This morning I was moved to write a letter to the editors of the New York Times, after reading the opinion piece "Schools That Work" in the Sunday Review section. The article begins with the story of a now high-school age African American student, Alanna Clark, who has a reading disability. Alanna's mother managed to find her a spot in a charter school "outside her neighborhood," after she "repeatedly asked the school for help, without success."
The article's main point is that charter schools do a better job than regular public schools. I have mixed feelings about charter schools. While there are some very good ones and in some cases they may be a family's best option, at least in the short term, comparisons made with "regular" public schools are often not presented fairly. Also, some charter schools are run by for-profit companies, which seems as unethical to me as for-profit healthcare.
What struck me most about the article was how the author seems to accept as a given that Alanna's regular school was unable to address her reading disability. The article also mentions that Alanna's mother feared that Alanna would repeat the pattern of her older sister, who "had also struggled in school. But schools kept promoting her, until she eventually made it to community college, where, unprepared, she flunked."
The article does not mention whether Alanna's older sister suffered from any further adversities such as depression or substance abuse after the trauma of failing in college. Given her mother's obvious dedication to her children, I am hopeful that she was able to remain resilient. In my experience as a pediatrician, however, I have seen many cases where failure in school was the beginning of a multigenerational cycle of trauma and ACEs.
The New York Times article, perhaps unintentionally, highlights what I see frequently as a pediatrician: low income children of color whose difficulty learning is attributed to social factors or English learner status. Dr. Julie Washington, Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Georgia State University, has said that while it is true that African American students are overrepresented in special education as a whole, they are underrepresented in the diagnosis of specific learning disabilities such as reading disability, often because they are not tested or diagnosed. At the same time as any evaluation of learning difficulty should include questions about ACEs, it should also include appropriate testing for medical conditions such as reading disability, regardless of a student's background. As I concluded my letter, "In the same way that pediatricians are now recognizing the impact that trauma such as witnessing violence in the community or in the home (or, I might have added, parental depression, parental substance abuse or other ACEs) has on students' ability to learn, we should recognize that difficulty learning due to unrecognized or unaddressed medical conditions is in itself traumatic, and that low income children are those most often traumatized. "
I would love to hear from others, especially in the education field, who have thoughts on this topic.
Here is the text of my letter:
Dear Editors,
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