California sends mixed messages when it comes to serving dyslexic students.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is the most famous dyslexic political official in the country, even authoring a  to raise awareness about the learning disability. And yet, California is one of 10 states that doesn’t require dyslexia screening for all children. 

Education experts agree that early screening and intervention is critical for making sure students can read at grade level. But so far, state officials have done almost everything to combat dyslexia except mandate assessments for all students.

“It needs to happen,” said Lillian Duran, an education professor at the University of Oregon who has helped develop screening tools for dyslexia. “It seems so basic to me.”

Since 2015, legislators have funded dyslexia research, teacher training and the hiring of literacy coaches across California. But lawmakers failed to mandate universal dyslexia screening, running smack into opposition from the California Teachers Association.

The union argued that since teachers would do the screening, a universal mandate would take time away from the classroom. It also said universal screening may overly identify English learners, mistakenly placing them in special education. 

The California Teachers Association did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In a letter of opposition to a bill in 2021, the union wrote that the bill “is unnecessary, leads to over identifying dyslexia in young students, mandates more testing, and jeopardizes the limited instructional time for students.”

In response, dyslexia experts double down on well-established research. Early detection actually prevents English learners — and really, all students — from ending up in special education when they don’t belong there.  

While California lawmakers didn’t vote to buck the teachers union, they haven’t been afraid to spend taxpayer money on dyslexia screening. In the past two years, the state budget allocated $30 million to UC San Francisco’s Dyslexia Center, largely for the development of a new screening tool. Newsom began championing the center and served as its  in 2016 when he was still lieutenant governor. 

“There’s an inadequate involvement of the health system in the way we support children with learning disabilities,” said Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini, co-director of UCSF’s Dyslexia Center. “This is one of the first attempts at bridging science and education in a way that’s open sourced and open to all fields.”

Parents and advocates say funding dyslexia research and developing a new screener can all be good things, but without mandated universal screening more students will fall through the cracks and need more help with reading as they get older.

Omar Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the governor did not respond to questions about whether Newsom would support a mandate for universal screening. Instead, he listed more than $300 million in state investments made in the past two years to fund more reading coaches, new teacher credentialing requirements and teacher training.

The screening struggle

Rachel Levy, a Bay Area parent, fought for three years to get her son Dominic screened for dyslexia. He finally got the screening in third grade, which experts say could be  to prevent long-term struggles with reading. 

“We know how to screen students. We know how to get early intervention,” Levy said. “This to me is a solvable issue.”

Levy’s son Dominic, 16, still remembers what it felt like trying to read in first grade.

“It was like I was trying to memorize the shape of the word,” he said. “Even if I could read all the words, I just wouldn’t understand them.”

Dyslexia is a neurological condition that can make it hard for students to read and process information. But teachers can mitigate and even prevent the illiteracy stemming from dyslexia if they catch the signs early.

Levy, who also has dyslexia, said there’s much more research today on dyslexia than there was 30 years ago when she was first diagnosed. She said she was disappointed to find that California’s policies don’t align with the research around early screening.

“Unfortunately, most kids who are dyslexic end up in the special education system,” Levy said. “It’s because of a lack of screening.”

Soon after his screening in third grade, Dominic started receiving extra help for his dyslexia. He still works with an educational therapist on his reading, and he’s just about caught up to grade level in math. The biggest misconception about dyslexia, Dominic said, is that it makes you less intelligent or capable.

“Dyslexics are just as smart as other people,” he said. “They just learn in different ways.”

The first step to helping them learn is screening them in kindergarten or first grade.

“The goal is to find risk factors early,” said Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, a speech-language pathologist and a professor at the University of Houston. “When you find them, the data you collect can really inform instruction.”

Cárdenas-Hagan’s home state of Texas passed a law in 1995 requiring universal screening. But she said it took several more years for teachers to be trained to use the tool. Her word of caution to California: Make sure teachers are not only comfortable with the tool but know how to use the results of the assessment to shape the way they teach individual students.

A homegrown screener

UC San Francisco’s screener, called Multitudes, will be available in English, Spanish and Mandarin. It’ll be free for all school districts. 

Multitudes won’t be released to all districts at once. UCSF scientists launched a pilot at a dozen school districts last year, and they plan to expand to more districts this fall. 

But experts and advocates say there’s no need to wait for it to mandate universal screenings. Educators can use a variety of already available screening tools in California, like they do in 40 other states. Texas and other states that have high percentages of English learners have Spanish screeners for dyslexia.

For English learners, the need for screening is especially urgent. Maria Ortiz is a Los Angeles parent of a dyslexic teenager who was also an English learner. She said she had to sue the Los Angeles Unified School District twice: once in 2016 to get extra help for her dyslexic daughter when she was in fourth grade and again in 2018 when those services were taken away. Ortiz said the district stopped giving her daughter additional help because her reading started improving.

“In the beginning they told me that my daughter was exaggerating,” Ortiz said.

 “They said everything would be normal later.”

California currently serves about 1.1 million English learners, just under a fifth of all public school students. For English learners, dyslexia can be confused with a lack of English proficiency. Opponents of universal screening, including the teachers association, argue that English learners will be misidentified as dyslexic simply because they can’t understand the language. 

“Even the specialists were afraid that the problem might be because of the language barrier,” Ortiz said about her daughter’s case.

But experts say dyslexia presents a double threat to English learners: It stalls them from reading in their native language and impedes their ability to learn English. And while there are some Spanish-language screeners, experts from Texas and California say there’s room for improvement. Current Spanish screeners penalize students who mix Spanish and English, they say. 

Duran, who helped develop the Spanish version of Multitudes, said the new screener will be a better fit for how young bilingual students actually talk. 

“Spanglish becomes its own communication that’s just as legitimate as Spanish on its own or English on its own,” Duran said. “It’s about the totality of languages a child might bring.”

Providing Multitudes free of cost is important to schools with large numbers of low-income students. Dyslexia screeners cost about $10 per student, so $30 million might actually be cost-effective considering California currently serves 1.3 million students in kindergarten through second grade. The tool could pay for itself in a few years. Although there are plenty of screeners already available, they can stretch the budgets of high-poverty schools and districts.

“The least funded schools can’t access them because of the cost,” Duran said.

In addition to the governor, another powerful state lawmaker, Glendale Democratic state Sen. Anthony Portantino, is dyslexic. While chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, authored legislation to require public schools to screen all students between kindergarten and second grade. 

Portantino’s 2021 bill received unanimous support in the Senate Education and Appropriations committees, but the bill died in the Assembly Education Committee. Portantino authored the same bill in 2020, but it never made it out of the state Senate.

“We should be leading the nation and not lagging behind,” Portantino said. 

Portantino blamed the failure of his most recent bill on former Democratic Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell, who chaired the Assembly Education Committee, for refusing to hear the bill. 

“It’s no secret, Patrick O’Donnell was against teacher training,” Portantino said. “He thought our school districts and our educators didn’t have the capacity.”

O’Donnell did not respond to requests for comment. Since O’Donnell didn’t schedule a hearing on the bill, there is no record of him commenting about it at the time.

Portantino plans to author a nearly identical bill this year. He said he’s more hopeful because the Assembly Education Committee is now under the leadership of Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, a Democrat from Torrance. Muratsuchi would not comment on the potential fate of a dyslexia screening bill this year.

Levy now works as a professional advocate for parents of students with disabilities. She said without mandatory dyslexia screening, only parents who can afford to hire someone like her will be able to get the services they need for their children.

“A lot of high school kids are reading below third-grade level,” she said. “To me, that’s just heartbreaking.”

This was originally published on CalMatters.

When COVID struck in 2020, the then-eighth grader’s Upper Valley, New Hampshire middle school campus shut down for several weeks to pivot to virtual learning, like most others across the country. Paige knew then that her daughter Amy — whose name has been changed in this piece for the student’s privacy — was at risk of falling behind even further. Once online school started, live instruction was only on a “part-time basis,” Paige said.

“There was lost learning time,” she said. “Sometimes there weren’t teachers because the teachers were sick.”

Although Paige didn’t know it yet, Amy had dyslexia. For years, the now-17-year-old’s condition went undiagnosed. Meanwhile, it complicated the teen’s part-time job at a clothing store, because she struggled to type in email addresses at the cash register.

In a last-ditch effort to help her daughter, Paige connected with a tutor specializing in phonics-based literacy, who she now works with via a relatively new state program. After beginning tutoring, Amy showed quick improvement on spelling and reading tests administered by her high school, Paige said. Amy’s literacy coach recognized signs of dyslexia and pointed the family toward screening for the disability, which led to her diagnosis and extra services at school.

“I’ve seen progress,” Paige said. “The way [her tutor] works with her is not a way … a teacher would have the time to work with her in a classroom situation.”

That sort of individualized, intensive coaching is a key solution the Granite State has bet on to help students like Amy get back on track after the pandemic. The state is entering its second year offering the scholarship, which uses a digital wallet to provide $1,000 for private tutoring to any young person whose education was negatively impacted by the pandemic. The scholarship is available to all students, regardless of need, and can be applied toward tutoring from state-approved educators.

“When I explain the program to [parents], they become very excited, like, ‘Oh, this is great,’” New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut said. “In some cases, they’re almost like, ‘It’s too good to be true. How can this possibly be?’”

But families in New Hampshire have tapped into less than a third of the available scholarship funds. So far this academic year, 724 young people have received scholarships — accounting for just $724,000 out of a $2.5 million total funded by federal COVID relief cash. Upon inception, the state granted scholarship eligibility only to students from low-income families, but with signups lagging and substantial funds remaining, they made access universal.

State testing in 2022 revealed that more than half of New Hampshire students were not proficient in math and over 40% were behind in English, though scores have rebounded slightly since 2021, according to data provided by the state. Research shows sustained individual or small-group tutoring can be one of the best ways to help children catch up.

“One student might be struggling with functions. Another is struggling with algebraic equations,” Edelblut said. “Those are the kinds of things that in a one-on-one tutoring session with a teacher that can be drawn out, they can be addressed, they can be targeted, and we can fill in those gaps.”

Soon after the Paige family began tutoring, they saw a post on social media about the YES! grant and realized they qualified. Though they’re still working out the logistics of the digital wallet, the funds will cover more than two months of intensive lessons, which will be “definitely helpful, without a doubt,” Paige said.

The program has also served its purpose for student Sylas Marrotte. The scholarship gave him access to a trained special education teacher for twice-a-week math and reading tutoring, grandmother Sherry Newman said.

“My grandson, who already had learning disabilities, was falling way behind [during COVID],” Newman wrote in an email to The 74. “The tutor was very flexible and supportive.”

The program could help to “democratize” the private tutoring market, which often is available only to wealthier families, said Matthew Kraft, associate professor of education at Brown University. 

But in his eyes, the slow uptake among low-income families is a damning indicator, signaling either poor advertising to the neediest parents or failure to alleviate other barriers such as transportation costs. 

It’s possible many families “just never learned about the program or couldn’t figure out how to sign up or didn’t think that they could make it work,” Kraft said. “I don’t think … they’ve met the demand in that group of students.”

Nationwide, parental interest in learning recovery options has been lower than policymakers would have hoped, according to recent from the Brookings Institute. Despite significant gaps in learning for millions of students across the country, less than a third of families said they wanted their kids to participate in tutoring and less than a quarter said they were interested in district-run summer camps.

Even if all the New Hampshire tutoring funds get disbursed, Kraft observed, it will still only serve 2,500 learners — a drop in the bucket compared to the state’s over 185,000 students, including roughly 50,000 who are eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, a proxy indicator for the number of students living in poverty.

The New Hampshire Department of Education does not “at this time” know the share of low-income students who have taken advantage of the tutoring scholarship money compared to wealthier youth, Edelblut said. Students could opt for virtual sessions in cases where transportation presented a barrier, he noted.

The YES! scholarship is one of three state-funded tutoring options available to New Hampshire families. The state announced this month that it had that will give more than 100,000 students access to the site’s 24/7 digital tutoring services. Since early in the pandemic, the state has also partnered with Khan Academy founder Sal Khan’s initiative, providing the state’s students with free access to the site’s learning resources. That site has seen about 4,300 New Hampshire visitors, said Kimberly Houghton, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Education, although she did not have figures on how many tutoring sessions students have actually participated in.

Among the 74 individuals and organizations registered by the state as , including specialists in math, literacy, speech and executive functioning, a handful said over email that none or just one student had reached out for tutoring sessions.

But Krista Martin, who runs the Sylvan Learning centers in Portsmouth and Salem, has worked with six students who have used YES! scholarship money to pay for sessions. Two of those families were already paying for Sylvan tutoring services before the grant and now use the funds to offset costs, but the other four enrolled once they received the scholarship, Martin said. 

For the most part, families come in hopes that the sessions will help their kids recover from the pandemic, Martin wrote in an email.

“​​For many of our students, the breakdowns started during the COVID years,” Martin said. “Since the pandemic, we have heard from many families that they want their children to enjoy school again and show interest in what they are learning like they did before COVID.”

For the Paige family, Amy’s struggles began earlier, but YES! has helped — at least a little — along the way. On an August evening in northern New Hampshire, tutor Lynne Howard sat at her dining table and helped the teen break down words into their individual sound components. Howard was a longtime reading specialist in the local schools and now runs a tutoring company called Summit Literacy.

“Say hush,” Howard said.

“Hush,” Amy responded.

“Now say hush but change ‘shh’ to ‘mm,’ ” Howard added on.

“Hum,” Amy answered.

Word by word, sound by sound, Howard and Amy made out ways to fill the student’s learning gaps. They identified prefixes, suffixes, root words, closed and open vowels — steadily making progress to improve her spelling. And their time together ended with praise that, for many years before tutoring, Paige was concerned she’d never hear about her daughter’s literacy.

“And that’s it, you worked hard today,” Howard said at the end of an hour. “Excellent job.”

Coming out of COVID-19 isolation, I looked forward to making up for many missed social opportunities with friends. I joined the track team at my new school and did well in my events. I made good friends with some of my teammates and other students on campus, which can be challenging for me as a person with autism. When my mom was looking for a church for us to attend, my track coach shared information about his church, and we began attending on Sundays; I also went to a Wednesday church youth group when my study schedule allowed it. Thanks to social media, I could keep in contact with friends from my former school, and I even have a girlfriend who attended my old school.

But despite it being a terrific year for me overall, I feel profound disappointment in the circumstances that led me to South Torrance. Several racially charged events occurred during my middle school years, such as the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery murders and trials. As a result, there were many discussions about race and safety in white communities. In the climate at that time, I expected to be safest with the same people who protested, saying, “Black Lives Matter” and “Stop Killing Our Sons.” I thought the people who said my life matters would believe that my education also matters. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the community, accountability, collaboration and support that was talked about at those 8th grade recruitment meetings during my first semester in a school attended mostly by students of color and run mostly by educators of color.

I found myself in a situation where some teachers were not motivated to teach and help their students succeed, some were bullied by their own students and didn’t know how to discipline the class and some repeated the same lessons and shared the answers before they gave tests and quizzes (and some kids still failed!). When my mom, herself an administrator who has been in education for over 20 years, tried to intervene, it was difficult to impossible to get some teachers to respond or administrators or other top education officials to address the problem. Eventually, she started looking for a new home in a different school district and we moved in December.

South High is a predominantly white and Asian ethnic high school where most of the teaching staff is also primarily white and Asian. They treat their students as I expected a school should, providing counselors, tutoring and “Spartan Seminar.” 

Spartan Seminar is a 25-minute session every Wednesday and Thursday, where students sign up for specific classes to catch up on work, get tutoring from the teacher or study for an upcoming test/quiz with that teacher. If you are not doing well in a class or on an assignment, you are expected to attend Spartan Seminar for that class. 

My Spanish teacher has great classroom control. First, he provides us with study guides (not answers!) for upcoming quizzes. He reviews the homework to ensure we are updated on the current unit’s information. Finally, whenever someone does act up, he raises his voice and tells them to stop, which works, and we immediately return to learning.

My algebra teacher at South High was terrific. She showed the class how to work on new equations, like factoring and polynomials. She has a pleasant personality, making learning enjoyable for everyone in her classroom. She didn’t wait for my mom to email or call her; she often emailed my mom if she had information she thought would help me. My friends all agreed that she is a good teacher, which is unusual for a math class, and some even consider her their favorite teacher. 

I finished the semester at South High with 4 As, 2 Bs, and a C. It took much work, and I sometimes spent as many as six hours a night doing homework to learn the subject. I credit my school team and my mom because they challenged me to communicate with them about when I needed help and they created a schedule to review my work and grades to ensure I was on the right track. I was motivated to work harder at South High because I knew it was expected of me. I did not mind staying at my desk for hours and sometimes sacrificing my sleep to get the grades I knew I could if I tried hard. 

Although this was a great school year, I am disappointed that I had to leave a community I loved to find it. I also don’t want to suggest that my old school was not a good school because it was attended and run predominantly by people of color. I was raised by a Black educator, who cared so much about her students that we still go to their weddings, graduations, sporting and social events years after they were in her class.

If I could go back and talk to the staff at my former school, I would want them to know that:

I want to be valued as someone who takes their work seriously.

I want teachers who take their jobs seriously and hold me accountable. 

I want to look up to my teachers, like what I see, and be like them.

I want them to care enough to know who I am because my life matters to them, for them to see my potential and help me reach my goals.

My African-American peers and I want to be educated by teachers who look like us.

We want to hear their stories. We want to hear how they made it to college. If they go, maybe we can go, too. Tell us about African-American fraternities and sororities, dorms and the fun times they had so we know that college isn’t just boring hard work. We want to hear about their mistakes, so we learn from them. 

We want to know about the problems they faced in predominantly white spaces and how they overcame them so that when we have those experiences, we can overcome them, too. 

We want to talk to them about our experiences as African-American students and know that they understand. We sometimes do not want to “air our family business” to people who may not understand or who already stereotype us because we are African American. They don’t understand our community, language, idioms, values or history. They don’t understand us, no matter how well intentioned or woke they are. 

The teachers are the ones who told us they would do all these things for us and it hurts the most to think they are aware of our unmet expectations. I want them to know that, too.

My goal is not to criticize but to remind them that their students need them. We want them to care about us. Some of their students will only care when they do. We are waiting for them.