted was to secure their right to learn in public school,” said Maggie.

Their son Billy was in middle school and struggling. “It just got so overwhelming,” he said. “I would just constantly have these anxiety attacks and it got to a point where I refused to go to school.”

Trying to get him the help he needed for his dyslexia was turning into a long and contentious process. Maggie and Rob felt that for Billy and his older sister, time was running out. They decided to send them to the Jemicy School, a private school for students with language-based learning differences in Owings Mills, Maryland.

Jemicy has about 380 students in grades one through 12. The hallways are covered in student artwork and there’s a woodworking shop where students can take geometry. For students who struggle with written language, learning by doing is especially helpful.

Class sizes at Jemicy are capped at 12. The school also provides intensive reading remediation in small-group tutoring sessions.

In a recent tutoring session, Josie and Christopher — fifth-graders in their first year at Jemicy — were seated at a table with a teacher. They were working on the letter combination double vowel “oo.”

“What are the two sounds that ‘oo’ make?” the teacher asked.

Christopher responded confidently with the long vowel sound that “oo” makes in the word “school.” But there’s another sound “oo” makes. Josie and Christopher didn’t catch on.

“‘Uh’ as in ‘book,'” said the teacher.

This tutoring is based on an approach known as Orton-Gillingham, named after Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham, early 20th century pioneers in dyslexia research and remediation. They figured out that children with dyslexia struggle to understand how sounds and letters correspond. To teach them to read, they need to be explicitly taught the rules of the way written language works. Orton and Gillingham developed a systematic approach for doing this. Their ideas form the basis for a number of effective instructional approaches in use today.

When Billy Gibson started at Jemicy as a ninth grader, he wasn’t sure he would finish high school. His dream was to be an artist, but his middle school art teacher gave him C’s because he didn’t follow written directions. Billy went into Jemicy thinking, “I’m not going to be anything. I don’t have any dreams.”

But Jemicy’s small classes and intensive reading instruction helped him catch up and gave him confidence he’d never felt in school. On his first day, he says an art teacher noticed him doodling and told him she thought he could be a great artist. “You should take my class,” Billy remembers her saying to him. “I won’t give up on you.”

Billy graduated from Jemicy in 2017. He’s now studying 3D computer animation at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. His goal is to work in the film industry. “Hopefully someday you’ll be in the movie theater and see my name on the credits of the big screen,” he said.

Listen to families talk about their struggles to get reading helping for their dyslexic kids in the podcast version of this story available on Apple Podcasts or RadioPublic.

More than $60,000 a year

Billy’s mom Maggie noticed a difference at Jemicy right away. As the parent of kids with dyslexia in public school, she says you get used to being in fight mode. “You’re fighting for it to be recognized that your kid needs X, Y and Z,” she said. “And then you go into Jemicy and you have a teacher conference and the teachers sit down and say, ‘You know, we think your child would benefit from this, this and this. And we notice that your child needs’ — whatever it is. And you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh! We’re speaking the same language. We’re all noticing the same thing.'”

But to send two kids to Jemicy cost more than $60,000 a year. Maggie and Rob are fortunate: He’s a physician and they got financial help from their children’s grandparents. But five private school tuitions weren’t in their budget. So, with their lawyer, the Gibsons kept fighting with the Baltimore County Public Schools to try to get their three other kids better help.

The Gibsons eventually got the school system to pay for two of their children to go to Baltimore Lab School, a private school for students with learning disabilities. The Gibsons don’t think they would have gotten that if they hadn’t hired an attorney. Getting what you need for a kid with dyslexia is a rich man’s game, says Maggie. The Gibsons estimate their family has spent more than $350,000 — including legal fees, private tutoring and tuition — to get their five dyslexic kids what they needed to be successful in school.

Without help from grandparents, Maggie says she and Rob probably couldn’t have made private school work. “What does a person do that doesn’t have the luxury of other people to help them?” she said. “What do you do?”

Pam Guest, for example, did not have the financial means to send her son Dayne to private school. “I talk to a lot of upper-class white families who were able to take their kids out and send them to private school. Those kids are doing well now, and they’re able to go to college,” she said. “And we didn’t have that opportunity.”

Dayne and Pam Guest (APM Reports/Emily Hanford)

Dayne went to the Baltimore County Public Schools, too. There’s no evidence that Baltimore County has more of a problem than other public school systems when it comes to identifying and providing proper instruction to students with dyslexia. But officials with the Baltimore County Schools are now admitting they have a problem. “We need to do better,” said Rebecca Rider, who’s been director of special education for the Baltimore County Public Schools since 2014. Under her leadership, the school system has begun to train teachers in Orton-Gillingham. Before this effort began in 2016, the county schools did not have anyone trained to provide this instruction.

Stephen Cowles, a lawyer for BCPS, said the school system is making more of an effort to identify students with dyslexia. As a result, he says the county is paying for more students to go to private schools. In the 2016 fiscal year, the county paid nearly $40 million dollars for students with disabilities who could not be appropriately served in public schools to go to specialized private schools. BCPS couldn’t say how much of that money is being spent on students with dyslexia.

But helping students with dyslexia is not just about expanding special education services. Research suggests that if students with dyslexia got effective early reading instruction in their regular classrooms, some of them may not need intensive, specialized instruction. The problem is that many teachers do not know how to teach reading effectively.

Thousands of teacher preparation programs

In 2000, the National Reading Panel identified five key components of effective reading instruction. Ten years later, the U.S. Department of Education decided to find out whether people coming out of teacher preparation programs had learned those five components.

New teachers could correctly answer only about half the questions on a multiple-choice test. They rated their own preparation in how to teach reading as below “moderate.”

In 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a think tank in Washington, D.C., analyzed syllabi from undergraduate elementary teacher preparation programs and found that fewer than 40 percent covered all the components of effective reading instruction. And that was a big improvement from 2014 when NCTQ found just 17 percent of teacher preparation programs taught all five components.

What are teachers learning about how to teach children to read?

“We learned a lot about creating a literature-rich environment,” said Rowson, the Ohio teacher. She got her initial training in the 1980s and says she learned nothing about phonics; in fact, she says her professors were against the idea of explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters. She learned the whole language approach.

Rowson says she didn’t learn how to teach children to read until she was trained in Orton-Gillingham. She now trains teachers in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a school district that has significantly changed how it teaches reading in response to a formal complaint filed by a group of parents.

Amelia Smith, a teacher in Upper Arlington who got her degree in elementary and special education in 2012, says by then there was recognition that phonics was important. “We knew what it was but we weren’t taught how to teach it,” she said.

One reason teachers are not being better prepared to teach reading is there’s still an ideological fight going on about whole language versus phonics, according to Jule McCombes-Tolis, chief academic officer for educator training initiatives at the International Dyslexia Association. She spent more than two decades as a professor in teacher preparation programs. “The division in higher ed in reading is alive and well,” she said.

McCombes-Tolis says in the wake of the National Reading Panel report, many teacher educators who believed in the whole language approach promoted the idea of “balanced literacy” instead.

But balanced literacy is basically whole language with some phonics mixed in, says Tim Shanahan, a literacy expert who served on the National Reading Panel. “Balanced literacy began as the notion of a different attempt to try to settle the reading wars. It’s supposed to be the best of both worlds.”

Shanahan says what’s wrong with balanced literacy is that it combines a whole bunch of things that don’t work with a little bit of what does work, and that’s not good reading instruction. He thinks a big problem with teacher preparation programs is that many of the people who are teaching the reading instruction courses don’t know the science of reading that well.

“The folks who teach these courses range in their knowledge dramatically,” he said. Enroll in a teacher preparation program and your instructor might have a Ph.D. and be familiar with the latest research, says Shanahan. But “you could have somebody who — this person teaches four other things for us and we’ll give them an extra course in reading instruction. They have last year’s syllabus and they do their best,” he said.

There are thousands of teacher preparation programs in the United States and there’s very little oversight of them. In higher education, the faculty typically controls the curriculum. There is no one authority to hold accountable for how teachers in America are trained.

States do have some power and many are trying to exert more control over what gets taught in teacher preparation programs as well as what is happening in public schools when it comes to students with dyslexia.

As of October, 41 states have some sort of dyslexia law, regulation or resolution. The laws and regulations vary widely. Some require graduates of teacher preparation programs to pass science of reading tests; others encourage public schools to provide teacher training on how to identify dyslexia.

Most of these laws have passed in the past few years partly due to parent advocacy groups pushing for change.

Pam Guest is a leader of one of these groups, Decoding Dyslexia-Maryland. Decoding Dyslexia has chapters in all 50 states. In Maryland, the group succeeded in getting a bill through the legislature to establish a task force that reviewed how students in the state are identified and treated for dyslexia. Now the group wants funding for a pilot program to demonstrate best practices when it comes to not only helping students with dyslexia, but to teaching all children how to read.

Even though it’s too late for her son, Guest says she’s determined to change things so what happened to Dayne won’t happen to other kids.

“It’s simple,” she said. “Teachers must be able to teach children how to read.”

Emily Hanford is senior education correspondent for APM Reports, the documentary and investigative journalism group at American Public Media. The fall season of four education documentaries can be heard via the Educate podcast. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts.

Why Getting Help for Kids with Dyslexia is Difficult published first on http://ift.tt/2y2Rir2

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Why Getting Help for Kids with Dyslexia is Difficult

Dayne Guest graduated from high school in 2016. He had been working construction but quit, knowing that wasn’t what he wanted do with his life. Today Guest’s options are limited because he struggles to read. When he opens a book, he sees “just a whole bunch of words, a whole bunch of letters lined up.”

His mom, Pam Guest, knew something wasn’t right when Dayne was in kindergarten. “In the mornings when students came into the classroom, they would write that they’d brought their lunch or that they were going to purchase lunch in the cafeteria,” she said. “And Dayne always walked right past that board and sat down.”

Teachers said Dayne would catch up, but by the end of first grade, he still wasn’t reading.

Pam thought her son might have dyslexia. But the teachers said no. It went on like this for years: Pam suspecting Dayne was dyslexic, the schools saying no, and Pam believing them because they were the education experts.

Listen to families talk about their struggles to get reading helping for their dyslexic kids in the podcast version of this story available on Apple Podcasts or RadioPublic.

At the end of Dayne’s senior year in high school, Pam learned she had a legal right to an evaluation. The school tested him, and the report said Dayne had weaknesses “often seen in students diagnosed with reading disabilities including dyslexia.”

“But they would not say that he was dyslexic,” said Pam. “And I asked the psychologist why, and she said we would never say that a student is dyslexic. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘It is not in our realm of professionalism to say that a student is dyslexic.'”

The reluctance to confirm that a child is “dyslexic” goes beyond avoiding a label that could harm kids. Public schools nationwide have long refused to use the word, allowing many of them to avoid providing special education services as required by federal law. According to dozens of interviews with parents, students, researchers, lawyers and teachers across the country, many public schools are not identifying students with dyslexia and are ignoring their needs.

While scientists estimate that between 5 and 12 percent of children in the United States have dyslexia, just 4.5 percent of students in public schools are diagnosed with a “specific learning disability,” a category that includes dyslexia and other learning disabilities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In addition, while schools routinely screen children for hearing impairment, a problem that occurs much less frequently than dyslexia, screening for dyslexia is rare.

Moreover, most students who are diagnosed with dyslexia aren’t identified until at least third grade, according to Dr. Sally Shaywitz, co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity, and author of Overcoming Dyslexia. She says it is not unusual for dyslexics to go unrecognized until adolescence and beyond, a systemic shortcoming that effectively abandons struggling young readers during the most critical years of learning.

When children are identified with dyslexia, public schools often lack staff with the appropriate training to help, according to several studies and reports.

And yet, there are proven ways to teach people with dyslexia how to read that are not new or controversial. Research suggests that if all children were taught to read using approaches that work for students with dyslexia, reading achievement would improve overall.

According to the most recent federal data, more than 60 percent of fourth-graders in the United States are not proficient readers. Students who struggle to read are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty.

Students at or above proficient reading level

  Disagreements Over Reality 

When Billy Gibson, 18, was in elementary school, he couldn’t spell his own name. “I would get all the letters backwards,” he said. “The worst thing for me was figuring out between lower case ‘b’ and ‘d.’ I would always get those mixed up.”

He bombed all his spelling tests. He says his teacher would respond by sending him to the hall with the kid who did best on the test. “I remember her saying, like, ‘See if you can teach this kid how to spell these words.’ The teacher just didn’t have the time for me.”

Billy says he came to think of himself as the dumb kid who spent a lot of time in the hall. He didn’t know he was dyslexic. Neither did his parents.

“We knew something wasn’t right,” said Billy’s mom, Maggie Gibson.

“You can tell things are off, but you don’t know specifically what,” said Rob, Billy’s father.

In response to a formal complaint filed by parents, children in Upper Arlington, Ohio are now taught to read using a phonics-based approach. (APM Reports/Emily Hanford)

The Gibsons, from Baltimore County, Maryland, have five kids. All of them have dyslexia. They know, because they paid thousands of dollars for private testing.

But when the Gibsons showed the test results to their children’s schools, administrators didn’t buy it, says Rob. “The schools essentially said, ‘Yeah, we understand this is a test showing abnormalities from a reputed institution that recommends a child with dyslexia have this, that and the other. And, oh, we don’t agree with it.’ And when we got to that disagreement it was almost like we were disagreeing over reality.”

The Gibsons gave APM Reports an audio recording of the meeting where they discussed the test results with staff at their son Eddie’s school. In the recording, a staff member says, “We do not suspect a learning disability.”

The Gibsons wanted their children to have Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs. Those are the specialized education plans that students with disabilities who are behind in school are entitled to by federal law.

But in the recording, the school staff says Eddie can’t have a disability because he has passing grades and average standardized test scores.

More than a dozen families across the country interviewed by APM Reports reported getting into similar fights with their child’s school. Parents say their children figure out ways to compensate for their dyslexia and get by in school, but they aren’t being taught to read. Children with dyslexia need specialized reading instruction.

But specialized instruction is expensive. The average cost to educate a student in public school is about $12,500, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The cost to educate a child receiving special education services can be more than twice that. When the federal special education law first went into effect in 1975, Congress committed to covering 40 percent of the extra cost of educating children with disabilities. But the federal government is only covering slightly more than 15 percent. States and local districts pay for the rest.

That’s one reason schools have avoided using the word dyslexia, according to Fran Bowman, a former special education teacher who now runs an educational services company that works with school districts to train teachers. “They would say, ‘We don’t use the word dyslexia.’ Because once you open Pandora’s box, you have to serve those children.”

In other words, if schools acknowledge a student has dyslexia, they may be legally obligated to provide special education.

Six special education directors from around the country interviewed by APM Reports denied their schools were refusing to use the word dyslexia to keep students out of special ed.

Kevin Gorman, director of special education in Upper Arlington, Ohio, and a former school principal in another Ohio district, said schools were avoiding the word because it wasn’t a term used by the state on IEP forms. Instead, the state used the umbrella term “specific learning disability.” Gorman explained that schools are so concerned about adhering to the letter of the law that they are reluctant to use terms that do not appear on official paperwork.

Avoiding the word was such a problem in schools across the country that in 2015 the U.S. Department of Education issued a special letter reminding schools that not only can they use the word dyslexia, they should use the word if it can help them tailor an appropriate education plan for a student.

It’s a legal requirement for schools to identify all children who have disabilities and provide them an “appropriate” education. But many schools have resisted the approaches to reading instruction that students with dyslexia need — and that would help all children read better — because of a long-running dispute about how to teach children to read.

The reading wars

You can trace the debate in the United States about how to teach kids to read all the way back to Horace Mann, the father of the public schools movement. In the 1800s, Mann railed against the idea of teaching kids that letters represent sounds. He believed children would better understand what they were reading if they first learned to read whole words.

This came to be known as the “whole language” approach. On the other side of the debate are people who say children must be explicitly taught how sounds correlate with letters. This is commonly referred to as the “phonics” approach.

The argument over which approach is best has been intense and political, with phonics cast as a traditional, conservative approach. Think of children sitting in front of a blackboard, sounding out words as a teacher points to the letters that represent each sound.

Whole language, on the other hand, holds that learning to read is a natural process and that kids don’t need explicit instruction. Expose them to lots of good books and they will learn to read. That approach is seen as the more liberal, progressive way.

As with many ideas in education, there have been big pendulum shifts over the decades. Whole language was big in the 1920s, for example, as progressive education became influential. The pendulum swung back toward phonics in the 1960s. By the 1980s, whole language was popular again.

Bowman, the former special education teacher, got extensive training in phonics in the 1970s and used that approach early in her teaching career. But she says she soon got a supervisor who told her she wasn’t allowed to teach phonics. “You should be teaching by the entire word, instead of these little sounds,” she recalls the supervisor telling her.

Bowman says it’s easier to train teachers to use the whole language method than to train them to use phonics. She thinks that’s one reason whole language has been so attractive. “School districts were like ‘Wow! We can just give you a bunch of books!'”

Proponents of whole language say the approach is more than that. They promote a set of strategies that emphasize comprehension, engagement, and helping children to develop a love of literature.

But by the late 1990s, there was rising panic in the United States that too many kids were not reading well. Scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress showed most students were not reading proficiently.

In 1997, Congress called for a National Reading Panel to determine how best to teach reading. It reviewed more than 100,000 studies and in 2000, the panel published a 449-page report that was a crushing blow to the whole language movement. There was no evidence to show whole language worked and lots of evidence that teaching children the relationship among sounds, letters and spelling patterns improves reading achievement.

This is for all kids, not just those with dyslexia.

Andrea Rowson was teaching in a public school in Ohio when the report was released, but she says she didn’t learn about the findings until years later. “What happens in public education is a lot of initiatives come through, a lot of information gets thrown at schools. New regulations, new this, new that,” she said. “And I think it was just one of those things where (schools) said ‘OK’ and didn’t really realize how huge it was.”

Maggie Gibson going through paperwork related to her children’s education. Getting proper help for a kid with dyslexia takes a lot of time and money, she says. (Emily Hanford, APM Reports)

In 2012 when the public schools in Baltimore County refused to give the Gibson children IEPs, Rob and Maggie decided to hire a lawyer. “All we wanted was to secure their right to learn in public school,” said Maggie.

Their son Billy was in middle school and struggling. “It just got so overwhelming,” he said. “I would just constantly have these anxiety attacks and it got to a point where I refused to go to school.”

Trying to get him the help he needed for his dyslexia was turning into a long and contentious process. Maggie and Rob felt that for Billy and his older sister, time was running out. They decided to send them to the Jemicy School, a private school for students with language-based learning differences in Owings Mills, Maryland.

Jemicy has about 380 students in grades one through 12. The hallways are covered in student artwork and there’s a woodworking shop where students can take geometry. For students who struggle with written language, learning by doing is especially helpful.

Class sizes at Jemicy are capped at 12. The school also provides intensive reading remediation in small-group tutoring sessions.

In a recent tutoring session, Josie and Christopher — fifth-graders in their first year at Jemicy — were seated at a table with a teacher. They were working on the letter combination double vowel “oo.”

“What are the two sounds that ‘oo’ make?” the teacher asked.

Christopher responded confidently with the long vowel sound that “oo” makes in the word “school.” But there’s another sound “oo” makes. Josie and Christopher didn’t catch on.

“‘Uh’ as in ‘book,'” said the teacher.

This tutoring is based on an approach known as Orton-Gillingham, named after Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham, early 20th century pioneers in dyslexia research and remediation. They figured out that children with dyslexia struggle to understand how sounds and letters correspond. To teach them to read, they need to be explicitly taught the rules of the way written language works. Orton and Gillingham developed a systematic approach for doing this. Their ideas form the basis for a number of effective instructional approaches in use today.

When Billy Gibson started at Jemicy as a ninth grader, he wasn’t sure he would finish high school. His dream was to be an artist, but his middle school art teacher gave him C’s because he didn’t follow written directions. Billy went into Jemicy thinking, “I’m not going to be anything. I don’t have any dreams.”

But Jemicy’s small classes and intensive reading instruction helped him catch up and gave him confidence he’d never felt in school. On his first day, he says an art teacher noticed him doodling and told him she thought he could be a great artist. “You should take my class,” Billy remembers her saying to him. “I won’t give up on you.”

Billy graduated from Jemicy in 2017. He’s now studying 3D computer animation at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. His goal is to work in the film industry. “Hopefully someday you’ll be in the movie theater and see my name on the credits of the big screen,” he said.

Listen to families talk about their struggles to get reading helping for their dyslexic kids in the podcast version of this story available on Apple Podcasts or RadioPublic.

More than $60,000 a year

Billy’s mom Maggie noticed a difference at Jemicy right away. As the parent of kids with dyslexia in public school, she says you get used to being in fight mode. “You’re fighting for it to be recognized that your kid needs X, Y and Z,” she said. “And then you go into Jemicy and you have a teacher conference and the teachers sit down and say, ‘You know, we think your child would benefit from this, this and this. And we notice that your child needs’ — whatever it is. And you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh! We’re speaking the same language. We’re all noticing the same thing.'”

But to send two kids to Jemicy cost more than $60,000 a year. Maggie and Rob are fortunate: He’s a physician and they got financial help from their children’s grandparents. But five private school tuitions weren’t in their budget. So, with their lawyer, the Gibsons kept fighting with the Baltimore County Public Schools to try to get their three other kids better help.

The Gibsons eventually got the school system to pay for two of their children to go to Baltimore Lab School, a private school for students with learning disabilities. The Gibsons don’t think they would have gotten that if they hadn’t hired an attorney. Getting what you need for a kid with dyslexia is a rich man’s game, says Maggie. The Gibsons estimate their family has spent more than $350,000 — including legal fees, private tutoring and tuition — to get their five dyslexic kids what they needed to be successful in school.

Without help from grandparents, Maggie says she and Rob probably couldn’t have made private school work. “What does a person do that doesn’t have the luxury of other people to help them?” she said. “What do you do?”

Pam Guest, for example, did not have the financial means to send her son Dayne to private school. “I talk to a lot of upper-class white families who were able to take their kids out and send them to private school. Those kids are doing well now, and they’re able to go to college,” she said. “And we didn’t have that opportunity.”

Dayne and Pam Guest (APM Reports/Emily Hanford)

Dayne went to the Baltimore County Public Schools, too. There’s no evidence that Baltimore County has more of a problem than other public school systems when it comes to identifying and providing proper instruction to students with dyslexia. But officials with the Baltimore County Schools are now admitting they have a problem. “We need to do better,” said Rebecca Rider, who’s been director of special education for the Baltimore County Public Schools since 2014. Under her leadership, the school system has begun to train teachers in Orton-Gillingham. Before this effort began in 2016, the county schools did not have anyone trained to provide this instruction.

Stephen Cowles, a lawyer for BCPS, said the school system is making more of an effort to identify students with dyslexia. As a result, he says the county is paying for more students to go to private schools. In the 2016 fiscal year, the county paid nearly $40 million dollars for students with disabilities who could not be appropriately served in public schools to go to specialized private schools. BCPS couldn’t say how much of that money is being spent on students with dyslexia.

But helping students with dyslexia is not just about expanding special education services. Research suggests that if students with dyslexia got effective early reading instruction in their regular classrooms, some of them may not need intensive, specialized instruction. The problem is that many teachers do not know how to teach reading effectively.

Thousands of teacher preparation programs

In 2000, the National Reading Panel identified five key components of effective reading instruction. Ten years later, the U.S. Department of Education decided to find out whether people coming out of teacher preparation programs had learned those five components.

New teachers could correctly answer only about half the questions on a multiple-choice test. They rated their own preparation in how to teach reading as below “moderate.”

In 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a think tank in Washington, D.C., analyzed syllabi from undergraduate elementary teacher preparation programs and found that fewer than 40 percent covered all the components of effective reading instruction. And that was a big improvement from 2014 when NCTQ found just 17 percent of teacher preparation programs taught all five components.

What are teachers learning about how to teach children to read?

“We learned a lot about creating a literature-rich environment,” said Rowson, the Ohio teacher. She got her initial training in the 1980s and says she learned nothing about phonics; in fact, she says her professors were against the idea of explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters. She learned the whole language approach.

Rowson says she didn’t learn how to teach children to read until she was trained in Orton-Gillingham. She now trains teachers in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a school district that has significantly changed how it teaches reading in response to a formal complaint filed by a group of parents.

Amelia Smith, a teacher in Upper Arlington who got her degree in elementary and special education in 2012, says by then there was recognition that phonics was important. “We knew what it was but we weren’t taught how to teach it,” she said.

One reason teachers are not being better prepared to teach reading is there’s still an ideological fight going on about whole language versus phonics, according to Jule McCombes-Tolis, chief academic officer for educator training initiatives at the International Dyslexia Association. She spent more than two decades as a professor in teacher preparation programs. “The division in higher ed in reading is alive and well,” she said.

McCombes-Tolis says in the wake of the National Reading Panel report, many teacher educators who believed in the whole language approach promoted the idea of “balanced literacy” instead.

But balanced literacy is basically whole language with some phonics mixed in, says Tim Shanahan, a literacy expert who served on the National Reading Panel. “Balanced literacy began as the notion of a different attempt to try to settle the reading wars. It’s supposed to be the best of both worlds.”

Shanahan says what’s wrong with balanced literacy is that it combines a whole bunch of things that don’t work with a little bit of what does work, and that’s not good reading instruction. He thinks a big problem with teacher preparation programs is that many of the people who are teaching the reading instruction courses don’t know the science of reading that well.

“The folks who teach these courses range in their knowledge dramatically,” he said. Enroll in a teacher preparation program and your instructor might have a Ph.D. and be familiar with the latest research, says Shanahan. But “you could have somebody who — this person teaches four other things for us and we’ll give them an extra course in reading instruction. They have last year’s syllabus and they do their best,” he said.

There are thousands of teacher preparation programs in the United States and there’s very little oversight of them. In higher education, the faculty typically controls the curriculum. There is no one authority to hold accountable for how teachers in America are trained.

States do have some power and many are trying to exert more control over what gets taught in teacher preparation programs as well as what is happening in public schools when it comes to students with dyslexia.

As of October, 41 states have some sort of dyslexia law, regulation or resolution. The laws and regulations vary widely. Some require graduates of teacher preparation programs to pass science of reading tests; others encourage public schools to provide teacher training on how to identify dyslexia.

Most of these laws have passed in the past few years partly due to parent advocacy groups pushing for change.

Pam Guest is a leader of one of these groups, Decoding Dyslexia-Maryland. Decoding Dyslexia has chapters in all 50 states. In Maryland, the group succeeded in getting a bill through the legislature to establish a task force that reviewed how students in the state are identified and treated for dyslexia. Now the group wants funding for a pilot program to demonstrate best practices when it comes to not only helping students with dyslexia, but to teaching all children how to read.

Even though it’s too late for her son, Guest says she’s determined to change things so what happened to Dayne won’t happen to other kids.

“It’s simple,” she said. “Teachers must be able to teach children how to read.”

Emily Hanford is senior education correspondent for APM Reports, the documentary and investigative journalism group at American Public Media. The fall season of four education documentaries can be heard via the Educate podcast. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts.

Why Getting Help for Kids with Dyslexia is Difficult published first on http://ift.tt/2xi3x5d