Who Will Teach America’s Learning Disabled—and How?

At 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday in June, the entrance to Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles is quiet. The students are already inside the campus’ main building, a two-story brick-and-stone structure built in the Italian Renaissance style, featuring arched windows and a copper bell tower that has oxidized green since 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 part of the Literate Adolescents Intervention Project. The program is a collaboration between the Los Angeles Unified School District and California State University, Northridge, where Young earned her master’s degree in special education and which is known nationally for its high-quality credentialing program for special education teachers. The day before, Lin-Manuel Miranda had announced that he would be departing from the musical he wrote based on Alexander Hamilton’s life. From the stage of Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theater every night, Miranda would sing, “I’m young, scrappy, and hungry.” Around 3,000 similarly young, scrappy, and hungry (some literally so) students attend Hamilton High, part of the 667,000-student LAUSD—the nation’s second-largest school district. About 55 percent of Hamilton students come from economically disadvantaged homes, according to LAUSD. Half of them identify as Latino and nearly one-third as black. Tickets to see Miranda’s final performances brought $20,000 on the secondary market. Here, in an unglamorous neighborhood framed by auto repair shops and Interstate 10, $20,000 covers about half a year’s salary for a new teacher.

LAIP uses intensive literacy interventions, such as two-hour-long blocks of focused practice on phonics skills or comprehension strategies, to boost the reading ability of high school students with mild to moderate learning disabilities. It includes materials designed to draw the interest of teens and technology to help the kids complete the classwork, bringing methods that have been proved to be effective in a controlled setting into a real-world school environment. LAIP was one of three special ed programs to win a four-year, $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs in August 2015. “What we’re trying to do is a real-life implementation of an evidence-based practice,” said Larry Wexler, director of the Research to Practice Division at OSEP.

A lot rides on the grant winners’ success. “There is a huge unemployment problem among adults with learning disabilities,” Sally Spencer, a special education professor at CSUN and one of the creators of LAIP, told me in a phone conversation before my visit to Hamilton. People with learning disabilities have the cognitive ability to continuously learn and can attain the same intellectual capabilities as anyone else, but they process information differently. Unaddressed, differences such as dyslexia and dyscalculia, which affects the ability to understand numbers and learn math, hold back the learning disabled. (They are distinct from people with intellectual disabilities such as cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, or autism, who have neurodevelopmental problems that can keep 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 very well.” Yet “stress, stigmatization, wanting to feel fully included, wanting be treated with respect and dignity and high expectations,” follow these kids around, said Steve Zimmer, president of the LAUSD Board of Education.

The inability to fluently read or comprehend a novel assigned in English class, a 20-page chapter on ancient Rome assigned in a world history course, or the word problems in an algebra textbook make special education students more likely than their general education peers to fail a class, repeat a grade, or drop out of school altogether. A full 69 percent of special ed students nationwide have failed a secondary school course, compared with 47 percent of the general education population, according to the National Center on Learning Disabilities. As a result, only about two-thirds receive a high school diploma.

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

Kids who are frustrated in school because they don’t understand the academic content will eventually act out, Spencer said. Half of special ed students have been suspended or expelled, and research shows that as many as 70 percent of kids involved in the juvenile justice system have a learning disability. That’s similar to what the U.S. Department of Justice has found in the state prison population.

So the goal of Young’s class is to get her kids up to grade level in reading and give them 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. The Department of Education hopes that if successful, LAIP could be a model for giving special ed kids nationwide a shot at a brighter future.

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

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

I am greeted with a warm smile from Young, who has started her lesson. With shoulder-length dark-blond hair and wearing a crisp blue tunic and black dress slacks, Young, 34, is sitting in the center of the room at a table with a projector on it. The machine is shining a passage from a book onto a screen at the front of the room.

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

Though Hamilton’s student-teacher ratio is 42.5 to 1, according to LAUSD, just six students are in the room. They’re clad in typical teenage gear: jeans, T-shirts, and hoodies. A yellow skateboard rests on the floor next to one of the desks. Some students follow along with their own copies of the book while others watch the screen. During the 10 or so minutes of this part of the lesson, the classroom is focused. There’s no sneaking a peek at a smartphone, whispering, or dozing off. The students come to the end of the chapter, which turns out to be the book’s conclusion.

“That’s it—you did it!” Young says, applauding. The kids cheer and clap for one another, beaming with pride. Young swiftly breaks the students up into two groups, 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 Touch Phonics slip if you’re with Ms. Riley,” says Young, indicating her instructional assistant, “and you’re going to turn in your flash drive for reciprocal teaching if you’re with me.”

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

The 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 student named Eduardo is the group facilitator; since the beginning of the school year Young has been modeling for the teens how to analyze text using four reading comprehension strategies.

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

The kids open their laptops and begin typing responses for their assigned tasks while Young monitors their progress. When time is up, they begin to share what they’ve written.

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

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

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

“How would you act if you were hysterical?” asks Young. The students role-play the word; one boy pretends to laugh, and another pretends to cry. But they’re still stuck 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 starts anew. As in the first group, the student tasked with asking clarifying questions gets stuck on the word “hysterical,” and Young repeats her suggestion about doing a Google Images search.

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

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)

In spring 2015, OSEP put out a call for proposals for model demonstration projects that would boost the literacy of middle and high school special ed students. LAIP stood out to the department because “it’s in a high-need urban high school,” Wexler said, where kids “are not typically exposed to interventions that are evidence based and as intensive” as LAIP. Grant makers were impressed that it takes “evidence-based practice that was effective in a controlled setting and brings it into a typical school environment, with typical implementers, typical resources, typical money and time,” he said. OSEP wanted to see a program that could succeed at a school where “the air conditioning breaks, the leadership changes, there are gangs in the school—the constellation of issues that makes it very difficult and challenging to learn and teach,” Wexler said.

The day the call for proposals went out, Sally Spencer happened to have been meeting with LAUSD administrators. Colleagues of theirs at the district’s Intensive Diagnostic Education Centers, which teach kids with learning disabilities, had heard she was training CSUN students to do intensive reading interventions. “We kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Should we see if IDEC is 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 their proposal was a long shot. Usually big institutions win such grants, Spencer said, and OSEP’s model demonstration projects would be no exception: The other two winners were the University of Texas at Austin and the Michigan Department of Education.

“But what we wrote in our grant proposal is, if you can do it in LAUSD, you can do it anywhere,” Spencer said. “I feel like that’s true. If we can make this work in LAUSD—with all the bureaucratic traps of a really huge school district—then in smaller 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 the campus, the principal was supportive, and Young was a graduate of Spencer’s CSUN program. “We all knew her pretty well and knew that she was fantastic,” Spencer said of Young. They were able to get the pilot project up and running in Young’s classroom by October.

Young didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a high school special education teacher—and from the number of vacancies in school districts nationwide, it seems few do.

The number of kids marked for special education has held steady at about 13 percent of all students since 2000, while the number of educators qualified to teach them has fallen steadily to just 6.4 percent of all teachers. Today, 49 states are experiencing a shortage of special ed teachers, according to the National Coalition on Personnel Shortages in Special Education and Related Services. In Clark County School District in Nevada, the Las Vegas Sun reported in May, 38 percent of teacher vacancies in the elementary and middle schools are for special ed teachers; 83 percent of the special ed vacancies are in Title I schools, serving the neighborhoods with the highest share of poor families. In Arkansas, 15 percent of teachers assigned to special education students lack the required training, according to KATV.

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

Those who become special education teachers often end up quitting; turnover is quite a bit higher than among general ed instructors. Spencer cited several reasons. It’s a hard job to begin with, she said, and schools have recently seen an increase in the number of students placed in special ed for emotional problems or behavioral disorders such as anxiety or depression, bipolar disorder, or even schizophrenia. More than 20 percent of American adolescents have a mental health disorder or illness, making it the leading cause of disability among American youths. “They put kids with behavior problems on special ed caseloads, sometimes inappropriately,” Spencer said. “Or teachers get students with all kinds of disabilities, so it’s really hard to meet their individual needs.” Teachers also report burnout from paperwork requirements and lack of support from schools and 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. “I thought I wanted to be an English professor,” she said. During grad school, she taught at community college, tutored students, and worked as a substitute teacher at Northridge Academy High School to support herself. “I realized that I liked high school students better because they had more energy.”

At Northridge Academy, Young was often asked to help out in special education classrooms. “I thought, ‘This is incredible,’ ” she said. “I felt like the students were getting individualized attention. I just didn’t know that’s what special education looked 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 with disabilities in high-need schools. She taught at Verdugo Hills High in the northeast San Fernando Valley under the supervision of a mentor teacher and took classes at night. After graduation in 2013 she was hired there full-time. A friend working at IDEC later told Young about an open position in special ed at Hamilton High. “I love to have fun, and I have fun every single day,” she said. “I really like teenagers. I think my job is creative, and I always think, ‘Gosh, if I can teach someone to read, then they can teach themselves to do anything.’ ”

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

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

Her students from last year have transitioned into a 10th grade general ed world history class. “That’s a huge deal for them—most of these kids haven’t been in general ed since third or fourth grade,” Young said. She’s also running a support class for eight of those 10th graders, teaching them vocabulary from the history textbook and metacognition skills. Meanwhile, a veteran special education teacher, Jeff Fractor, also funded by the OSEP grant, is training the history teachers to integrate the kids from special ed into their curriculum.

The CSUN professors help Young out too. Sue Sears, one of the professors who wrote the grant proposal, frequently pops by to observe the classroom. Young talks to Spencer at least once a week, either in person or via Skype. This is the kind of support that Zimmer believes helps to retain special education teachers. More than any other field, he said, constant professional engagement and career development is essential for special education instructors: “If you talk to teachers, it’s really about conditions of teaching and learning, support, and feeling like they’re making a difference.”

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

Data from the 2015–16 school year show Young’s students made significant progress, going from below average to average in their reading abilities, Spencer said, though she provides a dose of caution: “We don’t know yet whether we’ll be able 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 positive results. “Nothing breeds success like success. I think the fact that the school has seen some great outcomes from doing this—that will reinforce them wanting to do more,” he said.

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

Last year’s students improved their reading skills, Young said, and grew more computer literate. Their confidence soared. “At the beginning of [last] year I may have seen them shut down so quickly, but now they spend time thinking. They have the confidence that they can figure it out, and we’re working on grade-level stuff,” 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 be identified as having been in special education. “I get distracted easily. [But] it’s been really good since last year. I am getting a little bit comfortable in my classes.”