Juvenile Justice, Special Education & Reading

David Boulton: Now I’d like to invite you to go into this question that I asked earlier about the relationship between learning disabilities in the field and reading, and reading as a learning-disabling process for those that don’t get it.

Rick Lavoie: Right.

David Boulton: To an extent that it’s just mind-boggling to me, when we look at the various things children are at risk for, that they might develop that could do harm to their lives, that could diminish their potential in life, the risk of having some reading-related difficulty that can harm their life is greater than everything else we pay attention to combined.

Rick Lavoie: Absolutely. Reid Lyon talks all the time about the number of states in the United States who use reading skill levels in third grade to project how many prisons they’re going to need twenty years down the line. That’s horrifying to think of that, but they really do. Their prison-building programs are based on the literacy rates in the third grade and they’re figuring in twenty years they’re going to need this many prisons based on the number of kids who can’t read in third grade. That’s how close the correlation is. That’s how real the correlation is.

David Boulton: What we’re basically saying is this comes back to the shame avoidance, the kind of things that you’ve been talking about. What we’re saying is that children that struggle with learning to read become self-disabled in some ways. Their relationship with themselves becomes disabled. They become more prone to social pathology, and it radiates, at massive expense to our society as a whole and to our population as a whole, to such an extent that this is the nation’s greatest learning disability.

Rick Lavoie: There are a number of schools within the field of education; in terms of the way we view the relationship between reading and learning. I come from the school where the inability to read is a symptom of a larger language problem. The overwhelming majority of kids who have difficulty, who have learning problems, have difficulty reading. And the overwhelming majority of kids with reading problems also have learning problems. So, I have a difficult time teasing the two of them away because they are so fundamental and so interlocked.

David Boulton: Is there any other statistical things that you could summarize that would help in the case making side of this.

Dr. Peter Leone: I can give you some information about a national survey we conducted a couple of years ago that might shed some light on this, David. My colleagues at American Institutes for Research and at Arizona State and I and several other folks, with some federal support, surveyed juvenile correctional facilities, detention centers and state departments of education, to ask about how many kids who were confined were receiving special education services. There’s been pretty unreliable data on the prevalence of kids with disabilities or kids eligible for special ed services in juvenile corrections. Whether one accepts that there’s over or under-identification of kids, the issue is these are kids that somebody has recognized are not making it in the general ed curriculum, not making it pretty seriously.

So what we found was that about thirty-four, thirty-five percent of all kids are identified and receiving special ed services in juvenile corrections. Now, that’s about three times the number that you find in public schools. But the other side of that is that we had four states, I believe, that reported more than fifty percent of the kids that they serve were special ed eligible. Now, these are kids who came from the public schools and had been enrolled in special education. Again, whether or not that eligibility — whether or not there’s problems with that or not, it’s kind of a proxy…

David Boulton: It’s still a rough order of magnitude of saying that there’s a distorted relationship that’s going on, and that’s obvious.

Let me share one other little piece of information with you, David.

David Boulton: Please.

Dr. Peter Leone: We’ve been looking at the suspension rates in Maryland for the last few years and we’re trying to look at vulnerabilities of kids and the relative risks that various kids face.

Rick Lavoie: The reading process is the first experience of failure that our children meet when they get to school. What begins to happen is as they become isolated from the other kids and they become rejected by parents and teachers, they can fall victim to all sorts of societal pathologies. We see a disproportionate number of kids with reading and language problems, and we see a disproportionate number of kids in populations of kids with eating disorders and juvenile delinquency.

There’s a judge in the state of Connecticut who is so convinced of the link between reading and language problems and delinquency that when she meets a child in juvenile court she will say to the attorney, to the prosecutor, ‘Does this child have a reading and language problem?’ If the prosecutor says yes, then the judge conducts the proceedings in her chambers. If the prosecutor says no, she conducts the hearing as she normally would. And if the prosecutor says, ‘I don’t know’, she says, ‘Find out,’ and adjourns the hearing until the prosecutor finds out.

We’re finding that with kids with reading and learning problems, for example, juvenile delinquency, is a strike one, strike two, strike three situation for our kids. They’re more likely to get involved in juvenile crime because they can’t get and hold jobs because of their reading and language problems. They need the money, so they’re more likely to get involved in juvenile crime. They’re more likely to get caught because they’re not real good at being bad. They don’t plan real well because of the learning and language problems. So, they’re more likely to get caught. And they’re more likely to get stiffer sentences from the judicial system because they don’t handle the proceedings really well. So, it really is a strike one, strike two, strike three.

You see a disproportionate number of learning disabled kids and kids with reading and language problems in populations of kids who abuse drugs, who abuse alcohol, self-abusive behavior, suicide. A startling statistic in California is that approximately nine or ten percent of the kids in Los Angeles County have severe diagnosed learning and language reading problems. However, between the years 1995 and the year 2000, of the school-age children in Los Angeles County who attempted suicide and were successful, almost sixty percent had a history of learning and reading and language problems. Now that, statistically, is almost mind-numbing. Do the math. It’s easily seven, eight times what it should be.

So, the inability to read because of language, whether it’s directly or indirectly caused by a learning and language problem, looms very, very large in the lives of these kids. It impacts their peer relationships, it impacts relationships with teachers, and it impacts their relationship to learning. The reading and the learning are so intricately tied together, it’s such a Gordian knot at this point, that attempts to untie them and separate them into the learning disabilities camp and the reading disabilities camp, I see as an exercise in futility. They’re so closely linked, and so closely tied together.

David Boulton: I appreciate where you’re coming from. Here’s some differences and distinctions that I would like to exercise. For example, you just made a ten percent quote in Los Angeles county. That’s true on the one hand. On the other hand, nationwide, eighty-eight percent of black fourth-grade children are below proficiency in reading. Eighty-eight percent. Eight times that number are at some degree of life risk here.

Rick Lavoie: What I said was, and I always make a point to say it, ten percent have diagnosed learning disabilities.

David Boulton: What we’re basically saying is that some are so severe and so obvious that we can put a label on them in this way. But nonetheless, some six to eight times that, on a national average, are struggling and they’re not getting the same degree of attention.