Parents Push for Better Reading

Milling in the hallways during the International Dyslexia Conference at a downtown hotel last week were swarms of experts, academics from the Ivy League, authors of research papers with long titles and clinicians there to discuss the latest theories and breakthroughs in the complicated subject of learning disabilities.

Amid the crowd was Diane Badgley, diligently taking notes at every presentation.

Is Badgley an educator? A tweedy professor from one of the nation's esteemed colleges? An emissary from some government think tank?

None of the above. Badgley is a parent of two from Richmond, Ind., one of whom struggled mightily with reading.

In the past, parents were content to let the latest educational strategies trickle down from university labs to state conventions to district offices to classrooms. Now, the parents are the ones attending the national conferences, testifying before state legislatures, buttonholing the clinicians and sharing their findings at the local level. Badgley's transformation from parent to advocate came when her son, then a 3rd-grader, was relegated to a special class for poor readers, held in a cleaned-out janitor's closet.

"My daughter, who is gifted, was given the world . new building, new computers," she said. "But for my son, I couldn't even get a window. I thought "What's wrong with this picture?"

By 4th grade, Badgley was so desperate for answers that she had her son dividing his day between public school and Catholic school. By 6th grade, she added six months of intensive tutoring with a reading specialist (cost: $15,000).

"We had to . we were losing him, which is what happens when you take an intelligent kid and expose him to humiliation every day," she said.

The bold strategy did the trick. Her son, now 15, reads at grade level, but the experience changed her forever. She started the Parent's Coalition for Literacy, has wooed national speakers to her small town, has testified before the Department of Education and has spent thousands of dollars traveling to conferences like the one at the Chicago Marriott Hotel.

"We were very fortunate that we had the resources to address the problem," said Badgley, who gave up a career in advertising to deal with her son's learning problems. " But a lot of people don't . and their stories would break your heart. That's why I teach parents how to advocate for their child . I tell them that it's not the system's responsibility; it's their responsibility."

Of the 3,500 participants at the conference, which ended Saturday, an estimated 10 percent were parents, all aware that in an era of strapped budgets, overworked teachers and insatiable needs, patience is anything but a virtue.

"The latest information doesn't have to come through that education filter anymore," said Susan L. Hall, a Long Grove mother and president of the Illinois chapter of the International Dyslexia Association. "In fact, we're leap-frogging over the traditional system altogether."

It would be easy to dismiss this grass-roots movement as Volvo-driving, Evian-swilling, Prada-toting fast-trackers fretting over whether Junior is Princeton-bound, but participants transcend race, geography and income. What they share is an unshakable belief that institutional change - when it occurs at all - moves at a glacial pace. By the time new practices seep into the classroom, it may be too late to help their children. So they have little choice but to hammer the point home themselves.

"There's a lot of frustration out there," said Louisa Moats, a project director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Interventions Project who is contacted regularly by parent groups. School districts are often linked to the status quo by a wide range of factors, from politics to publishing ties, Moats said. "They have a point of view they hold dear. even if it's not always informed," she said.

And so parents, just like patients fed up with health-care shortcomings, feel they have no choice but to become relentless consumers, immersing themselves in the dry-as-dust journal articles, Web sites and professional organizations once reserved for the academic elite. When they can't find the right answers, they consult volleyball-size Rolodexes filled with names and phone numbers of the national experts or take graduate-level education classes.

Hall even has co-authored a book ("Straight Talk About Reading") with the Washington-based Moats and is a regular at invitation-only symposiums to provide the parent perspective.

Hall's quest began when her son, a 1st grader in Wilmette, labored with the written word.

"I was told, "Don't worry, he'll catch up. It's just a developmental lag,'" she said. But her intuition told her not to wait. She had her son tested by a psychologist who recommended a different approach.

If at times such parents seem testy, it's because there's so much at stake. Kids with learning problems are at risk for a wide range of problems, from dropping out of school to juvenile delinquency. (Although learning disabilities affect 20 percent of the general population, they afflict 50 percent of those in jail). A child who lags behind by the end of 3rd grade has only a one in five chance of catching up.

Not surprisingly, many educators are less enthusiastic. For the record, they all say they welcome well-informed, pro-active parents; privately, they say these "moms on a mission" can be overbearing. "Sometimes they forget that we have to run a school system and for all children," said one west suburban principal, "not just theirs."

John Logan, assistant superintendent of Northbrook School District 27 and one of the few willing to comment, called this empowerment "positive. although that doesn't mean we always agree."

The good news is that researchers know that much of reading failure can be remedied by early identification and early intervention, said Hall, a Harvard Business School graduate. The new model is Texas, experts say, which recently trained 17,000 kindergarten teachers in how to assess a child's phonemic awareness ("the single best indicator for reading readiness"). For it's efforts, Texas was rewarded with a $35 million federal grant - the largest of the 17 state recipients. (Illinois received zero.)

The Texas program, Hall said, is a perfect example of the kind of research-based program that parents like her have been advocating.

"It is about the prevention of reading failure.not the wait-to-fail model so popular here," she said. "Parents can't wait. We know how overwhelming these learning problems can be. We know when something is wrong. And we know that no one cares about your kid like you."

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