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Episode: Hard to Read: How American Schools Fail Kids with Dyslexia

Author: APM Reports
Duration: 00:53:35

Episode Shownotes

The parents knew something wasn’t right. The school said everything would be fine. But their kids weren’t learning how to read. In this documentary, originally published in September 2017, we look at why kids with dyslexia have a hard time getting the help they need in school.Read more: How American

schools fail kids with dyslexiaQ&A: What is dyslexia, with neuroscientist Guinevere EdenSupport this show: Donate to APM ReportsDive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit.

Summary

In this episode of "Sold a Story" by APM Reports, titled "Hard to Read: How American Schools Fail Kids with Dyslexia," the systemic failures in the American educational system regarding dyslexia are explored. Parents like Pam face significant challenges in obtaining necessary support for their dyslexic children, compounded by a lack of acknowledgment from schools. Despite scientific knowledge on effective reading methods, a shortage of resources and outdated teaching approaches hinder proper interventions. The episode emphasizes the urgent need for systemic change, including improved teacher training and recognition of dyslexia in schools to ensure that students receive the education they deserve.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Hard to Read: How American Schools Fail Kids with Dyslexia) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:05 Speaker_05
Hi, this is Emily Hanford, host of Soul to Story. If you haven't heard Soul to Story yet, please stop, go back and start with episode one. If you have heard Soul to Story and you want more, you're in the right place.

00:00:19 Speaker_05
We're going to have a bonus episode of Soul to Story coming soon. In the meantime, we are putting up four hour long audio documentaries on this podcast feed. Some of you may have already heard one or all of these documentaries.

00:00:33 Speaker_05
They're all about reading. how kids learn to read, how they're being taught. I made these audio documentaries before I made Soul to Story.

00:00:41 Speaker_05
In fact, if you listen to all four of these documentaries, you will basically hear the story of how the Soul to Story podcast came to be. This first audio documentary is called Hard to Read.

00:00:54 Speaker_05
It's about why kids with dyslexia have a hard time getting the help they need in school. It was originally released on September 11th, 2017, The first voice you hear is Stephen Smith, who introduces the program.

00:01:10 Speaker_01
From American Public Media, this is an APM Reports documentary. Dane Guest graduated from high school in 2016. He was working construction, but he knew that wasn't what he wanted to do with his life.

00:01:22 Speaker_01
His options are limited, though, because Dane has a really hard time reading. When he opens a book, he sees... Just a whole bunch of words, you know, a whole bunch of letters just lined up.

00:01:34 Speaker_01
Ever since he can remember, letters and written words haven't made much sense to him. His mom, Pam Guest, knew something wasn't right starting back in kindergarten.

00:01:42 Speaker_29
In the mornings when students came into the classroom, they would write that they brought their lunch or that they were going to purchase lunch in the cafeteria. And Dane always walked right past that board and sat down.

00:01:55 Speaker_01
The teacher said he'd catch up, but by the end of first grade, Dane still wasn't reading. The school said he had to be two grade levels behind before he could get special education.

00:02:04 Speaker_01
And there's no way to be two grade levels behind when you're still in first grade. So Pam hung a blackboard on the wall of her home office and tried teaching Dane herself.

00:02:13 Speaker_29
He wasn't learning anything at school, so we spent time every evening almost, you know, teaching him the lessons, teaching him the classwork, teaching him what he hadn't learned during the day.

00:02:23 Speaker_29
And no matter how much practice we did, he still didn't get it. It didn't make sense.

00:02:27 Speaker_01
By second grade, the school acknowledged there was a problem, and Dane started getting special education services for reading.

00:02:33 Speaker_07
They would take you into a room, there would be like 10 of us maybe, and they would read to you or write for you.

00:02:40 Speaker_01
But he never remembers anyone teaching him to read. Instead, he says teachers told him he just wasn't trying hard enough. That's what teachers told his mom, too.

00:02:50 Speaker_29
They were telling me that he was a smart person, he was entirely capable of doing the work, but he just wasn't applying himself in a way that would help him to become successful academically.

00:03:00 Speaker_01
Watching Dane struggle was eerily familiar. Pam's brother had struggled like this, never graduated from high school, ended up addicted to drugs, and died. People in Pam's family suspected her brother had dyslexia. He never had formal testing.

00:03:14 Speaker_01
That can cost thousands of dollars. But Pam kept thinking, maybe Dane has dyslexia. She figured if he did, though, the school would let her know. It's not like dyslexia is some kind of unknown disorder. Theo Huxtable from The Cosby Show had dyslexia.

00:03:31 Speaker_01
Pam used to watch that show.

00:03:32 Speaker_09
— Theo, I think that you should be tested for dyslexia.

00:03:36 Speaker_07
— Dyslexia? What's that?

00:03:38 Speaker_01
— This is the episode where Theo is first diagnosed.

00:03:40 Speaker_09
— He has the brain power. He just has a glitch in the way he takes in information. — A glitch?

00:03:46 Speaker_29
— Yes, he just has a problem in the way that he processes language.

00:03:50 Speaker_01
— This is exactly what seemed to be going on with Dane.

00:03:52 Speaker_29
— So I asked the teachers if he was dyslexic. I said it. I said the word, is he dyslexic?

00:03:58 Speaker_01
And they said no. It went on like this year after year, Pam suspecting he was dyslexic, the schools saying no, and Pam believing them because they were the education experts. She didn't know what else to do.

00:04:11 Speaker_01
And then when Dane was a senior in high school, Pam found out about a group called Decoding Dyslexia. It's a network of parents across the country concerned that schools aren't screening kids for dyslexia or giving them appropriate help.

00:04:24 Speaker_01
Pam learned she had a legal right to demand that her son be tested. The school finally did, Dane's senior year of high school, and the testing report said,

00:04:33 Speaker_29
characteristics similar to those of dyslexia, but they would not say that he was dyslexic. And I asked the psychologist why she used that phrasing. And she said she would never say that a student is dyslexic. We don't do that.

00:04:49 Speaker_29
And I said, what do you mean you don't do that? She said it is not in our realm of professionalism to say that a student is dyslexic. We will never do that.

00:04:59 Speaker_01
It's as if dyslexia were a bad word, a label that would harm kids. But for Dane, never getting that label meant never getting the right kind of help. And here's the thing. People with dyslexia can learn to read. There are teaching methods that work.

00:05:13 Speaker_01
But in American public schools, millions of kids with dyslexia are not getting this kind of teaching. From APM Reports, this is Hard to Read, How American Schools Fail Kids with Dyslexia. I'm Stephen Smith.

00:05:33 Speaker_01
Scientists estimate that somewhere between 5 and 12 percent of children in the United States have dyslexia. It's the most common learning disability. And yet, it's routinely ignored or improperly treated in many public schools. Why?

00:05:47 Speaker_01
Our correspondent Emily Hanford has been investigating this question for months. Over the next hour, she's going to tell us what she's learned. It's not just a story about dyslexia.

00:05:56 Speaker_01
This is a story about what's wrong with the way kids are being taught to read in American public schools. She begins with a student named Billy Gibson.

00:06:06 Speaker_05
When Billy was in elementary school, he couldn't spell his own name.

00:06:09 Speaker_08
Even Billy stumped him. I'd be like B-I-L-E-I and I just would get all the letters backwards and I would write the Y's in the wrong direction.

00:06:29 Speaker_08
The worst thing for me was figuring out between lowercase b and d. I would always get those mixed up and stuff.

00:06:36 Speaker_05
He bombed all of his spelling tests, of course. Here's what he remembers about how his teacher would respond.

00:06:42 Speaker_08
I would be immediately sent out into the hallway of the classroom. After she's done handing out the tests to the rest of the kids, the kid with the highest grade in the class would come out.

00:06:52 Speaker_08
I remember her saying, like, see if you can teach this kid how to spell these words.

00:06:56 Speaker_05
Billy had no idea he was dyslexic. Neither did his parents. Billy just came to think of himself as the dumb kid who spent a lot of time in the hall. We're going to return to the question of how schools deal with kids who have dyslexia.

00:07:13 Speaker_05
But first, what was going on in Billy's brain? What is dyslexia?

00:07:22 Speaker_02
So this is a boy who has dyslexia and he's 11.

00:07:25 Speaker_05
That's Guinevere Eden. She's a neuroscientist who studies dyslexia, and this is a recording of a child in one of her studies.

00:07:36 Speaker_02
Most children at that age are able to sound out this word. It's not an easy word, trivialities.

00:07:45 Speaker_05
Gwynevere Eden says all babies will naturally start talking unless they have some kind of major cognitive impairment or hearing issue. Our brains are wired for speech.

00:07:55 Speaker_02
They are not wired to read. Nothing in the brain was organized to be reading. So when we learn to read, we put together a set of brain systems that have properties that allow us to become skilled readers. but they weren't actually designed to do that.

00:08:09 Speaker_05
In other words, reading doesn't come naturally. We have to learn to read. And there's something about the brains of people with dyslexia that makes learning to read really hard.

00:08:18 Speaker_19
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

00:08:26 Speaker_05
That's our producer Suzanne with her son Milo, who's four. Milo is not dyslexic.

00:08:31 Speaker_19
What rhymes with cat?

00:08:35 Speaker_02
Mat.

00:08:35 Speaker_05
What rhymes with jelly? Deli. What Milo's doing, rhyming words, requires something called phonemic awareness. That's the ability to notice and manipulate the individual sounds or phonemes in spoken words.

00:08:52 Speaker_05
People with dyslexia have a hard time doing this. Guinevere Eden says this makes it difficult to learn to read because, When we see words for the first time, we really try to sound them out.

00:09:02 Speaker_02
So we go through them very carefully and try to match the sounds to the letters.

00:09:07 Speaker_05
After we sound out a word a few times, our brain stores it in our visual system as a whole word, and we know it when we see it. That's how it works if you're not dyslexic.

00:09:17 Speaker_05
If you are dyslexic, it doesn't come to you the way that sounds and letters correspond. A common perception is that dyslexia is about reversing letters, getting lowercase b's and d's mixed up the way Billy Gibson did.

00:09:29 Speaker_05
But all beginning readers tend to do this. It's just that many people with dyslexia don't get past the beginning reader stage, unless they get the right kind of help. When they don't get that help, school can be torture.

00:09:42 Speaker_24
Stay home. I want to stay home.

00:09:49 Speaker_05
This is Judy. She was in third grade when her mom recorded this. I can't let you stay home, though. We're going to have to go give it a try. Judy does not want to go to school today. She would refuse to go to school a lot.

00:10:01 Speaker_05
She even learned to make herself throw up on command. No need to put her finger down her throat, says her mom Maggie Gibson. Maggie's oldest son is Billy. Maggie and her husband Rob have five kids, and they all have dyslexia.

00:10:15 Speaker_05
But they didn't know it at first. We knew something wasn't right.

00:10:18 Speaker_23
You can tell things are off, but you don't know specifically what.

00:10:25 Speaker_05
I talk to parents all over the country, and this is the way so many stories about kids with dyslexia begin. The parents know something's wrong, but the school doesn't see it.

00:10:35 Speaker_05
That's why Maggie recorded Judy, to show the school how miserable her daughter was. Finally, a private tutor one of the Gibson kids was working with said, you should have him evaluated. The Gibsons decided to pay to have all five kids tested.

00:10:49 Speaker_05
Here's Rob.

00:10:50 Speaker_23
So what we did is we kind of set up where we had Gibson Day. And so they evaluated every single kid back to back for an entire day.

00:10:59 Speaker_05
Results in hand, the Gibsons marched into their kid's school and said, look, our children have dyslexia. And according to Rob, this is how the school responded.

00:11:09 Speaker_23
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.

00:11:20 Speaker_23
And when we got to that disagreement, it was almost like we were disagreeing over reality.

00:11:24 Speaker_10
So our purpose today is to review the educational evaluation you have completed by Kennedy Krieger.

00:11:32 Speaker_05
This is a recording Rob and Maggie gave me of the meeting where they went over the test results with staff at their son Eddie's school. It's not a great recording, but you can hear the disagreement Rob described.

00:11:47 Speaker_05
That's one of the school staff saying the school doesn't suspect Eddie has a learning disability, despite the private testing results.

00:11:54 Speaker_05
What the Gibsons wanted for their son is an IEP, an individualized education plan that students with disabilities who are behind in school are supposed to get according to the federal special education law.

00:12:05 Speaker_05
But the school says Eddie can't have a disability because he has passing grades and average standardized test scores. This is the fight a lot of parents get into with their schools.

00:12:16 Speaker_05
Their kids figure out ways to get by, but they're not doing nearly as well as they could if they got specialized instruction. And for years, many public schools refused to acknowledge dyslexia.

00:12:28 Speaker_15
They would say, we don't use the word dyslexia.

00:12:32 Speaker_05
This is Fran Baumann. She's a former special education teacher.

00:12:35 Speaker_15
Because once you open Pandora's box, you have to serve those children.

00:12:40 Speaker_05
In other words, if schools acknowledge a kid has dyslexia, they may be legally obligated to provide specialized education. And that's expensive.

00:12:50 Speaker_05
Special education directors I talked to denied their schools were refusing to use the word dyslexia to keep kids out of special ed. Whatever the reason, schools not using the word was such a problem that in 2015, the U.S.

00:13:04 Speaker_05
Department of Education issued a special letter reminding schools that not only can they use that word, they should use it if it can help them tailor an appropriate education plan for a student with dyslexia.

00:13:16 Speaker_05
Because there are effective methods to help people with dyslexia learn to read, first developed back in the 1930s.

00:13:23 Speaker_15
So Samuel Orton was a neurologist and psychiatrist. This is Fran Baumann again. He was seeing a lot of adolescent boys who had all sorts of emotional problems because they couldn't read.

00:13:35 Speaker_05
These boys were otherwise perfectly intelligent. They just couldn't make sense of words on the page. Orton paired up with a woman named Anna Gillingham, who was an educator and psychologist.

00:13:45 Speaker_15
What they figured out was that there were children who had to learn to read differently.

00:13:52 Speaker_05
They came up with an approach known as Orton-Gillingham, OG for short. It's an approach where students are explicitly and systematically taught the ways that sounds and letters correspond. To oversimplify a bit, it's basically heavy-duty phonics.

00:14:07 Speaker_15
They started working in mostly very fancy private schools. This was not in public school at all or in Gillingham.

00:14:15 Speaker_05
Fran Baumann got trained in OG in the 1970s. And her dream was to bring this approach to kids in public school.

00:14:23 Speaker_05
She thought her dream would come true when in 1975, President Ford signed what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

00:14:32 Speaker_15
I was teaching college at the time. I can remember like literally almost the day the law was passed. And I remember saying to all of my students, this is so exciting.

00:14:42 Speaker_15
We're finally going to be able to say, OK, so you're having trouble with reading, and it's the beginning of kindergarten. We can help you.

00:14:51 Speaker_27
The intent behind the law was absolutely incredible, and it began to schools to recognize they needed to do something.

00:14:59 Speaker_05
This is Ben Shiffrin. He's dyslexic, grew up in the 1960s, got no help for his dyslexia in public school. He says his parents paid $15 a week for an Orton-Gillingham tutor to come to his house.

00:15:12 Speaker_05
Ben Shiffrin eventually got a master's degree in special education and started working in public schools a few years after the special ed law went into effect. He quickly became disillusioned with the law.

00:15:22 Speaker_27
I think the thing that has insulted me the most and why I left public ed was when they wanted me to say to parents, when I'd look at IEPs and say, oh no, no, no, we don't have to provide a Cadillac. We just have to provide a Chevy.

00:15:35 Speaker_05
Meaning, public schools don't have the money to give every kid with learning disabilities the best treatment. But it's not just cost that's kept public schools from giving kids with dyslexia what they need.

00:15:47 Speaker_05
It's a long-running disagreement about how to teach children to read.

00:15:51 Speaker_15
Oh, the reading wars go way back.

00:15:53 Speaker_05
They go back hundreds of years. That's Fran Baumann again. The reading wars in the U.S. go all the way back to Horace Mann, the father of the public schools movement.

00:16:03 Speaker_05
In the 1800s, he railed against the idea of teaching kids that letters represent sounds. Mann believed children would better understand what they were reading if they first learned to read whole words.

00:16:16 Speaker_05
This came to be known as the whole-language approach, as opposed to the phonics approach Fran Baumann learned in her Orton-Gillingham training in the 1970s.

00:16:25 Speaker_05
She was able to use OG in public schools for a while, but she says she soon got a supervisor who told her she wasn't allowed to use it.

00:16:34 Speaker_15
And this guy said to me, I will never forget it, it's like emblazoned on my brain, he said, Do you talk like this? I said, no. He said, well, that's how you're teaching people how to read.

00:16:53 Speaker_15
You should be teaching them by the entire word instead of these little sounds. He was a whole language guy.

00:17:00 Speaker_05
Whole language was big in the 1980s. Most teacher preparation programs bought into it, and so did most school districts. The basic idea behind whole language is that reading is a natural process.

00:17:13 Speaker_05
If you expose kids to lots of good books, they will learn to read. But by the 1990s, there was rising panic in America that too many kids were not reading well.

00:17:23 Speaker_28
From the U.S. Department of Education tonight, a report card that no one would be very proud to bring home.

00:17:28 Speaker_00
Reading and writing skills have stagnated. The reading skills of American students declined last year for the first time in 20 years.

00:17:35 Speaker_05
In response to the news about poor reading skills, Congress created a national reading panel to get to the bottom of the debate about how best to teach reading.

00:17:44 Speaker_09
So what they decided to do was do a mega analysis on all the scientifically based research.

00:17:49 Speaker_05
This is Andrea Rosen. She trains teachers in how to teach reading. The National Reading Panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies. And in 2000, the panel published a report that was a crushing blow to the whole language movement.

00:18:04 Speaker_05
There was no evidence to show whole language worked, and lots of evidence that teaching children the relationship between sounds, letters, and spelling patterns improves reading achievement. This is for all kids, not just kids with dyslexia.

00:18:19 Speaker_05
Andrea Rosen was teaching in public school when the report was released, but she says she didn't learn about the findings until years later. She doesn't think the report changed much of anything about the way schools taught reading.

00:18:32 Speaker_09
What happens in public education, to be honest, is I think a lot of initiatives come through, a lot of information gets thrown at schools, new regulations, new this, new that.

00:18:41 Speaker_09
And I think it was just one of those things where they said, OK, and didn't really realize how huge it was.

00:18:46 Speaker_05
Rosen works for a school district in Ohio that's made big changes in the way it teaches reading, but not because of the National Reading Panel. Her district changed because a group of parents hired a lawyer and filed a complaint.

00:19:00 Speaker_05
We'll hear about that later. For now, back to the Gibsons, the family with five dyslexic kids. When the school system refused to give their kids IEPs, Rob and Maggie Gibson hired a lawyer too.

00:19:12 Speaker_17
All we wanted was to secure their right to learn in public school.

00:19:18 Speaker_05
At this point, their oldest daughter was in high school. Their youngest was in first grade. Billy, who you met earlier, was in middle school. And he was really struggling.

00:19:28 Speaker_08
It just got so overwhelming. I would constantly have these anxiety attacks. And it got to a point where I just refused to go to school.

00:19:36 Speaker_05
Trying to get him the help he needed was turning into a long and contentious process. Rob and Maggie felt that for Billy and his older sister, time was running out. They needed help with reading before they finished high school.

00:19:49 Speaker_05
So the Gibsons decided to put them in a private school for students with language-based learning differences. Lucky for them, there's one of these schools not far from their house, the Gemesee School.

00:20:02 Speaker_27
That's Ben Shiffrin.

00:20:05 Speaker_05
He's the guy who got fed up with public schools because he thought they weren't doing right by kids with learning disabilities. He's the head of Gemesee. It's in Owings Mills, Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. He takes me on a tour.

00:20:16 Speaker_27
This is brand new, the theater.

00:20:18 Speaker_05
The school is beautiful. Modern buildings, student artwork everywhere. Tuition is about $35,000 a year. Hi there. Hi. Can we come stop in for a minute and just observe what you're doing? We're in a building with lots of small classrooms.

00:20:33 Speaker_05
Lower school students get daily tutoring in small groups.

00:20:36 Speaker_06
So this is Josie and Christopher. I'm Emily. And they are first year students here at Genesee.

00:20:42 Speaker_05
Josie and Christopher are in fifth grade.

00:20:57 Speaker_06
Book, right? School and book. Think of that.

00:21:00 Speaker_05
This tutoring is based on the Orton-Gillingham approach. The philosophy here at Gemesee is intensive reading remediation and a lot of hands-on learning. Students can take geometry in a woodworking shop.

00:21:12 Speaker_05
But by senior year of high school, students are in some pretty traditional-looking classes, with lectures and lots of reading. The idea is to prepare them for college.

00:21:23 Speaker_28
If you guys remember, yesterday we left off talking a little bit about this Rimland thesis. It's the opposite of what Halford Mackinder kind of proposed with the Heartland thesis.

00:21:33 Speaker_05
This is 12th grade history at Gemesee.

00:21:36 Speaker_07
That was my question. It's like, what was America's and China's relationship?

00:21:41 Speaker_05
And that is Billy Gibson. He's about to graduate from Gemesee. Next year, he's going to college to study 3D computer animation. But when he started at Gemesee, Billy wasn't sure he would finish high school.

00:21:53 Speaker_08
I was going in the mindset of, like, what's the point? What's the point of doing work? I'm not going to be anything. I've already been told that I'm not going to be anything. I don't have any dreams.

00:22:02 Speaker_05
But things turned around for Billy at Gemesee. His mom, Maggie, noticed the difference right away.

00:22:07 Speaker_17
You're so used to fight mode, because you're fighting for it to be recognized that your kid needs X, Y, and Z. And then you go into Gemesee, and you have a teacher conference. And the teachers sit down and say, you know,

00:22:20 Speaker_17
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.

00:22:32 Speaker_05
But it costs a total of more than $60,000 a year to send two kids to Gemesee. Maggie and Rob are fortunate. He's a well-paid physician, and they got financial help from their kids' grandparents. But five private school tuitions weren't in their budget.

00:22:49 Speaker_05
So they kept fighting with the public schools to try to get their younger kids better help. Getting what you need for a kid with dyslexia is a rich man's game, says Maggie Gibson.

00:23:00 Speaker_17
It is a rich man's game. And the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

00:23:08 Speaker_05
Maggie and Rob eventually got the school system to pay for two of their younger kids to go to a special private school. They don't think they would have gotten that if they hadn't hired an attorney.

00:23:18 Speaker_05
They estimate their family has spent more than $350,000, including legal fees, private tutoring, and tuition.

00:23:26 Speaker_17
We've taken out mortgages on the house. We have credit card debt that is astronomical. And we're fortunate enough to have family members that help. But what does a normal person do that doesn't have the luxury of other people to help them?

00:23:46 Speaker_17
What do you do?

00:23:49 Speaker_05
When kids with learning disabilities don't get the help they need, things often don't turn out well. Nearly 20% of students with learning disabilities drop out of high school. More than half end up involved with the criminal justice system.

00:24:03 Speaker_05
I wanted to know what school systems have to say about kids with dyslexia who aren't getting proper help.

00:24:09 Speaker_05
So I went to the people in charge of special education and reading instruction for the school system where the Gibson kids went, the Baltimore County Public Schools.

00:24:18 Speaker_13
I'm Megan Shea. I'm the Director of English Language Arts. Rebecca Ryder, Director of Special Education.

00:24:23 Speaker_05
Rebecca Ryder and Megan Shea are both relatively new to their positions. And they acknowledge the school system has a problem when it comes to kids with dyslexia. It's something they say they're beginning to fix. We need to do better.

00:24:36 Speaker_05
That's Rebecca Ryder. Here's Megan Shea.

00:24:39 Speaker_13
This is big. We need to do more for reading in this county. We have multiple data points that say that this is an issue. One alarming data point?

00:24:48 Speaker_05
The Baltimore County schools are paying nearly $40 million a year to send kids with disabilities to specialized private schools.

00:24:57 Speaker_05
The school system couldn't say how much of that is being spent on kids with dyslexia, but a lawyer told me the costs have been rising.

00:25:05 Speaker_05
He said that's because the school system is identifying more kids with dyslexia, and the schools don't have teachers trained to provide the appropriate help.

00:25:14 Speaker_05
Until recently, Orton-Gillingham tutoring was not an option in the Baltimore County Public Schools. But last year, the school system started training teachers in OG.

00:25:25 Speaker_05
Megan Shea says the goal is to have at least one OG-trained teacher in every elementary and middle school.

00:25:31 Speaker_13
In addition, she says, We need to train all of our teachers to be better teachers of reading.

00:25:38 Speaker_05
Megan Shea says colleges of education are not teaching teachers how to teach kids to read. She points to the fact that only half of third graders in the county schools are reading on grade level.

00:25:50 Speaker_05
Nationally, only 36 percent of fourth graders are proficient in reading. Baltimore County recently started training all of its primary school teachers in the science of effective reading instruction.

00:26:02 Speaker_05
What's prompting the Baltimore County Schools to make all these changes now? Megan Shea says it has a lot to do with parent advocacy. In Baltimore County and across the country, parents of kids with dyslexia have been pushing for change.

00:26:16 Speaker_05
One of those parent advocates is Pam Guest, Dane's mother. Dane also went to Baltimore County Public Schools.

00:26:23 Speaker_29
So all of these boxes are

00:26:28 Speaker_05
We're in Pam Guest's home office and she's pointing to boxes of paperwork from her years of unsuccessful efforts to get Dane help in school. At one point, she says she visited a private school for students with learning disabilities.

00:26:42 Speaker_05
She walked in and then turned around and walked out because she couldn't quite bear to see what she knew her son couldn't have.

00:26:50 Speaker_29
And I talked to a lot of these upper class white families who were able to take their kids out and send them to private school. I couldn't afford to do that.

00:26:57 Speaker_29
But those kids are doing well now, and they're able to go to college, and we didn't have that opportunity.

00:27:02 Speaker_05
She says she's determined to change things so what happened to her son won't happen to other kids. She's a leader of Decoding Dyslexia Maryland. Decoding Dyslexia has chapters in all 50 states.

00:27:15 Speaker_05
They're pushing for things like universal dyslexia screening and mandatory teacher training. As for Pam's son, Dane, things were pretty bad after he graduated from high school.

00:27:25 Speaker_05
His friends were going off to college and he was at home, unsure what was next for him. But she says Dane's doing better now. He found a job as an apprentice helper with the plumbers and steamfitters union. His plan is to open his own business someday.

00:27:46 Speaker_01
That was correspondent Emily Hanford. You're listening to Hard to Read, a documentary from APM Reports. I'm Stephen Smith. Research shows that changing reading instruction to help students with dyslexia would help all kids learn to read better.

00:28:00 Speaker_01
Up next, we visit the Ohio School District Emily mentioned where a group of parents hired a lawyer in response to the way their kids were being taught.

00:28:08 Speaker_26
The way I was taught, in quotes, to read was to look at the words on the page and to guess based on the picture that was next to them.

00:28:16 Speaker_01
We have more about this documentary on our website, apmreports.org. There's an interview with Guinevere Eden on what scientists are learning about reading and the brain, and we have several podcast episodes about dyslexia.

00:28:29 Speaker_01
This documentary is available as a podcast as well. You can go to educatepodcast.org to subscribe. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email to contactatapmreports.org or find us on social media.

00:28:42 Speaker_01
Support for APM Reports comes from Lumina Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. More in a moment, this is APM, American Public Media. This is Hard to Read, a documentary from APM Reports. I'm Stephen Smith.

00:28:56 Speaker_01
We're going to head straight to Upper Arlington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. The Trenoski family recently bought a house in Upper Arlington, and our correspondent, Emily Hanford, takes us there.

00:29:06 Speaker_13
Oh, sorry. I just wanted to keep... Oh, Tess is now... We're now collecting rocks in our mailbox. Okay.

00:29:12 Speaker_05
Kelly Trenoski just picked her twin daughters up from school, and now they're arriving home. Tess and Molly are 12. They're in sixth grade. That's their dog, Macy. Macy is officially Tess's dog.

00:29:27 Speaker_05
She was a gift from her parents a couple of years ago, when Tess was miserable in school.

00:29:32 Speaker_13
Something for her to look forward to after school. Right?

00:29:37 Speaker_05
Somebody to cuddle with, chase skunks with. The Chernosky family used to live in another Columbus suburb. But Kelly says her daughters weren't getting what they needed in the public schools. It's the same story I heard from so many parents.

00:29:53 Speaker_05
Something was off with their kid, they didn't know what, and the school wasn't helping.

00:29:59 Speaker_05
The Chernoskys eventually paid for their own testing, discovered Molly has dyslexia and Tess has an audio processing disorder that results in similar struggles with reading and spelling. Tess and Molly show me their new house.

00:30:13 Speaker_13
This is my room. I had a bunch of horse stuff.

00:30:17 Speaker_05
That's Tess.

00:30:18 Speaker_13
So how does this house compare to your old house? It's a lot smaller.

00:30:21 Speaker_05
And that's Molly. Yep, it is.

00:30:23 Speaker_19
Very basic. Yeah, it's pretty basic.

00:30:27 Speaker_05
The Chernoskis were willing to trade down to afford a home in this affluent suburb because Upper Arlington is known around here for doing a really good job with kids who have learning disabilities, especially dyslexia.

00:30:38 Speaker_05
They get it and it's just unbelievable. Within days of starting school here, Molly was getting one-on-one tutoring from a teacher trained in Orton-Gillingham.

00:30:48 Speaker_22
It's just like you're happier when you come home. I love school.

00:30:52 Speaker_05
Kelly is amazed by the changes she sees in her daughters. But things were not always like this in Upper Arlington.

00:31:00 Speaker_05
The district has been through two big battles with parents who accused the school system of failing to meet the requirements of special education law. One of those cases made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

00:31:12 Speaker_05
Meet the people who brought that case.

00:31:14 Speaker_11
I'm Cameron James. And I'm Nancy James. And I'm the father of four dyslexic children. And I'm the mother of four dyslexic children.

00:31:22 Speaker_05
Nancy and Cameron started dating in high school in Upper Arlington in the 1960s.

00:31:27 Speaker_11
When I went to pick her up for our first date, her father, Mr. Calderoni, looked at me and he says, if you kiss her, you marry her. And I did, and I did.

00:31:37 Speaker_05
Nancy and Cameron are both dyslexic. Cameron went to public elementary school in Upper Arlington, where he says teachers use the look-say method. Look at a word, say it. It's a whole-language approach, and it didn't work for Cameron.

00:31:51 Speaker_05
He says he struggled with reading all through school. Nancy was taught to read differently.

00:31:56 Speaker_14
I started school in first grade at a Catholic school, taught by nuns, and they taught phonics. And by Christmas of first grade, I could read.

00:32:06 Speaker_05
Dyslexia is hereditary. Scientists estimate that if just one parent has dyslexia, their child has a 40 percent chance of having it too. This is Cameron reading a letter he wrote to the superintendent of the Upper Arlington schools in 1996.

00:32:22 Speaker_11
Words can never describe how proud I am to be the father of Joseph Albert James.

00:32:27 Speaker_05
Cameron can read, but it typically takes a lot of effort. He says for him, reading a newspaper article is like someone without dyslexia reading their mortgage. But this letter isn't hard for him because he's read it many times.

00:32:41 Speaker_05
It describes the ordeal he and his wife went through trying to get the Upper Arlington schools to help their son Joe with his dyslexia. Of all their kids, Joe's dyslexia was the most severe.

00:32:53 Speaker_11
Joe's skills fell further and further behind those of his peers. He was a little boy with almost no friends. He refused to go to the shopping center with some boys once because he couldn't read the menu board in the restaurant in the food court.

00:33:06 Speaker_05
By the time Joe was in fourth grade, his parents had given up hope that the Upper Arlington schools would teach him to read. So they put Joe in a private school for students with reading disabilities.

00:33:17 Speaker_05
This letter was their request for the Upper Arlington schools to reimburse them for tuition. Federal law requires public schools to provide children with disabilities a free and appropriate education.

00:33:30 Speaker_05
Since Joe's education was not appropriate, in the James's view, and getting him an appropriate education was not free, they wanted the school district to pay for it.

00:33:40 Speaker_11
I have invested in excess of $150,000 in Joe's education. This letter is to request a due process hearing.

00:33:48 Speaker_05
Their case was at first dismissed on a technical issue about whether they could seek reimbursement.

00:33:53 Speaker_11
respectfully, Cameron James.

00:33:55 Speaker_05
But they appealed and eventually got to the Sixth Circuit, which ruled the Jameses had a right to trial. Then the school system appealed, so the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

00:34:07 Speaker_05
And the high court let the lower court ruling stand, meaning the Jameses could go to trial. They started preparing.

00:34:14 Speaker_14
We were in the middle of depositions and I had some health issues and a significant death in my family. And it just kept getting drawn out and more difficult. And Pete Wright. Pete Wright was their lawyer. Said let's do something else.

00:34:31 Speaker_14
So we came up with a settlement.

00:34:35 Speaker_05
The settlement is supposed to be confidential, but APM Reports got a copy of it through a records request. It shows the Jameses did not get a single cent to reimburse them for Joe's tuition.

00:34:47 Speaker_05
What they agreed to instead was for the school system to train teachers in Orton-Gillingham and similar methods.

00:34:54 Speaker_05
The Upper Arlington Board of Education admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed to appropriate $60,000 a year for five years for teacher training.

00:35:03 Speaker_05
Records show the school district did train two teachers in OG, but the district didn't change the way kids were being taught to read.

00:35:11 Speaker_16
You know, my kids would come home and say, hey, mom, I can read this book with my eyes closed.

00:35:16 Speaker_05
This is Gail Long. Her kids were in elementary school after the Upper Arlington schools went through the battle with the James family. She says her kids were memorizing books rather than being taught to read them. This is her daughter Emily.

00:35:30 Speaker_26
The way I was taught, in quotes, to read was to look at the words on the page and to guess based on the picture that was

00:35:37 Speaker_05
Emily and her three younger siblings all have dyslexia. They went to the same elementary school Joe James had gone to. So did Christine Beatty's son, Neil. They wouldn't acknowledge that he had a problem. They wouldn't say the word dyslexia.

00:35:51 Speaker_05
I wanted to question the people in charge at the time, but both the superintendent and the director of special education have retired. I tried to get interviews. The former superintendent declined, and the former special ed director didn't respond.

00:36:04 Speaker_05
I was able to talk to Joe Keith, who was the psychologist in charge of testing students for learning disabilities at the school where Emily and Neil went.

00:36:12 Speaker_05
I asked him why parents were having a hard time getting their kids identified with dyslexia and getting them appropriate help. Here's what he said.

00:36:20 Speaker_30
A lot of the complaints you hear about schools, well, they're public schools, and they only have so much. Knowing how many reading specialists you have, how many intervention or tutors that you have, you know, it's not an endless supply.

00:36:35 Speaker_05
I pushed him to be more specific. I wanted to know if the upper Arlington schools were refusing to acknowledge dyslexia so they didn't have to provide specialized education. Were you facing pressure from above you to limit what you could give?

00:36:50 Speaker_30
It's probably not a conversation to be had here.

00:36:55 Speaker_05
So, no comment?

00:36:56 Speaker_30
That would be no comment, yes.

00:37:01 Speaker_05
What Joe Keith will say is that the school district was wedded to the whole language approach when it comes to teaching reading.

00:37:09 Speaker_05
The district did have the two OG trained teachers, but there were close to 6,000 students in the Upper Arlington Public Schools. If between 5 and 12 percent of children have dyslexia, that could be more than 700 kids.

00:37:23 Speaker_05
There's no way two teachers could meet the needs of that many students.

00:37:28 Speaker_05
Gail Long, Emily's mom, says she felt like she was in an alternate universe when she would say her kids needed different reading instruction, and school staff wouldn't even acknowledge her kids had dyslexia. She didn't know what to do.

00:37:42 Speaker_05
Then one day, sitting in her family room with her laptop out, she typed dyslexia and Upper Arlington into Google. All of these hits come up with a family named the James family.

00:37:56 Speaker_05
One of the links was to that letter Cameron James had written about his son Joe.

00:38:00 Speaker_16
And as I started reading it, it all came together. Upper Arlington knew. They all knew. And they let my children suffer.

00:38:16 Speaker_05
Gail Long decided she was going to do something. She asked her kids, who are the other students struggling with reading in school? She got in touch with their parents. And in August of 2010, she invited them to a meeting at her house.

00:38:29 Speaker_04
And we kind of all went around the room. This is Brett Tingley. Everyone had experienced the same thing.

00:38:35 Speaker_05
Their dyslexic kids were not being identified or given appropriate help. The parents decided to work together as a team. They ended up filing a group complaint against the school system. kind of like a class action.

00:38:49 Speaker_05
It wasn't a lawsuit, but they did hire a lawyer.

00:38:52 Speaker_03
I was not surprised that there was a group of students with dyslexia that were not getting the kind of instruction that they really needed.

00:39:00 Speaker_05
This is their lawyer, Carrie Agans. She's helped a number of parents of kids with dyslexia file complaints against their school districts. She says parents typically fight special education cases alone. seeking remedies one by one.

00:39:15 Speaker_05
Group complaints are rare.

00:39:17 Speaker_03
It is very difficult when you have a law like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to find an issue that is systemic in nature.

00:39:25 Speaker_05
But she thinks public schools failing to address the needs of kids with dyslexia is a systemic issue. She urged the Upper Arlington parents to file a complaint with the state.

00:39:35 Speaker_05
One benefit of a state complaint over going to court the way the James family did State complaint decisions get posted on a website for everyone to see. There would be no secret settlements.

00:39:47 Speaker_05
If the parents won, it could send a message to other public school districts. Change what you're doing when it comes to your students with dyslexia. 19 people signed the Upper Arlington complaint. In August of 2011, the state issued its findings.

00:40:02 Speaker_05
The parents won. We felt vindicated. This is Christine Beattie again.

00:40:08 Speaker_14
Like, we aren't crazy. We know what we're talking about.

00:40:13 Speaker_05
The Ohio Department of Education found the Upper Arlington schools in violation of the law when it came to promptly and properly identifying students with learning disabilities and finding them eligible for special education services.

00:40:28 Speaker_05
The state issued a letter that included a list of corrective actions the school system had to take. That's how Molly, the twin you met earlier, ultimately ended up in Orton-Gillingham tutoring at Jones Middle School in Upper Arlington.

00:40:41 Speaker_10
OK, let's do our photogram, Julie. Ready?

00:40:43 Speaker_22
O-A-R-O. Yeah, you're right.

00:40:45 Speaker_05
Do it along the short vowel.

00:40:47 Speaker_22
O-U-N-U. Good.

00:40:49 Speaker_05
A-A. We're in a small room. Molly is working one-on-one with teacher Michelle Joubert. O-O, school. U, book.

00:40:58 Speaker_08
So school, you said U, and then book.

00:41:02 Speaker_05
As you heard in the first part of the program, if you have dyslexia, your brain has a hard time understanding the ways that sounds and letters correspond. You have to be explicitly taught the way language works.

00:41:20 Speaker_05
Molly is counting out the sounds with little blue blocks. Orton-Gillingham is what's known as a multi-sensory approach, meaning that as students learn, they use tangible items such as blocks.

00:41:32 Speaker_05
The idea is the more senses you use when learning something, hearing and seeing and touching, the better you learn it. There's something about activating multiple senses that helps carve new learning into the brain.

00:41:46 Speaker_05
Listen to how Molly is able to put it all together when she reads.

00:41:49 Speaker_22
English people came to North America for looking a new life. They found a new land with people living.

00:41:55 Speaker_05
Molly still stumbles sometimes over a word, but she can sound it out with a little help.

00:42:00 Speaker_22
Jamestown was the first permanent

00:42:07 Speaker_05
Molly will always have dyslexia. There's no cure. But neuroscience research shows that good intervention can actually change people's brains. The earlier the intervention, the better.

00:42:20 Speaker_05
OG tutoring is not something the state of Ohio required the Upper Arlington schools to invest in. But more OG-trained teachers is something parents push for after the complaint decision.

00:42:32 Speaker_05
And in 2012, the district hired a new director of special education who was open to the parents' ideas. His name is Kevin Gorman.

00:42:40 Speaker_25
They gave me... He pulls out a piece of paper. ...this as what their criteria was of where they were hoping to go.

00:42:49 Speaker_05
It's a list of things the parents wanted the Upper Arlington schools to do. They handed it to Kevin Gorman his first week on the job. He agreed to a meeting with them, having no idea who they were.

00:43:00 Speaker_25
And I could see that they weren't a happy group initially, but that they really had a cause and they were passionate about it.

00:43:07 Speaker_05
The parents were emboldened by their win. In addition to more OG tutoring, they wanted every kindergartner and all new students entering the district screened for dyslexia. The district now does that.

00:43:20 Speaker_05
The parents also wanted the district to change the way it teaches all kids to read. The district has done that too.

00:43:28 Speaker_17
Now we're going to try some other sounds. Let's start with this one.

00:43:32 Speaker_05
This is a class of first and second graders at Barrington Elementary School in Upper Arlington.

00:43:37 Speaker_16
C-K, sock. C-K, sock. What is C-K? A digraph.

00:43:46 Speaker_05
A digraph is two letters that appear together but make just one sound.

00:43:51 Speaker_16
W-H, whistle, wah. Who can tell me? What's the big difference between these two diagraphs?

00:43:58 Speaker_05
A little hand shoots up. Jacob. Jacob, what is it?

00:44:00 Speaker_22
So the CK can only go at the end and the WH can only go at the beginning.

00:44:06 Speaker_05
What Jacob said is CK can only go at the end of a word and WH can only go at the beginning. There are some words where CK comes in the middle, like chicken, but these kids haven't learned that yet.

00:44:18 Speaker_05
English gets a bad rap for being a language full of exceptions, but in fact the vast majority of words follow set rules and patterns.

00:44:26 Speaker_05
A tricky thing for kids learning to read, though, is that some of our most common words are the exceptions, words where the letter-sound correspondence is wacky, like the, and because, and school.

00:44:39 Speaker_05
The kids in this class work on memorizing those trick words.

00:44:43 Speaker_24
School. S-C-H-O-O-L, school.

00:44:50 Speaker_05
You might think this lesson sounds kind of rote and traditional.

00:44:54 Speaker_05
One reason the so-called reading wars have been so intense is they're political, with phonics being cast as a conservative approach and whole language as the more liberal, progressive way.

00:45:06 Speaker_05
What's interesting at Barrington Elementary is that parents here can choose to put their kids in a progressive classroom, where there's lots of play and hands-on learning.

00:45:15 Speaker_05
But all kids in the Upper Arlington Public Schools are taught to read the way you just heard. The class we were in, that is the progressive class. What would it take for other school districts to do what Upper Arlington did?

00:45:42 Speaker_05
The biggest thing is probably teacher training, because many teachers are coming out of teacher preparation programs without knowing how to teach kids to read.

00:45:52 Speaker_09
We learned a lot about creating a literature-rich environment, things like that.

00:45:57 Speaker_05
This is Andrea Rosen again, the one who trains teachers in Upper Arlington. When she studied to be a teacher back in the 1980s, she says she learned nothing about phonics. In fact, professors were against it.

00:46:09 Speaker_05
It wasn't until she got Orton-Gillingham training that she learned how to teach kids to read. Amelia Smith got her teaching degree more recently. When it comes to phonics, we weren't taught how to teach it.

00:46:22 Speaker_05
We knew what it was, but not how to teach it, and that there's a specific sequence in how it should be taught. Back in 2000, the National Reading Panel identified phonics as one of five key components of effective reading instruction.

00:46:36 Speaker_05
Ten years later, the U.S. Department of Education decided to find out if people coming out of teacher preparation programs were learning all five components. The answer, for the most part, was no.

00:46:48 Speaker_05
And last year, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a think tank in D.C., analyzed syllabi from undergraduate elementary teacher preparation programs and found that most of them still don't cover all five components of effective reading instruction.

00:47:03 Speaker_05
Jewel McCombs-Tolles says teacher preparation programs have resisted the findings of the National Reading Panel because there's still an ideological fight going on about whole language versus phonics.

00:47:14 Speaker_05
The division in higher ed in reading is alive and well. She's worked in teacher preparation for close to two decades, and she says many of her colleagues don't believe that kids need systematic explicit reading instruction.

00:47:27 Speaker_05
Instead, in the wake of the reading panel report, many teacher educators promoted the idea of balanced literacy.

00:47:34 Speaker_12
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.

00:47:42 Speaker_05
Balanced literacy is basically whole language with some phonics mixed in, says Tim Shanahan. He's a literacy expert.

00:47:50 Speaker_05
He says the problem 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.

00:47:59 Speaker_05
He thinks many instructors in teacher prep programs just don't know the reading science that well. An instructor might be a PhD who's up on the latest research.

00:48:08 Speaker_12
On the other end, you could have somebody who essentially, we need somebody to teach this. This person teaches, you know, four other things for us and we'll give them an extra course in reading instruction.

00:48:19 Speaker_12
You know, they have last year's syllabus and they do their best.

00:48:22 Speaker_05
He says part of the problem is there are thousands of teacher preparation programs in the United States and very little oversight. Faculty members typically decide what gets taught.

00:48:33 Speaker_05
There is no one authority, no person to hold accountable for how teachers in America are being trained. States do have some power and several are trying to exert more control.

00:48:45 Speaker_05
Some states have passed laws that require graduates of teacher preparation programs to pass science of reading tests before they get licensed. Teachers need to know the reading research, says Andrea Rosen.

00:48:57 Speaker_05
Because when they don't, kids suffer and so do teachers. I asked Andrea what teaching kids to read was like before she knew the research. Do you remember feeling, I don't know what I'm doing, like I don't know how to help this kid?

00:49:09 Speaker_09
Every single day of my career, yes. Yes, it was demoralizing. You felt so guilty and so bad because you were doing everything you could. It's not that people aren't working hard.

00:49:20 Speaker_09
People are trying everything that they were told to do, and it just wasn't working.

00:49:31 Speaker_05
I've come to think of kids with dyslexia as canaries in the coal mine when it comes to how students are being taught to read in American schools. More than 60% of fourth graders are not proficient readers.

00:49:44 Speaker_05
Some of those students are kids with dyslexia who are not getting the right kind of reading instruction.

00:49:49 Speaker_05
But all of those struggling readers would likely do much better if they got the kind of systematic, explicit reading instruction that kids with dyslexia need.

00:50:00 Speaker_05
Nancy and Cameron James, who went all the way to the Supreme Court fighting for their son Joe, say they see signs that things are improving.

00:50:08 Speaker_05
They point to what's happened in Upper Arlington, for example, and the fact that some states are starting to take action when it comes to teacher preparation.

00:50:16 Speaker_05
But the Jameses aren't ready to trust public schools when it comes to teaching kids to read. They still have to think about this, because now they have five young grandchildren.

00:50:25 Speaker_14
Our conversations go like this, A, ah, apple.

00:50:30 Speaker_05
Two of the grandkids are already in private Orton-Gillingham tutoring. The James' children are taking no chances when it comes to making sure their kids learn to read. Cameron James says all children deserve better reading instruction.

00:50:44 Speaker_11
If you want to affect poverty rate, if you want to affect homelessness, if you want to affect our prison population, teach every child to read. We know how to do it. We choose not to.

00:50:57 Speaker_11
And so that would be my prayer is that every child would learn to read.

00:51:12 Speaker_22
Some of these people were called pilgrims. They arrived in a ship called the Mayflower. How will I tame the Wild Mustang, you ask? Well, I have done a lot of research. It'll take a while, but I will not let you down.

00:51:29 Speaker_19
All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.

00:51:45 Speaker_21
You've been listening to Hard to Read, a documentary from APM Reports. It was produced by Emily Hanford and edited by Catherine Winter.

00:51:54 Speaker_18
We got research and reporting help from Curtis Gilbert, Josie... Josie Fun. Jeffrey Bisso... Bissoy Matisse. Bissoy Matisse. That's a hard one. Josh, Marcus, and Lila. Lila. It's Lila. Lila. Turner.

00:52:11 Speaker_13
Turner.

00:52:12 Speaker_20
Our web producers, Andy Cruz, Craig Thorson, mixes our documentary, and Eva Dasher does the fact-checking.

00:52:20 Speaker_21
Special thanks to Chris Juhlin and Liz Lyon. The APM Reports team includes Chris Worthington, Suzanne Pico, Sasha Eslanian, and Stephen Smith.

00:52:34 Speaker_20
We have more about dyslexia on our website. Go to apmreports.org.

00:52:39 Speaker_21
We also have a bunch of documentaries about education. You can hear all about them by subscribing to our podcast, Educate. Find out how at educatepodcast.org.

00:52:52 Speaker_20
You can send us an email. The address is contact at apmreports.org. You can also find us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Search for Educate Podcast.

00:53:02 Speaker_21
Support for this program comes from Lumina Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. This is APM American Public Media.

00:53:14 Speaker_05
Thanks for listening to Hard to Read from 2017. This is Emily again, host of the Soul to Story podcast. We will have a bonus Soul to Story episode on this feed coming soon.

00:53:26 Speaker_05
If you want to find out more about the Soul to Story podcast and all of our reporting on reading, you can go to our website, soultostory.org.