I think they just want to keep it in the school till now. And when they get to a point where they can’t figure out what it is, and then I guess they’ll send me somewhere else . . .
Wendy’s mother is not alarmed, because “the school” has told her not to worry about Wendy’s grades:
Her report card—as long as it’s not spelling and reading—spelling and reading are like F’s. And they keep telling me not to worry, because she’s in the Special Ed class. But besides that, she does good. I have no behavior problems with her at all.
Ms. Driver wants the best possible outcome for her daughter and she does not know how to achieve that goal without relying heavily on Wendy’s teachers.
I wouldn’t even know where to start going. On the radio there was something for children having problems reading and this and that, call. And I suggested it to a couple different people, and they were like, wait a second, it’s only to get you there and you’ll end up paying an arm and a leg. So I said to my mom, “No, I’m going to wait until the first report card and go up and talk to them up there.”
Ms. Driver might have placed somewhat less faith in Wendy’s teachers’ expertise had she known more about the bureaucratic rules educators in Lower Richmond School’s large urban district must contend with as they try to identify and resolve children’s learning difficulties. One teacher, speaking informally, notes that “[the district administrators] don’t want people written up.” To assign a student to a special education class full time, teachers are required to file two separate plans of intervention (each requiring a meeting with the principal, counselor, and mother), which each must be tried for 60 days before testing is permitted. The entire school year is only 180 days; thus, a minimum of two-thirds of the year would elapse before the end of the referral stage. As a practical reality, testing and placement in an appropriate classroom could not occur within the same school year, even in the extremely unlikely event that the process were to be initiated on the first day of school. The paperwork for Wendy was begun in the spring of third grade, but her “case” fell through the cracks; the referral had to be reinitiated in fourth grade. The only special help Wendy receives as a fourth-grader is access to the reading resource teacher. Had she attended an elementary school in a smaller suburban district like the one Garrett Tallinger went to, or a private school like the one Alexander Williams was enrolled in, where the educational resources were much more extensive and better funded and the bureaucratic machinery less imposing, Wendy might have received more effective attention, sooner.
Lower Richmond educators, however, tend not to stress these kinds of institutional differences as important factors in Wendy’s persistent reading problems. Instead, they often emphasize the critical role of parents. During the parent-teacher conference, Mr. Tier, Wendy’s fourth-grade teacher, expresses his outrage that she has made it to fourth grade without knowing how to read. He urges Ms. Driver to be more demanding with him and other school personnel, telling Ms. Driver in a parent-teacher conference: “If our roles were reversed—I’d be beating me on the head.”
Here, Mr. Tier suggests that Ms. Driver should take a concerted cultivation approach to her daughter’s education. She should aggressively monitor, criticize, and even badger educators rather than simply following the professionals’ advice. He shifts much of the responsibility for Wendy’s current predicament away from these expert decision makers and on to her mother, implying that had Ms. Driver taken this approach from the start, Wendy’s reading deficiency would never have been “allowed” to persist.
When Ms. Driver asks Mr. Tier to specify what she should do to help Wendy, he stresses the role of parents as leaders in developing their children’s language skills.
I would just try to get Wendy to get an interest in reading. Go to the library, find out the types of things she’s interested in, read to her, just get her—find out her interests and try to capitalize on them. And just see how far you could get. Because I think Wendy could learn how to read.
The school’s reading resource teacher, Mr. Johnson, echoes the view that, given the proper encouragement outside of school, Wendy “could learn how to read.” He adds tutoring to the list of parent-sponsored interventions.
The first thing I would do is seek some outside help. And the outside help would be—I might put her in something like a tutorial program. There is something at the Salvation Army. They have the same thing at the YMCA . . . [I’d] try to read a story and see if they can pick out any of the words, to try to develop a sight vocabulary.
Despite their agreement that Wendy could learn to read, and that parental input would be essential in her developing this skill, Mr. Tier and Mr. Johnson do not agree on the underlying cause of Wendy’s problems nor on what the most effective institutional response might be. Mr. Johnson is struck by the fact that Wendy performs at grade level in math. He believes she has a reading “phobia,” possibly compounded by other learning difficulties. In his view, it is emotional issues (a “social emotional overlay”) that are the problem. Mr. Johnson’s plan for intervention for fifth grade is to repeat the basic steps involved in reading readiness (a process normally initiated in kindergarten and continued in first grade) to “try to improve her sight vocabulary and some of her language arts skills.”
Mr. Tier and Ms. Green (Wendy’s third-grade teacher) see Wendy’s reading problems differently. Rather than diagnosing Wendy as suffering from a “phobia,” they think she may have neurological problems. In contrast to Mr. Johnson, Mr. Tier feels Wendy should be placed in special education classes full time. Mr. Tier also believes that she should repeat fourth grade. Each of Wendy’s classroom teachers, beginning in second grade, identified her as a student with learning problems and each feels that he or she tried to get additional help for her. But, as Mr. Tier puts it, somehow Wendy “slipped through the cracks”:
Wendy, I think, slipped through the cracks . . . I firmly believe that if Wendy was a little Black girl that she would already have been in a special education type of situation. A kid in fourth grade who can’t read a first-grade reader, something is dreadfully wrong here . . . And Wendy is so cute and so sweet. She has a smile for everybody, and I think somehow or other, I think they did her a terrible disservice by just letting her go forward.
Ms. Driver is somewhat aware that the school may not have fully met its responsibilities in Wendy’s case. For instance, after the parent-teacher conference in the spring, she realizes that the teachers disagree over whether Wendy should repeat fourth grade.
I went to talk to Mr. Johnson after I saw [Mr. Tier]. He said she’s doing fine and she doesn’t need to stay back. He said the same thing—that she can’t stay back ‘cause she’s in Special Ed. He said that she’s only failing [in] reading and spelling but she’s doing fine in math and social studies, so he can’t fail her. But the other teacher (she does not use Mr. Tier’s name) said she has to stay back. They said the opposite things.
When asked for her own “gut feeling” about whether Wendy should be promoted to fifth grade, Ms. Driver says, “I think she should stay back.” Nevertheless, she seems prepared to accept whatever “the school” decides is best for Wendy. Unlike Ms. Marshall, she does not place numerous calls to educators, follow up to find out what happened at the most recent meeting, or express her opinion about what should happen next. Faced with contradictory information, Wendy’s mother seems both bewildered and intimidated by the possibility that any intervention on her part might end up introducing more errors and delays in the process of getting the best education for Wendy.9