Slipping Through the Cracks

A good friend of mine happens to socialize with a number of families who have school aged children, and ever since the pandemic caused the swing to virtual learning, she has followed the fate of one child in particular with ever mounting concern about her academic progress.  There is a closer personal relationship with the family (her own now grown daughter babysat this neighbor’s child for years), and what has concerned my friend is the apparent lack of parental supervision around schooling and the consequences of that for their young teenage daughter, who is floundering on-line and failing every single one of her classes by a significant margin.

The reason I know all of this is because there was a recent confrontation between the adults involved in this situation that led to the recognition that the child in question basically has reached middle school and cannot read—a state of affairs that a lot of denial has enabled—and my friend was reaching out to me, as an educator, both to share how aghast she was that no one had been willing to acknowledge “the elephant in the living room” and to ask me how could educational systems have failed this child so badly.  “Aren’t there laws about such things?” She queried.

To which I had to reply, “yes, but…” and then I decided that the “but” needed some airing.  So for those of you not in education, here comes some proverbial “dirty laundry.”  Let’s start with the basics, both the Federal Individuals with Disabilities Education and Improvement Act as well as Maryland state law “require that all students with disabilities be provided a ‘free, appropriate public education’ [from birth to age 21] that helps them learn and prepares them for employment and daily living” (Maryland Department of Disabilities).  However, having a law on the books and having the resources to meet demand are two different things entirely, and what most non-educators don’t know is just how enormous the demand actually is. 

The statistics are sobering. One in five students in this country (20%) has a language-based learning challenge, regardless of socio-economic status or ethnicity, and of those 20%, 70-80% of them are likely to have dyslexia that would require significant educational intervention.  Indeed, 85% of children in public schools who have managed to get an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for reading difficulty are dyslexic, and 30% of all dyslexic children (diagnosed or not) suffer from ADHD on top of having difficulty with a task that requires restrained, quiet, focusing.

That is a LOT of need, and the simple truth is that almost no public-school system in this country has the resources to meet it adequately.  The law may say that every child is eligible for the psychological testing to determine if an IEP is appropriate, but unless there is an insistent and persistent parent who practically has to threaten to sue, no school district is going to volunteer the service because they simply do not have the money to cover the level of need that would be revealed without having to take funding from other programs—which would set off a different set of parents howling!

 Instead, as I suspect happened with my friend’s neighbor’s daughter, because she was well-behaved and tackled the tasks asked of her with effort and determination, enough good quality work was produced from verbal interactions for her teachers over the years to justify giving her grades that wouldn’t cause a parent to go pester the school psychologist, and the system simply moved her on up the grade levels.  In addition, as I have witnessed too often with parents of a certain socio-economic status, there was likely some denial that there was a problem because “we aren’t the kind of people who have a child with a special need!” Combine all of this together, and you have the perfect conditions for a child with a reading challenge getting all the way to 8^th grade before a pandemic uncovers the problem—because it forced nearly all learning to take place through words on a screen.

I should be clear that this habit of passing children along is not confined to public schools.  It happens regularly in private and parochial schools as well, and sometimes for far more mercenary reasons.  Tuition dollars can be hard to come by, and when there are schools that specialize in educating children with brains that work differently, there can be a lot of rationalizing about an individual student’s academic performance in those schools that do not.  My experience is that it happens less often in the independent school world because those same extra resources are regularly brought to bear in support of students with extra needs.  But social promotion is as much a part of the reality of these schools as it is of the public realm.

Which is part of what my friend finds so distressing about the young teenager who started this whole conversation:  this child has not only effectively lost this entire year of learning; she wasn’t really ready for this year of learning in the first place! Nor is she remotely alone in that fact.  Individuals with reading challenges are so prevalent in U.S. society and so underdiagnosed and undertreated that 5% of all adults are non-literate and approximately 25% of those who can read can only do so at the lowest levels.  That’s a third of adults in this country who are, at best, effectively semi-literate—all while struggling to survive in an information economy.

And of course that third is disproportionately represented by people of color.  In my efforts to help educate about White privilege, I’ve already written extensively throughout my posts about this pandemic’s learning costs and particularly those costs for BIPOC children (see the LaC Updates page).  But here is yet another example of the entrenchment of systemic racism in our society.  Dyslexia and other reading challenges truly are colorblind, affecting the exact same proportion of Black children as White.  Yet as my friend freely acknowledges, the child she is concerned about comes from enough economic and cultural privilege that the consequences of this child’s learning loss will not be as great as those for a person of color.  What’s more, if you think the White student with unmet special needs has an uphill climb to get acknowledged in a relatively wealthy school district such as Baltimore County’s, you can imagine what that battle looks like for a Black student in less affluent Baltimore City.

The bottom line is that COVID-19 has revealed yet another dysfunction of our educational system and the inequities that go with it.  Yet as epidemiologist and Baltimore City School Board commissioner, Durryle Brooks points out (and I’m paraphrasing):  the learning loss from this pandemic was already a core and foundational issue for the last 30 years, with Black students entering school 2-3 grade levels behind where they should be each year, and the notion that the past 9 months of learning loss is somehow more significant feels “anemic” (Katz & Harvie).  He points out that City teachers have known for years how to remediate learning gaps of all kinds, and that growing up as a Black child in South Baltimore, he was himself the beneficiary of these extra efforts.  Tutoring programs (such as the OASIS one my mother participates in) and other one-on-one learning situations have the power to shrink the performance gap; it simply boils down, he argues, to making the commitment to providing the necessary resources.

Ah! But there, the notion of “pie” and how many pieces there are rears its ugly head once more.  Since the Reagan Revolution, we have steadily and systematically concentrated more and more of our wealth into fewer and fewer hands.  There is a finite amount of resources (no matter how appealing the capitalist myth of perpetual growth is), and it is indeed a cliched truism that “you get what you pay for.”

So once again, I conclude with a question I have already asked many times in this project: what are we prepared to pay for the futures of all of our children? And what’s the cost if we do not?

References

Kast, Sheilah & Harvie, M. (Feb. 11, 2021) Opposition to Baltimore City Schools’ Return Plan.  On the Record. https://www.wypr.org/post/opposition-baltimore-city-schools-return-plan.

Maryland Department of Disabilities.  http://mdod.maryland.gov/education/Pages/Special-Education-Servcies.aspx.

National Center for Education Statistics (2021) https://nces.ed.gov/.

Society for Neuroscience (2004) Brain Research Success Stories. www.sfn.org.

State of Maryland (2020) Maryland Commission on Innovation & Excellence in Education. http://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/NoPblTabMtg/CmsnInnovEduc/2019-Interim-Report-of-the-Commission.pdf#page=11.