Law Involvement in Enhancing Education for Students with Dyslexia

Written by: Sara Radovic

Edited by: Keerthana Rao

"The management of dyslexia demands a life-span perspective."

- Sally E. Shaywitz, M.D.

Efforts to enhance the quality of special education for students with [learning] disabilities remain interminable – a fact the Education Law Center substantiates with brief recounts of specific cases. One such case includes A.W. v. Jersey City Public Schools, in which plaintiff A.W., a twenty-year-old student in the tenth grade diagnosed with dyslexia, files a lawsuit against the Jersey City School District and the New Jersey Department of Education – including several employees of both institutions – for failure in acknowledging his condition and providing him with the appropriate resources needed to successfully learn – thus jeopardizing his academic career through elementary and secondary school.

Dyslexia, according to physician-scientist Dr. Sally E. Shaywitz (1998), is “characterized by an unexpected difficulty in reading in children and adults who otherwise possess the intelligence, motivation, and schooling considered necessary for accurate and fluent reading.” It is the most common of learning disabilities, affecting approximately eighty percent of the learning impaired. Linda S. Siegel (2006) accentuates difficulties at the word level to be the best method in recognizing dyslexia because the development of comprehension skills includes decoding words due to insufficient phonological processing, a reasoning affirmed by G. Reid Lyon et al. (2003); reading comprehension, nonetheless, remains a crucial element in diagnosing an individual.

A.W. enrolled in the Jersey City Public School District as a second-grade student in September 1988. From that point until May 2000, as the case (2002) reveals, he was deprived of a proper educational program, hence lacking progress in reading, writing and spelling. This, the plaintiff claimed, only meant that the defendants had violated his rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [20 U.S.C.A. § 1400 et seq.] (IDEA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 [29 U.S.C.A. § 794] (RA), the Civil Rights Act of 1971 [42 U.S.C. § 1983] (Section 1983), Article VIII [§ 4 ¶ 1] of the New Jersey Constitution, and the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination [N.J.S.A. 10:5-1 et seq.] (NJLAD). The violation was indisputable because, even though he was eligible for special education and all other related services under the Individuals with Disabilities Act – qualified as an individual with a disability under RA – he did not receive any of the services promised to him by the law. The defendants were receiving federal funds for all educational programs, including programs protected by IDEA – yet they were seemingly unaware of A.W.’s condition and did not provide the resources he needed.

The plaintiff’s grandmother, as his legal guardian, filed a complaint on his behalf – as well as on the behalf of other students in Jersey City with dyslexia – with the New Jersey Department of Education and its accountable employees [notably State Defendant Barbara Gantwerk - Director of the Office of Special Education Programs - and Melinda Zangrillo - Coordinator of Compliance], explicitly describing the severity of her grandson’s condition. NJDOE responded with an issued report in June 1998, determining the Jersey City District to have been noncompliant for “failing to demonstrate that its written reading curricula could be adapted to meet the needs of classified pupils.” The state department, however, did not grant A.W. any sort of relief in light of the report, resulting in A.W. declaring NJDOE and its employees to have been negligent because they were aware of his disability but failed to implement an “educational program effective at remediating his condition.”

An independent educational evaluation was granted to A.W. on the twenty-eighth of January in 2000 to diagnose his condition; the school district subsequently instituted an Individualized Education Program that required specialized instruction to assist him in overcoming his inability to read, write, and spell. The IEP, according to the plaintiff, was implemented in May 2000. He, nonetheless, filed a lawsuit approximately eight months later, on January 10th, 2001, alleging the Defendants had deprived him of an education suitable to his academic needs for at least ten years. The United States District Court for the District of New Jersey – member of the Third Circuit – denied the appeal of the Defendants for the dismissal of the complaint filed by A.W. [and his grandmother]. The Third Circuit took up the case; the first decision in 2003 held that the defendants could be sued under IDEA and Section 504 for not implementing a specialized educational program for A.W. – and other dyslexic students – while they received federal financial assistance at the same time. The 2007 decision substantiated that individual state defendants could not be held liable under Section 1983. The court ruled in the plaintiff’s favor, with the settlement successfully resolving his claims against NJDOE and the school district of Jersey City.

One may attribute the lack of defendants’ knowledge of the severity of dyslexia to a more public ignorance of the literary [and linguistic] disability. Norton et al. (2015) admit that the brain basis and core causes of dyslexia are not fully understood, despite it being the most common of learning disabilities. Uncertainty in determining causes includes the complexity of reading itself, as evidenced by the linguistic, visual, and attentional processes undergone while reading. Norton and her colleagues, however, have determined the best understood cause for dyslexia to be the “weakness in phonological awareness (PA) for spoken (auditory) language that predicts and accompanies dyslexia. Secondary and tertiary reasonings include rapid automatized naming (RAN) and any processes that could be underlying either PA or RAN – or perhaps both.

Researchers have studied the likelihood of a correlation between dyslexia and other mental disorders. Norwegian professor Anne Mari Undheim (2003) even concedes to a possible link between dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, usually detected when the individual is still a child, but any other possibilities of such a correlation have yet to be adequately substantiated. Modern science and psychology continue to research and investigate analyses acquired from studies to disclose more information about dyslexia to the public; the law, nevertheless, may yet exemplify a pivotal role in advocating awareness of an [astonishingly] common disability.

[The views expressed in this article are those of the author and the author alone; they do not necessarily represent the views of all members of the first RULR Editorial Board and Rutgers University.]