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CHAPTER 1
Yamilka's Journey
Yamilka returned to her reading classes at Huntington and continued going until July 2007, when she reached the deadline for using her 1,500 hours. She typically had three hours a day of classes, five days a week, with certified teachers who taught her basic phonics: the sounds of each letter and how to blend those sounds into words. "Fuh-reh-Fred," she would say, in what teachers call decoding. It was a painfully slow process; she knew she stood out in a place where most of the pupils were much younger.
Yamilka is about five foot two and chubby. She dresses casually, often in jeans and a denim jacket, but it's clear that she takes time putting herself together. She has smooth brown skin and typically wears a little bit of carefully applied eye makeup and a hint of lip gloss. Her curly hair is usually pulled back into a ponytail, revealing a few silver earrings on each ear. And she always has beautifully manicured nails. Sometimes she would sit inside a semiprivate conference room at Huntington with her tutors, who would alternate every hour when she switched activities. But many times she was placed at tables in the center's big open room, among the teenagers and younger children. She slowly read picture books, including Goodnight Moon, Love You Forever, and the "Bob" series. Sometimes she'd listen to a tutor read short words such as "man," "well," and "jet," and would write them on a page. Then she would practice using these words by writing brief sentences such as "The man likes to fly a jet." As her skills increased, she was given worksheets with illustrations to help her read short paragraphs. One showed a couple loading groceries into their station wagon. The text read: "Mother and Father went to the store. They were surprised when they came home Jill had cut the grass. Mother and Father said, 'Thank you, Jill.' "
Her tutors used a variety of different reading exercises to customize their approach for an older student, but they still had to concentrate on the basics. Yamilka learned how putting the letter e at the end of a word makes a vowel "say its name," as when the e in "make" prevents the word from being pronounced like "mack." She also learned addition and subtraction and how to tell time with a clock. She had always relied on a digital watch.
Yamilka didn't use all 1,500 hours of tutoring she was awarded by the city because she skipped a few weeks of instruction. And when she finally finished her program in July 2007, she was still reading at a low elementary level.
That a twenty-one-year-old woman could win more than a hundred thousand dollars' worth of tutoring to learn how to read — all at taxpayer expense — would have been unthinkable a century ago, or even a few decades ago. Yamilka's struggle to learn at Huntington, and the steps she would take after leaving, wouldn't have been possible without the development of the very concept of public education that culminated in the civil rights movement.
There is no federally protected right to an education in the U.S. Constitution. The word "education" isn't even mentioned in the document. Although the nation's founders were intellectuals who valued book learning, the war they'd fought against British rule also left them wary about consolidating too much power in their nascent federal government.
Education was therefore left to the states — as in colonial times — and it was heavily influenced by Protestantism. Some churches created charity schools for the poor, while parents with means sent their children to grammar schools. The most common textbook was The New England Primer, which was used to teach reading and the Protestant catechism. By the time of the Revolutionary War, most adult Americans were educated just enough to read the newspaper and the Bible and to figure their taxes. But public schools as we know them didn't exist. Massachusetts and New Hampshire had enacted laws requiring towns to support local schools with taxes and fees. But there was little support for taxpayer-funded education outside of New England. Plans for a national school system were rejected by Congress in the late 1790s. Thomas Jefferson's efforts as a Virginia state legislator to guarantee three years of public schooling for all (white) children was defeated three times. "People have more feeling for canals and roads than for education," he declared in frustration.
But things began to change by the nineteenth century, thanks to the industrial revolution and the growth of newspapers. Horace Mann, the Massachusetts secretary of education, traveled throughout his state promoting a taxpayer-funded public education system to ensure a minimal level of quality. Though he was rebuffed, his reformist ideas made an impact, and by the 1840s there was growing support for "common schools." New immigrants were arriving from Europe, mainly Ireland; they were poor and had little if any education. Social reformers saw the schools as a means of "Americanizing" the children of these new arrivals. Nearly half of New York City's residents were foreign-born in 1840. While laborers didn't need high literacy skills to work in the factories, the poor and the immigrants wanted a better life for their children. So did the settlers who were moving to western states, and the slaves who were freed after the Civil War. To encourage this western expansion, Congress began requiring the new states to set aside land for free, nonsectarian schools. Public school enrollments increased from 7.6 million in 1870 to 12.7 million in 1890 — out of a total population of about 69 million. The United States provided more public schooling to more children than any other nation.
But public education still wasn't widely available past the elementary level. Many children left school at the age of fourteen to work in factories or on farms. That gradually began to change as public high schools sprung up throughout the country. In 1900, 10 percent of teens between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were attending high schools; by 1920 that number had tripled to 31 percent. Yet there were debates about whether all young people really needed twelve years of schooling. Immigration had swelled, with many children arriving from poor countries in Southern and Eastern Europe. Progressive educators argued that a classical education grounded in Latin and literature was no longer relevant to these masses. They persuaded schools to make their lessons more practical, and to "track" less academically inclined children into vocational programs. The public schools taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, but the goal was employment.
The debate about public education shifted again in the 1950s. The Soviet Union had launched the Sputnik satellite, and industrial work was getting more and more technical. Americans feared their schools weren't competitive, and the government directed more money toward science, math, and higher education. Meanwhile, a book called Why Johnny Can't Read, by Rudolf Flesch, had become a bestseller in 1955 by fueling another insecurity about the nation's schools. It argued that teachers were neglecting the basics of reading. But the ensuing debates about the best ways of teaching children how to read were driven by philosophy and practice. Education was clearly valued, but it wasn't considered a fundamental right.
That all changed in the years after the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This ruling struck down a common practice in seventeen states of racially segregating white and black students. Brown held that all students were entitled to the same education, under the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee that no state shall deny to any person the equal protection of its laws. The court found "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." This ruling ushered in the civil rights era, as blacks marched and protested for equality in the schools, in voting booths, and in the workplace. Brown also empowered other minority groups to fight for their own educational rights, including students whose disabilities made it difficult for them to learn. Education wasn't a constitutional right, strictly speaking. But the nation's highest court had ruled that everyone was entitled to the same services, including the public schools.
Students with disabilities had a long way to go to achieve such equality. For most of the twentieth century, they were treated as second-class citizens. Children with physical or mental handicaps were warehoused in institutions, or segregated from other students when they were allowed in the public schools. The court's finding in Brown that all students were entitled to the same education gave these children and their advocates a powerful weapon. By the early 1970s, mentally retarded students in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., had won landmark victories, as courts ruled that children with handicaps were entitled to attend the same public schools as other students. That right to a seat in the schoolhouse was secured in 1975, when Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. This legislation was later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.
The basic tenet of IDEA was revolutionary: that children with disabilities are entitled to a "free and appropriate" public education. It also required that schools provide these children with any services they needed to meet their individual disabilities. These services could include audio recordings for the blind, speech therapy for a child who has trouble with spoken language, or physical accommodations for children in wheelchairs. Schools have to evaluate these students at regular intervals and make sure the parents are involved in all decisions.
Because of IDEA, districts had to hire specialized teachers and counselors. They had to provide smaller classes for students with special needs. The law required the federal government to offset 40 percent of these extra costs, but that commitment was never fully honored. Though many students with disabilities got what they needed and went on to higher education, the vast majority of them continued to perform well below their nondisabled peers. A gap is to be expected given their extra needs, but that gap is enormous. Nationally, a little more than half of all students with disabilities earn high school diplomas — about twenty percentage points below the average. In Georgia and Louisiana, graduation rates among students with disabilities are forty percentage points lower than for the high school population as a whole.
The Bush administration considered its No Child Left Behind law another step forward in making education a civil right. This law aimed to close the achievement gaps between children of different races, abilities, and income groups by requiring states and school districts that receive federal dollars to meet annual performance targets. It's no longer acceptable to merely report the overall number of children passing a statewide test. Schools have to show how well their Hispanics, blacks, English Language Learners, and children with disabilities are performing, as well as the five other subgroups. All these students are held to the same standards. They can't be shuffled off to vocational schools or institutions as they were just a few decades ago.
But despite these laws, and the threat that schools will lose federal funds if scores don't improve, there are still many students like Yamilka who claim they haven't gotten the education they're entitled to from the public schools. Students with special needs rely on attorneys to persuade local school districts to provide their services. Education advocates have used the courts to fight for state funding to ensure that all students receive an adequate education. Though public education was never mentioned in the Constitution, our society now clearly considers it a fundamental right.
In her own small way, Yamilka was challenging America's commitment to teach every child. Her rights as a learning-disabled student had been violated. The city's agreement to provide her with 1,500 hours of private tutoring was meant to rectify that wrong. She finally had her chance to find out whether she could learn to read.
Yamilka's case was extraordinary because of the size of her settlement. But it's not unusual for a school district to pay for extra services, or even full tuition at a private school, when a student with a disability is able to prove they can't get the education they're entitled to in the public schools. During the 2007/08 school year, the New York City Department of Education says 4,368 students won taxpayer-funded tuition at private schools. The city spent $89 million on private school tuition that year, an increase of more than 50 percent over the previous year. The Department of Education's chief attorney, Michael Best, said that was partly due to a backlog of cases. The city had settled a class action lawsuit charging it was taking too long to pay for students to attend private schools.
In late 2007 The New York Times reported on how the Department of Education was trying to rein in these costs by doubling the size of its legal team to fight these cases — at the suggestion of an outside consultant. Five lawyers and a dozen paralegals were added, with the goal of saving $25 million on private tuition and expediting the backlog. It was that same year that "Tom F" became Exhibit A in the city's argument that some students were abusing the system as they sought a taxpayer-funded private education.
The plaintiff in the case was Tom Freston, a former Viacom chief executive whose son attended a private school from the age of eight through high school because, he claimed, the city schools couldn't adequately address his reading disability. Freston had reportedly left Viacom with a golden parachute worth $85 million. He had already been reimbursed for about $50,000 — two years' worth of tuition — for his son's attendance at the Stephen Gaynor School on the Upper West Side. He wanted the city to pay for the rest of his son's education. Freston's lawyers argued the case wasn't about his individual wealth, but about preserving the rights of all students with disabilities to have the city pay for their services. To support that point, the attorney Neal Rosenberg said Freston donated the $50,000 in reimbursements he had received from the city to underwrite an after-school reading program at Gaynor to be used by public school students from the neighborhood. He said Freston also gave the program an extra $100,000 of his own money. But New York City argued that Freston's son had had a good option at a downtown public school and that he should have been required to try it before seeking permission to attend a private school at taxpayer expense. The city fought the case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued a split decision in the fall of 2007, letting a lower court's ruling stand. Freston won.
The case was closely watched across the country because special education is so expensive. In the fall of 2007, there were more than 66,600 students nationwide whose parents placed them in private schools at public expense, according to the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs. Overall, however, the number of such placements remains relatively small — just 1 percent of the country's 6.6 million special education students. But private school tuition is a great expense for districts. Washington, D.C., was reportedly spending $118 million in 2005 for 2,283 of its special education students to attend private facilities. That was about one out of every five of its special education pupils. In financial terms, that amounted to 15 percent of the city's education budget for just 4 percent of its pupils, and the costs were growing every year.
Special education is so expensive because the children require many mandated services and more individualized attention (more teachers) than general education students. In New York City, special education students made up roughly 12 percent of total enrollment in the 2007/08 school year. But the city's Department of Education was spending about $4 billion — roughly 20 percent of its budget — on services and classes tailored to their physical, emotional, and learning disabilities. Approximately sixty thousand special education students were eligible for yellow bus service because they couldn't travel alone to their school or program — at a cost of $640 million, including the salary of the driver and matron on each bus.
In a system with finite resources and seemingly endless needs, one could rationally argue that the schools can't do everything — especially when it comes to older students. If a student gets to the age of twenty-one and still isn't reading, is it time to give up?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Why Cant U Teach Me 2 Read?"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Beth Fertig.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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