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Who Will Teach America’s Learning Disabled—and How?Kids with dyslexia and similar problems have as much potential as anyone yet areat a higher risk of dropping out, becoming unemployed, or going to prison. A LosAngeles pilot program is set to find out if schools can do better.

Lindsay Young, who teaches a special education reading intervention program funded by the U.S. Department of

Education, stands in her classroom at Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles. (Photo: Élishia Sharie)

SEP 9, 2016

Culture and education editor Liz Dwyer has written about race, parenting, and socialjustice for several national publications. She was previously education editor at Good.

At 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday in June, the entrance to Alexander Hamilton HighSchool in Los Angeles is quiet. !e students are already inside the campus’ mainbuilding, a two-story brick-and-stone structure built in the Italian Renaissancestyle, featuring arched windows and a copper bell tower that has oxidized greensince it was erected in 1931. Final exams begin in three days.

I’m here to visit Lindsay Young’s classroom, where she is teaching a class as partof the Literate Adolescents Intervention Project. !e program is a collaborationbetween the Los Angeles Unified School District and California State University,Northridge, where Young earned her master’s degree in special education andwhich is known nationally for its high-quality credentialing program for specialeducation teachers. !e day before, Lin-Manuel Miranda had announced that hewould be departing from the musical he wrote based on Alexander Hamilton’slife. From the stage of Broadway’s Richard Rodgers !eater every night, Mirandawould sing, “I’m young, scrappy, and hungry.” Around 3,000 similarly young,scrappy, and hungry (some literally so) students attend Hamilton High, part ofthe 667,000-student LAUSD—the nation’s second-largest school district. About 55percent of Hamilton students come from economically disadvantaged homes,according to LAUSD. Half of them identify as Latino and nearly one-third asblack. Tickets to see Miranda’s final performances brought $20,000 on thesecondary market. Here, in an unglamorous neighborhood framed by auto repairshops and Interstate 10, $20,000 covers about half a year’s salary for a newteacher.

LAIP uses intensive literacy interventions, such as two-hour-long blocks offocused practice on phonics skills or comprehension strategies, to boost thereading ability of high school students with mild to moderate learningdisabilities. It includes materials designed to draw the interest of teens andtechnology to help the kids complete the classwork, bringing methods that havebeen proved to be effective in a controlled setting into a real-world school

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environment. LAIP was one of three special ed programs to win a four-year, $1.6million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of SpecialEducation Programs in August 2015. “What we’re trying to do is a real-lifeimplementation of an evidence-based practice,” said Larry Wexler, director of theResearch to Practice Division at OSEP.

A lot rides onthe grantwinners’success. “!ereis a huge

unemployment problem among adults with learning disabilities,” Sally Spencer, aspecial education professor at CSUN and one of the creators of LAIP, told me in aphone conversation before my visit to Hamilton. People with learning disabilitieshave the cognitive ability to continuously learn and can attain the sameintellectual capabilities as anyone else, but they process information differently.Unaddressed, differences such as dyslexia and dyscalculia, which affects theability to understand numbers and learn math, hold back the learning disabled.(!ey are distinct from people with intellectual disabilities such as cerebral palsy,Down syndrome, or autism, who have neurodevelopmental problems that cankeep them from learning past a certain point.)

Kids with learning disabilities may seem “just like any other kid in the world,”Spencer said. “You would never know that they can’t read or they can’t write verywell.” Yet “stress, stigmatization, wanting to feel fully included, wanting be treatedwith respect and dignity and high expectations,” follow these kids around, saidSteve Zimmer, president of the LAUSD Board of Education.

!e inability to fluently read or comprehend a novel assigned in English class, a

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20-page chapter on ancient Rome assigned in a world history course, or the wordproblems in an algebra textbook make special education students more likelythan their general education peers to fail a class, repeat a grade, or drop out ofschool altogether. A full 69 percent of special ed students nationwide have faileda secondary school course, compared with 47 percent of the general educationpopulation, according to the National Center on Learning Disabilities. As a result,only about two-thirds receive a high school diploma.

!at puts them squarely on the path to unemployment or incarceration as adults.Only 46 percent of adults with learning disabilities report being employed, andof those with jobs, 67 percent earn $25,000 or less per year. “!ey end up on thepublic dole,” Spencer said.

Kids who are frustrated in school because they don’t understand the academiccontent will eventually act out, Spencer said. Half of special ed students havebeen suspended or expelled, and research shows that as many as 70 percent ofkids involved in the juvenile justice system have a learning disability. !at’ssimilar to what the U.S. Department of Justice has found in the state prisonpopulation.

So the goal of Young’s class is to get her kids up to grade level in reading and givethem the tools they need to succeed in general education classes such as history,science, and math so they can graduate and go on to college or find a job. !eDepartment of Education hopes that if successful, LAIP could be a model forgiving special ed kids nationwide a shot at a brighter future.

Zimmer’s words about special ed students wanting to be “treated with respectand dignity” come back to me as the school’s receptionist directs me to Young’sclassroom: It’s in the basement. I pass a couple of students loitering in thestairwell. !e low ceiling and dim fluorescent lights make the hallway below feelcold and confining. In a few steps I see Young’s room number above a door. Iknock and a student opens the door.

I am greeted with a warm smile from Young, who has started her lesson. Withshoulder-length dark-blond hair and wearing a crisp blue tunic and black dressslacks, Young, 34, is sitting in the center of the room at a table with a projector onit. !e machine is shining a passage from a book onto a screen at the front of theroom.

!e paragraph is from Sharon Draper’s Darkness Before Dawn, a young adultnovel that deals with sexual assault by a high school track coach. Young uses athree-by-five-inch card to track the text, moving it down to reveal each line insuccession, as a voice from an audio recording reads the story.

A statue of Alexander Hamilton greets visitors at the entrance to the eponymous high school. (Photo: Élishia Sharie)

!ough Hamilton’s student-teacher ratio is 42.5 to 1, according to LAUSD, just sixstudents are in the room. !ey’re clad in typical teenage gear: jeans, T-shirts, andhoodies. A yellow skateboard rests on the floor next to one of the desks. Somestudents follow along with their own copies of the book while others watch thescreen. During the 10 or so minutes of this part of the lesson, the classroom isfocused. !ere’s no sneaking a peek at a smartphone, whispering, or dozing off.!e students come to the end of the chapter, which turns out to be the book’sconclusion.

“!at’s it—you did it!” Young says, applauding. !e kids cheer and clap for oneanother, beaming with pride. Young swiftly breaks the students up into twogroups, instructing them to take laptops with them to one of two stations.

“You’ll have 15 minutes in each group. You’re going to turn in your TouchPhonics slip if you’re with Ms. Riley,” says Young, indicating her instructionalassistant, “and you’re going to turn in your flash drive for reciprocal teaching ifyou’re with me.”

Two of the students go sit at a table on the left side of the room with Riley. !edigital program they’re using, Touch Phonics, teaches students to recognize thebasic sounds and sound blends that make up a word.

!e group with Young jumps into the process of student-led reciprocal teaching—kids leading a small-group discussion of what they’ve read. Today a studentnamed Eduardo is the group facilitator; since the beginning of the school yearYoung has been modeling for the teens how to analyze text using four readingcomprehension strategies.

“I’ll do ‘question,’ you’ll do ‘summarize,’ you do ‘clarifying,’ and you do‘predicting,’ ” Eduardo tells his three group mates, assigning themcomprehension tasks to complete within five minutes.

!e kids open their laptops and begin typing responses for their assigned taskswhile Young monitors their progress. When time is up, they begin to share whatthey’ve written.

A girl named Maria tells the group that she needs help clarifying the meaning ofthe word “hysterical.”

“ ‘Hysterical’ is like ‘crazy,’ ” Eduardo tells her.

Young steps in. “Read the sentence, Maria,” she says, referring to the line in thebook where the word appears. Maria reads the sentence, but she’s still confused.

“How would you act if you were hysterical?” asks Young. !e students role-playthe word; one boy pretends to laugh, and another pretends to cry. But they’re stillstuck on the definition.

“You can look it up on Google Images and see what it looks like,” Young suggests.Murmurs of comprehension buzz around the table.

At the end of the 15 minutes, the two groups swap places, and the process startsanew. As in the first group, the student tasked with asking clarifying questionsgets stuck on the word “hysterical,” and Young repeats her suggestion aboutdoing a Google Images search.

“If you have reading difficulties, think about looking up a definition [in thedictionary]. It’s almost not worth it,” Young tells me later. “You need to go to apicture.”

In spring 2015, OSEP put out a call for proposals for model demonstrationprojects that would boost the literacy of middle and high school special edstudents. LAIP stood out to the department because “it’s in a high-need urbanhigh school,” Wexler said, where kids “are not typically exposed to interventionsthat are evidence based and as intensive” as LAIP. Grant makers were impressedthat it takes “evidence-based practice that was effective in a controlled setting andbrings it into a typical school environment, with typical implementers, typicalresources, typical money and time,” he said. OSEP wanted to see a program thatcould succeed at a school where “the air conditioning breaks, the leadershipchanges, there are gangs in the school—the constellation of issues that makes itvery difficult and challenging to learn and teach,” Wexler said.

!e day the call for proposals went out, Sally Spencer happened to have beenmeeting with LAUSD administrators. Colleagues of theirs at the district’sIntensive Diagnostic Education Centers, which teach kids with learningdisabilities, had heard she was training CSUN students to do intensive reading

Economically disadvantaged students at Hamilton significantly outperform their counterparts statewide in English

tests, graduation rate, and eligibility for admission to state universities. (Photo: Élishia Sharie)

interventions. “We kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Should we see if IDECis interested in applying with us?’ ’’ Spencer recalled.

Spencer and her collaborators in the CSUN Department of Special Education,professors Nancy Burstein, Vanessa Goodwin, and Sue Sears, thought theirproposal was a long shot. Usually big institutions win such grants, Spencer said,and OSEP’s model demonstration projects would be no exception: !e other twowinners were the University of Texas at Austin and the Michigan Department ofEducation.

“But what we wrote in our grant proposal is, if you can do it in LAUSD, you cando it anywhere,” Spencer said. “I feel like that’s true. If we can make this work inLAUSD—with all the bureaucratic traps of a really huge school district—then insmaller school districts, implementing a program like this would be a lot simpler.”

Piloting LAIP at Hamilton High was ideal. IDEC already had a presence at thecampus, the principal was supportive, and Young was a graduate of Spencer’sCSUN program. “We all knew her pretty well and knew that she was fantastic,”Spencer said of Young. !ey were able to get the pilot project up and running inYoung’s classroom by October.

Young didn’tgrow updreaming ofbecoming ahigh schoolspecialeducationteacher—andfrom thenumber ofvacancies inschool districtsnationwide, itseems few do.

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!e numberof kids markedfor specialeducation hasheld steady atabout 13percent of allstudents since2000, whilethe number ofeducatorsqualified toteach them hasfallen steadilyto just 6.4 percent of all teachers. Today, 49 states are experiencing a shortage ofspecial ed teachers, according to the National Coalition on Personnel Shortages inSpecial Education and Related Services. In Clark County School District inNevada, the Las Vegas Sun reported in May, 38 percent of teacher vacancies in theelementary and middle schools are for special ed teachers; 83 percent of thespecial ed vacancies are in Title I schools, serving the neighborhoods with thehighest share of poor families. In Arkansas, 15 percent of teachers assigned tospecial education students lack the required training, according to KATV.

Education programs aren’t training enough graduates to fill the pipeline. A reportreleased last year by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing foundthat enrollment in special education teacher credentialing programs droppedabout 50 percent between 2009 and 2014. (In August, the U.S. Department ofEducation announced $7 million in grants to seven states to spend in part onboosting recruitment and retention of special education teachers.)

!ose who become special education teachers often end up quitting; turnover isquite a bit higher than among general ed instructors. Spencer cited severalreasons. It’s a hard job to begin with, she said, and schools have recently seen an

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increase in the number of students placed in special ed for emotional problemsor behavioral disorders such as anxiety or depression, bipolar disorder, or evenschizophrenia. More than 20 percent of American adolescents have a mentalhealth disorder or illness, making it the leading cause of disability amongAmerican youths. “!ey put kids with behavior problems on special ed caseloads,sometimes inappropriately,” Spencer said. “Or teachers get students with all kindsof disabilities, so it’s really hard to meet their individual needs.” Teachers alsoreport burnout from paperwork requirements and lack of support from schoolsand parents as reasons for leaving—despite the higher pay.

For Young, the appeal was the opportunity to focus on each student individually.

Back in 2007, she was enrolled in a master’s program in English at CSUN. “Ithought I wanted to be an English professor,” she said. During grad school, shetaught at community college, tutored students, and worked as a substituteteacher at Northridge Academy High School to support herself. “I realized that Iliked high school students better because they had more energy.”

At Northridge Academy, Young was often asked to help out in special educationclassrooms. “I thought, ‘!is is incredible,’ ” she said. “I felt like the students weregetting individualized attention. I just didn’t know that’s what special educationlooked like. So from that point on I decided that’s what I’d teach.”

She enrolled in CSUN’s two-year credentialing and master’s degree program,which was created to increase the number of teachers serving students withdisabilities in high-need schools. She taught at Verdugo Hills High in thenortheast San Fernando Valley under the supervision of a mentor teacher andtook classes at night. After graduation in 2013 she was hired there full-time. Afriend working at IDEC later told Young about an open position in special ed atHamilton High. “I love to have fun, and I have fun every single day,” she said. “Ireally like teenagers. I think my job is creative, and I always think, ‘Gosh, if I canteach someone to read, then they can teach themselves to do anything.’ ”

It’s the end of August, two weeks into the new school year, when I visit Young’sclassroom again. As if to satisfy Wexler’s desire for a model demonstrationproject in a “real-life” setting, the air conditioning is broken. Efforts to fix it haveleft a hole in the ceiling. Young has bought fans out of her own salary to cool herclassroom, but sweat is visible on the shirts of the dozen or so ninth graders in theroom.

Her students from last year have transitioned into a 10th grade general ed worldhistory class. “!at’s a huge deal for them—most of these kids haven’t been ingeneral ed since third or fourth grade,” Young said. She’s also running a supportclass for eight of those 10th graders, teaching them vocabulary from the historytextbook and metacognition skills. Meanwhile, a veteran special educationteacher, Jeff Fractor, also funded by the OSEP grant, is training the historyteachers to integrate the kids from special ed into their curriculum.

!e CSUN professors help Young out too. Sue Sears, one of the professors whowrote the grant proposal, frequently pops by to observe the classroom. Young

Young works with small groups of students with learning disabilities to develop their reading skills. (Photo: Élishia

Sharie)

talks to Spencer at least once a week, either in person or via Skype. !is is thekind of support that Zimmer believes helps to retain special education teachers.More than any other field, he said, constant professional engagement and careerdevelopment is essential for special education instructors: “If you talk to teachers,it’s really about conditions of teaching and learning, support, and feeling likethey’re making a difference.”

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Such support is expensive—and cost will be a factor in whether other districtsadopt the LAIP model. But Wexler is confident the program can show results inother settings, citing work funded by OSEP to help states and districts scale up apractice. All the materials that the model demonstration projects in Los Angeles,Texas, and Michigan develop will be available to any entity that wants them, hesaid.

Data from the 2015–16 school year show Young’s students made significantprogress, going from below average to average in their reading abilities, Spencersaid, though she provides a dose of caution: “We don’t know yet whether we’ll beable to replicate this program with another teacher. We had one really good year.”Wexler thinks LAUSD will continue to fund LAIP if it keeps producing positiveresults. “Nothing breeds success like success. I think the fact that the school hasseen some great outcomes from doing this—that will reinforce them wanting to

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do more,” he said.

Despite the heat, Young is energetic and smiling, and her students are on task asthey move into their reciprocal teaching groups.

Last year’s students improved their reading skills, Young said, and grew morecomputer literate. !eir confidence soared. “At the beginning of [last] year I mayhave seen them shut down so quickly, but now they spend time thinking. !eyhave the confidence that they can figure it out, and we’re working on grade-levelstuff,” she said. Some have even made it into honors-level classes.

“I never expected to be in honors,” said one student, who didn’t want to beidentified as having been in special education. “I get distracted easily. [But] it’sbeen really good since last year. I am getting a little bit comfortable in my classes.”

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