| Never miss a show! |  |
Email Signup |  |
Spotify |  |
RSS Feed |  |
Apple Podcasts |
Geraldine, a Black grandmother in a red sweater dress, surrounded by colorful scribbles of confused thoughts. (Graphic by Lissa Deonarain)
Featuring: Making Contact Team: Episode Credits:
TRANSCRIPT
Machine generated Transcript
Monica Lopez: This week on Making Contact, an Oakland African American matriarch fights for educational justice for the grandkids she’s raising.
Geraldine Robinson: I said, we have a history of dyslexia, and they said, “No, that wasn’t the problem.” That’s when the fight they began.
Monica Lopez: We hear about the students falling further and further behind in public school without the resources they need to learn how to read.
Geraldine Robinson: I’m sure if I had the resources, I could put ’em in a private school and he would get the help, but because I don’t have the resources, I can’t get the help. And so you be a candidate for the state prison or whatever.
Monica Lopez: Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability that affects the brain’s ability to match letters with their shapes and sounds. It impacts reading, writing, and sometimes speech. Lots of states these days have laws on the books that define dyslexia call on school districts to screen for it early and spell out the most effective way to teach students with dyslexia to read. But California’s guidelines aren’t mandatory, and it turns out most districts still lag behind the science that failure weighs heavily on low income kids of color. Reporter Lee Romney walks us through one African American family struggle for educational justice in Oakland.
Geraldine Robinson: As for stated, I am Gerald Dean Robinson and I am a fighting grandmother.
Lee Romney: Geraldine is a devout and joyful Christian who’s now raising three of her grandchildren. She’s been a relentless advocate for two of them in particular,
Geraldine Robinson: and I am fighting for their. It started about six years.
Lee Romney: On this fall evening in 2019, the crowd is celebrating the 40th anniversary of a disability rights nonprofit and honoring this Oakland matriarch. Her grandson and his younger sister showed early signs of dyslexia.
Geraldine Robinson: About 30 years ago, I had two sons that had dyslexia, so I knew some of the signs.
Lee Romney: Dyslexia runs in families. So Geraldine talked to the kids’ teachers,
Geraldine Robinson: I said, we have a history of dyslexia, and they said, “No, that wasn’t the problem.” That’s when the fight began.
Lee Romney: Research shows that even people with severe dyslexia can be taught to read. The longer the wait, though, the longer it takes, but evaluations of Geraldine’s grandkids never mentioned the learning disability. Instead, they assign the kids to a different special ed category.
Geraldine Robinson: Intellectually disabiled.
Lee Romney: That suggests a child is globally impaired. Low expectations often translate into fewer intensive resources to address underlying learning challenges like dyslexia, bias adds another twist. Nationwide, Black students are overrepresented in the category of intellectual disability, and some educators are more likely to punish black students for falling short, even if it’s clear the work is too hard for them.
Geraldine Robinson: My grandson, who didn’t have a behavior problem, was never able to go on field trips. They wouldn’t allow him because of his academics.
Lee Romney: Tonight though Geraldine is feeling grateful because an advocate here at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund taught her exactly which law to cite to fight for her grandson,
Geraldine Robinson: which changed his life because he was able to go hang out with the rest of the kids.
Lee Romney: And so that was the bigger. A few months earlier, the Oakland Unified School District agreed to pay for intensive evaluations of both kids by an outside neuropsychologist.
Geraldine Robinson: So they were tested for dyslexia after five years of fighting.
Lee Romney: As each year slipped by Geraldine’s, grandsons fell further and further behind, and securing those independent evaluations wasn’t the end of her fight. You’ll hear more a bit later from Cheryl, the education advocate who’s been helping Geraldine, but she had something to say about the family that night that you should keep in mind as you follow their journey.
News Clip: They’re a perfect example of doing everything right and still getting nowhere. Because assumptions were made around the intersection of race and disability, that these children were just low ability children.
Lee Romney: Before we get back to Geraldine’s story, I want you to get a better feel for dyslexia. It’s neurobiological in origin. Anywhere from 5% to 20% of the population are believed to have it, including lots of high achieving public figures who tell their stories to help end the stigma.
Gavin Newsom: Thanks for having me. It’s fun. Thank you for being so open about this.
Lee Romney: A few years back, Cheryl Jennings of ABC seven, interviewed our now Governor Gavin Newsom about the shame kids with dyslexia can carry. He was one of them. He dreaded reading aloud
Gavin Newsom: That moment where the clock didn’t strike and I had to stand up and people start laughing. I’m shaking and I’m trying to read and I can’t, you feel dumb, uh, you feel isolated. Uh, people call you dumb.
Lee Romney: But to really get it, it helps to go a little deeper into the dyslexic brain.
Megan Potente: We are going to participate in a simulation today where you will experience what it’s like to be in a classroom with dyslexia.
Lee Romney: Megan Potente is a San Francisco educational therapist and a leader of Decoding Dyslexia California, a grassroots movement of parents and educators. Her family has a history of dyslexia, just like Geraldine’s. On this spring Saturday, she’s using a kit developed by the Dyslexia Training Institute to blow some teachers minds.
Megan Potente: So for this, I will need seven volunteers.
Lee Romney: The first exercise is a round robin. Read aloud. Typical in plenty of classrooms,
Megan Potente: People with dyslexia see letters and words the same way. Those without dyslexia, do they just take an alternative neurological route to connect the letter with its appropriate?
Lee Romney: Sound it, but a few packets are booby trapped to mimic what a dyslexic reader might experience
Megan Potente: If they read something over the something they would improve, I have seen. … We’re we’re running out of time. What, what did you learn?
Student: Uh, I’m not really sure. Something.
Megan Potente: Okay. Student six?
Lee Romney: Because the dyslexic brain struggles to connect letter symbols with their sounds, it can be hard to distinguish I from ease. P’s from B’s or T’s and so on. Our unlucky volunteer was working so hard to decode the text. She couldn’t absorb the content. It’s also hard for dyslexic students to express their thoughts or intelligence in writing. We give that a shot too. One woman shares that she’d wanted to write. Yesterday, we drove to the hospital,
Megan Potente: but I couldn’t use all the words. So instead, I just said yesterday, I drove. We went in our car with the letter changed, so we’ve been doing this for a little over an hour. How would you feel if you had to experience this every day, all day long? I wouldn’t like school. I wouldn’t want to go to school.
Lee Romney: Geraldine has witnessed that pain, that shame, and she doesn’t wanna further stigmatize her grandkids, so we’re not naming them even though she’s been fighting hard for two of them. This story focuses mainly on her grandson because as a black boy, it’s his future. Geraldine says she fears for the most. She’s had full custody of the kids for a while now, but even as toddlers, they lived with her on and off. Her grandson showed. Early red flags for dyslexia.
Geraldine Robinson: His letters was backwards for sideways or uh, maybe even upside down. He would have such a hard time trying to distinguish what the word was. And even with his phs, if I pointing out the phonics, he could say it, but then. When we put it to the word, he could not exactly read the word with the phonics in there.
Lee Romney: Geraldine read to him a lot.
Geraldine Robinson: The Dr. Seuss books
Lee Romney: and the Amelia Bedelia series,
Geraldine Robinson: she was a busy body.
Lee Romney: Her grandson loved wrestling, so they brought home wrestling magazines. But
Geraldine Robinson: after a period of time, he wouldn’t even look at the magazine because it was a struggle.
Lee Romney: Outside of those frustrations, she’s. Says he was and is a gentle, caring kid.
Geraldine Robinson: If he has something he, he wants everybody else to have it. He, he sometimes gives his away so somebody else could have it.
Lee Romney: He’s also a drummer. He started at five years old and he now plays at the Family Small East Oakland Church,
Geraldine Robinson: and he almost just automatically knew how to do it. You know, he could keep a beat, you know, right off the bat.
Lee Romney: And he’s a whiz at building and repairing things. About two years ago when he was 12,
Geraldine Robinson: a friend had bought a part for my car and he couldn’t figure out how to put it on. And he say, he told my friend, move back. Move back. I got a idea and he says, go give me some black tape. Grandma got some black tape. So he gets the black tape and he went in up under the hood and fixed it and the car is still running with the way he fixed it. Just creative, you know, he can see something and create it. It’s just the writing and the reading part. He cannot do.
Lee Romney: That bleeds into every school subject. Nationwide. Curriculum standards developed about a decade ago, for example, rely heavily on word problems to teach math,
Geraldine Robinson: and so you’re just not doing a math problem. You’re doing reading and math. He tries, he really does try, but it’s a disability and. With the schools not accepting his disability the way it is, he have lost a lot of ground.
Lee Romney: To be clear, the Oakland Unified School District didn’t just abandon this boy to fail. Geraldine gave me permission to look at her grandson’s records. They show he got speech therapy and was pulled out of general ed classes to get some extra help, but none of it involved the type of reading instruction that dyslexic learners need. His annual special ed documents were supposed to address his strengths, but mostly they didn’t. They did spell out ambitious goals for him year after year, but
Geraldine Robinson: they never achieved the goals. He’s never achieved a goal.
Lee Romney: Some teachers blamed him for his frustrations. Quote. He sulks a lot, is often angry, but will not talk about it. He rarely attempts any classwork. One fifth grade teacher wrote in an evaluation, a seventh grade teacher said he quote, sometimes can be very difficult when it comes to his work.
Geraldine Robinson: Most of his teachers say that he could do better, but he doesn’t apply himself. And I say it is not that he doesn’t apply himself.
Lee Romney: His dyslexia, she says, makes it harder for him. When dyslexia goes unrecognized and unremediated experts say low self-esteem, depression and anxiety, almost always follow. Geraldine says that during her grandson’s seventh grade year, he was sleeping so much. She had him evaluated for narcolepsy. That wasn’t the problem. Just a week before she and I first meet in April, 2019, she tells me
Geraldine Robinson: she came home with. This headache and the shakes and the whole nine yards where he’s frustrated that he can’t. And he’s been like that the rest of the week. Terrified and, um, stressed.
Monica Lopez: You’re listening to Geraldine’s Story, how Public Schools Are Failing Black students with Dyslexia on making Contact. This program is offered for free to radio stations around the world. Check us out on your favorite podcast app and follow us on Twitter. Our handle is making underscore contact. Coming up in the second half. Geraldine Robinson takes the fight for her grandson’s education to the next level,
Lee Romney: even as the years took a toll on her grandson though. Big things were happening in Sacramento as its early 2016. ABC seven News report notes.
News Clip: There’s a new law going into effect this year, which acknowledges the learning disorder, dyslexia in the education code. Yeah, it will help children get access to special education and related services. You know, medical experts tell us that one in five children suffers from dyslexia.
Lee Romney: The legislation called for experts to draft guidelines for California’s public schools that would spell out best practices for teacher training, universal screening, and the type of curriculum. Known to work best for dyslexic learners.
It’s called structured literacy, and it explicitly teaches kids how to match letters with their sounds and break words into parts to read them. It works for all readers, but for dyslexic learners, it’s critical. In 2017, the state released those guidelines 125 pages long. They aren’t mandatory, but still that official acknowledgement of dyslexia likely helped Geraldine. When the following year,
Geraldine Robinson: I wrote a letter to the district and to the state.
Lee Romney: It was a formal complaint and the California Department of Education agreed. The Oakland Unified School District had to assess Geraldine’s grandson for dyslexia. They did. There was a problem though. Here’s Cheryl Theis the education advocate. We met at the beginning of the story.
Cheryl Theis: The result of that evaluation was so poor. I mean, there is no other way to put it. And I say that as someone who has a lot of respect for people working at the school district level.
Lee Romney: Evaluations are supposed to draw on parent and teacher interviews, class observation, and a variety of tests conducted by an educational psychologist, but a review of the district’s eval ordered by the state shows it had none of that. Cheryl consulted a dyslexia expert who told her that the district psychologist responsible
Cheryl Theis: clearly had no training in dyslexia and how to evaluate and identify it
Lee Romney: rather than turn to the state guidelines. Lines or other expert sources. Cheryl’s consultant noticed the district psychologist had pulled her dyslexia definitions directly from two non-scientific websites. They weren’t accurate.
Cheryl Theis: It also pointed to the fact that she was cutting corners.
Lee Romney: The psychologist conducted no new tests on her grandson. Instead, the paperwork shows she relied on his previous evaluations, the ones that had stuck him with that label of intellectually disabled. And because of that, the district psychologist concluded, quote, he does not fit the profile of a student with dyslexia. Cheryl says, assuming a child with intellectual disability cannot have dyslexia or benefit from dyslexia intervention,
Cheryl Theis: this factually incorrect. We know from the science that those two things are not mutually exclusive.
Lee Romney: Plus, Geraldine had contested those very evaluations. So at the next meeting to discuss the boys’ special ed plan,
Cheryl Theis: I just looked at the program manager and said, we’re asking for an independent evaluation. And they immediately said, yes, we’ll fund an independent evaluation. But it begs the question, what parent who doesn’t know that there’s even such a thing as the right challenge? An assessment would just go, well, that didn’t seem right, but I guess they’re the experts.
Lee Romney: This point Cheryl’s making is really important. How does a parent or guardian become an expert? What does it take to wield that power in a way that brings about real change for your kid? And why are some kids left behind in the first place? It turns out. Race and class are woven through the answers to those questions. Kareem Weaver sits on the education committee of the Oakland naacp, and he’s been playing a big role in pushing Oakland Unified to comply with the state dyslexia guidelines.
Kareem Weaver: What shows up as a racialized outcome, meaning black and brown kids aren’t getting the help they need. They’re not being identified, they’re not giving the support and all that’s true. Really what’s behind that? As we’ve identified are two gaps, an expectation gap and a resource gap.
Lee Romney: The expectation gap, that’s what leads educators to never flag a kid for a learning disability in the first place. Or it can lead school psychologists to gravitate to that label of intellectually disabled and write them off as a kid who just can’t and never will.
Kareem Weaver: Instead of saying, wait a second, you mean this child full of brilliance can’t read by the end of first grade. There’s a full scale on alert here. This is a problem. That’s how you act when your kid can’t read and you know they’re capable of doing it.
Lee Romney: The resource gap it plays out this way. Federal law requires school districts to provide a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive setting to students with disabilities. That includes students with dyslexia severe enough to affect their academic progress. Parents or guardians who believe their kids are. Aren’t being properly assessed or served. They can fight, but it’s not a fair fight. ‘
Kareem Weaver: cause those who have the advocacy, those who have the money and resources to get lawyered up to fill in the gaps where the school system did not. Their kids are gonna be all right.
Lee Romney: Like this is, these are private. Every once in a while we do have districts that, um, place a child that’s handled. It’s very rare though. Very rare, and it’s.
Kareem Weaver: A couple of months after I first meet Geraldine, I decide to check out Ed Rev, a huge annual expo focused on students with learning differences. I wanna get a sense of what’s available to dyslexic learners to see if there are any options for low income families like Geraldine’s. The news is not good. This administrator says districts will sometimes pay to place students at her private school, but that tends to happen. Only when families lawyer up, she directs me to a guy at a table down the way. “Special ed attorney?” “Yeah. Yeah. He is down.” “We don’t mess with him.” “He is like…” “oh, interesting. Good to know.”
Megan Potente: Some schools do help subsidize tuition for families in need. Not all though.
Lee Romney: Do you guys do scholarships? Not very much. It’s quite negligible, quite honestly. It’s a month’s tuition. There’s plenty of one-on-one tutoring represented here today too.
Megan Potente: Yeah, we are in-home tutoring, so we don’t have a center. Oh. We just send our tutors to work with families at their home.
Lee Romney: Got it. And is it all private?
Megan Potente: Uh, yes it is. Okay.
Lee Romney: Later in the morning I bump into Steve Carnival. He’s a venture capitalist and big donor for dyslexia causes who founded and co-chairs the Dyslexia Center at the University of California San Francisco. The center takes all of its research and innovations and applies it to a very fortunate group of kids from an elite private school for dyslexic students. Carnival was once president of the board of trustees there and you know, we raised one and a half million dollars a year to go to. Scholarships, but it’s still a drop in the bucket. I’ve come to realize that the underserved populations are completely ignored. The vast majority we’re not serving at all.
Lee Romney: Geraldine is more aware of this with each passing year.
Geraldine Robinson: I’m sure if I had the resources, I could put ’em in a private school and he would get the help, but because I don’t have the resources, I can’t get the help. And so you’d be a candidate for the state prison or whatever prison there is.
Lee Romney: Literacy and incarceration are correlated. A study of Texas prison inmates two decades ago estimated about half of them likely had dyslexia, and nearly two thirds of them scored poorly on reading comprehension. It is such a concern that Congress two years ago passed a law requiring dyslexia screening for inmates in federal prisons.
Geraldine knows our grandson is at risk and he has plenty of company. Black, Latino and Pacific Islander students in the Oakland Unified School District are four times more likely to be reading multiple years below grade level than white students. The NAACP’s, Kareem Weaver gets it his own nephew. Who went to Oakland schools, wasn’t assessed for dyslexia until he wound up in the criminal justice system,
Kareem Weaver: the trauma, the unnecessary trauma to have to go to jail to be screened for dyslexia is sick as a society. So I understand Geraldine’s concern. It’s a real concern, the impact on her grandson’s self-esteem and what that could lead to in terms of emotional stability, in terms of belief in self, in terms of you, you know, your capacity to. Guide your own path, so I know the urgency she feels
Lee Romney: in the fall of 2019. Geraldine gets the results from the outside neuropsychologist, the grandkids she’s been fighting for for so long.
Geraldine Robinson: Both of ’em had dyslexia.
Lee Romney: Not just dyslexia. Both struggle with other learning differences too. But the independent evaluator concluded neither child meets the criteria for intellectual disability. And at last, things start to get a little better. The district moves the kids to a different school where for the first time, they have access to speech, to text and text to speech technology to help override their reading and writing difficulties. Geraldine tells me her grandson is particularly transformed.
Geraldine Robinson: They put him in a place where kids are the same level and he is good at math, and he was able to help other kids. By the end of school year, he had a little bit more self confidence, self-worth.
Lee Romney: His eighth grade special ed teacher agreed in her evaluation in March of 2020. She wrote that he’d made quote, immense social, emotional, and academic progress that he was, quote, an exceptional math student who quote, always cooperates with his teachers and students alike.
In science class he’d created recycling projects and presentations on natural disasters. His teacher also happened to be one of the district’s first instructors to get trained on a new structured literacy curriculum for use in special ed classrooms. Geraldine’s grandson was making his way through the very first level.
Geraldine Robinson: The school has really been working with him, but I’ve been fighting for this for six years.
Lee Romney: Oakland Unified declined to comment on Geraldine’s case citing. Privacy reasons, but a spokesman said the district quote is committed to providing explicit daily instruction in foundational literacy skills to students, and it looks like that’s starting to happen. This past school year, the district started using a new diagnostic screening tool on its youngest students to catch problems like dyslexia.
Early on, Kareem Weaver of the Oakland NAACP has also mounted a full bore campaign to press the district to put a structured literacy curriculum in place for. All students, not just those in special ed.
Kareem Weaver: The superintendent was very clear. She agrees that we need a structured approach. We need to support kids, um, who need foundational skills taught explicitly, directly, and systematically. That includes dyslexic students.
Lee Romney: There is some other hope for kids just starting public school Legislation introduced in January, 2021 would require all districts statewide to screen students in kindergarten through second grade to see if they’re at risk for dyslexia. Helping older kids though, who are already way behind, that’s a bigger, more expensive lift.
That glowing evaluation. Geraldine’s grandson got from his eighth grade teacher in March, 2020. Noted he was reading at a third grade level. Then two days later, schools closed due to the coronavirus and they haven’t opened back up yet.
Kareem Weaver: The older kids. Can’t afford a year in the tank. They’re just now scratching the surface and being able to claw their way out of a hole.
Lee Romney: The COVID School shutdown means Geraldine’s grandson started ninth grade remotely. It’s been rough. In fact, Geraldine says. All her grandkids are losing academic ground like so many other kids.
News Clip: It’s KQED news. Oakland students are among those filing a lawsuit today against the state of California and its top education leaders alleging they’re denying students an equal right to an education.
Lee Romney: During the pandemic, the Oakland reach. A grassroots group of parents and guardians pushing to reverse generations of poor reading outcomes. Joined counterparts in Los Angeles. Filing that action. It contends that black and brown students, low-income students, unhoused students, and students with disabilities aren’t getting the remote learning help they need. Geraldine’s grandson checks three of those boxes. The district did give him some one-on-one help though starting last summer, a reading tutor who worked with him remotely.
Geraldine Robinson: She did make some progress, some very good progress. She was very good. She was very, uh, attentive,
Lee Romney: but that district funded tutoring ended in December.
Geraldine Robinson: I was feeling like I was getting somewhere with both of the children, and now I feel like, um, I’m left on a cliff without a rope. You know, now would be the time for them to get the help so that they can catch up if possible, and be able to move forward. It would be right now. But without the help, they’re leaving them for her.
Lee Romney: And further behind, Geraldine says she’s pressing the district to extend the tutoring. Private help would cost about $90 an hour, well beyond her budget.
Monica Lopez: This program was narrated, written and produced by Lee Romney. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
More stories like this:
Geraldine’s Story: How Public Schools Are Failing Black Students with Dyslexia
Why Policing Our Schools Backfires with 70 Million (Encore)
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
Reclaiming Public Schools: Education in the Trump Era
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
