California
Why California Still Doesn’t Mandate Dyslexia Screening
This article was originally published in CalMatters.
California sends mixed messages when it comes to serving dyslexic students.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is the most famous dyslexic political official in the country, even authoring a children’s book to raise awareness about the learning disability. And yet, California is one of 10 states that doesn’t require dyslexia screening for all children.
Education experts agree that early screening and intervention is critical for making sure students can read at grade level. But so far, state officials have done almost everything to combat dyslexia except mandate assessments for all students.
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“It needs to happen,” said Lillian Duran, an education professor at the University of Oregon who has helped develop screening tools for dyslexia. “It seems so basic to me.”
Since 2015, legislators have funded dyslexia research, teacher training and the hiring of literacy coaches across California. But lawmakers failed to mandate universal dyslexia screening, running smack into opposition from the California Teachers Association.
The union argued that since teachers would do the screening, a universal mandate would take time away from the classroom. It also said universal screening may overly identify English learners, mistakenly placing them in special education.
The California Teachers Association did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In a letter of opposition to a bill in 2021, the union wrote that the bill “is unnecessary, leads to over identifying dyslexia in young students, mandates more testing, and jeopardizes the limited instructional time for students.”
In response, dyslexia experts double down on well-established research. Early detection actually prevents English learners — and really, all students — from ending up in special education when they don’t belong there.
While California lawmakers didn’t vote to buck the teachers union, they haven’t been afraid to spend taxpayer money on dyslexia screening. In the past two years, the state budget allocated $30 million to UC San Francisco’s Dyslexia Center, largely for the development of a new screening tool. Newsom began championing the center and served as its honorary chair in 2016 when he was still lieutenant governor.
“There’s an inadequate involvement of the health system in the way we support children with learning disabilities,” said Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini, co-director of UCSF’s Dyslexia Center. “This is one of the first attempts at bridging science and education in a way that’s open sourced and open to all fields.”
Parents and advocates say funding dyslexia research and developing a new screener can all be good things, but without mandated universal screening more students will fall through the cracks and need more help with reading as they get older.
Omar Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the governor did not respond to questions about whether Newsom would support a mandate for universal screening. Instead, he listed more than $300 million in state investments made in the past two years to fund more reading coaches, new teacher credentialing requirements and teacher training.
The screening struggle
Rachel Levy, a Bay Area parent, fought for three years to get her son Dominic screened for dyslexia. He finally got the screening in third grade, which experts say could be too late to prevent long-term struggles with reading.
“We know how to screen students. We know how to get early intervention,” Levy said. “This to me is a solvable issue.”
Levy’s son Dominic, 16, still remembers what it felt like trying to read in first grade.
“It was like I was trying to memorize the shape of the word,” he said. “Even if I could read all the words, I just wouldn’t understand them.”
Dyslexia is a neurological condition that can make it hard for students to read and process information. But teachers can mitigate and even prevent the illiteracy stemming from dyslexia if they catch the signs early.
Levy, who also has dyslexia, said there’s much more research today on dyslexia than there was 30 years ago when she was first diagnosed. She said she was disappointed to find that California’s policies don’t align with the research around early screening.
“Unfortunately, most kids who are dyslexic end up in the special education system,” Levy said. “It’s because of a lack of screening.”
Soon after his screening in third grade, Dominic started receiving extra help for his dyslexia. He still works with an educational therapist on his reading, and he’s just about caught up to grade level in math. The biggest misconception about dyslexia, Dominic said, is that it makes you less intelligent or capable.
“Dyslexics are just as smart as other people,” he said. “They just learn in different ways.”
The first step to helping them learn is screening them in kindergarten or first grade.
“The goal is to find risk factors early,” said Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, a speech-language pathologist and a professor at the University of Houston. “When you find them, the data you collect can really inform instruction.”
Cárdenas-Hagan’s home state of Texas passed a law in 1995 requiring universal screening. But she said it took several more years for teachers to be trained to use the tool. Her word of caution to California: Make sure teachers are not only comfortable with the tool but know how to use the results of the assessment to shape the way they teach individual students.
A homegrown screener
UC San Francisco’s screener, called Multitudes, will be available in English, Spanish and Mandarin. It’ll be free for all school districts.
Multitudes won’t be released to all districts at once. UCSF scientists launched a pilot at a dozen school districts last year, and they plan to expand to more districts this fall.
But experts and advocates say there’s no need to wait for it to mandate universal screenings. Educators can use a variety of already available screening tools in California, like they do in 40 other states. Texas and other states that have high percentages of English learners have Spanish screeners for dyslexia.
For English learners, the need for screening is especially urgent. Maria Ortiz is a Los Angeles parent of a dyslexic teenager who was also an English learner. She said she had to sue the Los Angeles Unified School District twice: once in 2016 to get extra help for her dyslexic daughter when she was in fourth grade and again in 2018 when those services were taken away. Ortiz said the district stopped giving her daughter additional help because her reading started improving.
“In the beginning they told me that my daughter was exaggerating,” Ortiz said.
“They said everything would be normal later.”
California currently serves about 1.1 million English learners, just under a fifth of all public school students. For English learners, dyslexia can be confused with a lack of English proficiency. Opponents of universal screening, including the teachers association, argue that English learners will be misidentified as dyslexic simply because they can’t understand the language.
“Even the specialists were afraid that the problem might be because of the language barrier,” Ortiz said about her daughter’s case.
But experts say dyslexia presents a double threat to English learners: It stalls them from reading in their native language and impedes their ability to learn English. And while there are some Spanish-language screeners, experts from Texas and California say there’s room for improvement. Current Spanish screeners penalize students who mix Spanish and English, they say.
Duran, who helped develop the Spanish version of Multitudes, said the new screener will be a better fit for how young bilingual students actually talk.
“Spanglish becomes its own communication that’s just as legitimate as Spanish on its own or English on its own,” Duran said. “It’s about the totality of languages a child might bring.”
Providing Multitudes free of cost is important to schools with large numbers of low-income students. Dyslexia screeners cost about $10 per student, so $30 million might actually be cost-effective considering California currently serves 1.3 million students in kindergarten through second grade. The tool could pay for itself in a few years. Although there are plenty of screeners already available, they can stretch the budgets of high-poverty schools and districts.
“The least funded schools can’t access them because of the cost,” Duran said.
In addition to the governor, another powerful state lawmaker, Glendale Democratic state Sen. Anthony Portantino, is dyslexic. While chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, authored legislation to require public schools to screen all students between kindergarten and second grade.
Portantino’s 2021 bill received unanimous support in the Senate Education and Appropriations committees, but the bill died in the Assembly Education Committee. Portantino authored the same bill in 2020, but it never made it out of the state Senate.
“We should be leading the nation and not lagging behind,” Portantino said.
Portantino blamed the failure of his most recent bill on former Democratic Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell, who chaired the Assembly Education Committee, for refusing to hear the bill.
“It’s no secret, Patrick O’Donnell was against teacher training,” Portantino said. “He thought our school districts and our educators didn’t have the capacity.”
O’Donnell did not respond to requests for comment. Since O’Donnell didn’t schedule a hearing on the bill, there is no record of him commenting about it at the time.
Portantino plans to author a nearly identical bill this year. He said he’s more hopeful because the Assembly Education Committee is now under the leadership of Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, a Democrat from Torrance. Muratsuchi would not comment on the potential fate of a dyslexia screening bill this year.
Levy now works as a professional advocate for parents of students with disabilities. She said without mandatory dyslexia screening, only parents who can afford to hire someone like her will be able to get the services they need for their children.
“A lot of high school kids are reading below third-grade level,” she said. “To me, that’s just heartbreaking.”
This was originally published on CalMatters.
Gerald Kowalczyk tried to buy a hamburger with credit cards he found on the floor. Then, while presumed innocent, he spent months in a California jail — not because a judge determined he was dangerous, not because he threatened anyone, but because the court set bail at $75,000 for a man who couldn’t afford it, then simply denied bail altogether, in defiance of the law. Last week, the California Supreme Court unanimously said no more. The court held that pretrial liberty is the norm; incarceration before conviction for any crime is the rare, carefully limited exception. If courts choose to condition freedom on a monetary payment it “must” be “an amount that is reasonable.”
For years, California courts ran an unconstitutional shadow detention system. The mechanics were straightforward: Set bail at an amount the defendant cannot pay and the result is the same as ordering detention outright. As the court explained in its Kowalczyk ruling, pretrial detention requires strong evidence of a serious charge and “clear and convincing evidence establishing a substantial likelihood that the defendant’s release would result in great bodily harm to others.” Instead, as Justice Joshua P. Groban explains in concurrence, courts have used money bail to detain poor people accused of nonviolent offenses with “devastating repercussions for their employment, education, housing, access to public benefits, immigration status, and family stability.”
This wasn’t a bug. It was the system.
Last week’s ruling closes that loophole — unambiguously and unanimously. Courts can no longer use unaffordable bail as a backdoor detention order. Where detention isn’t authorized, bail must be set at an attainable amount, based on the defendant’s actual circumstances. The ruling builds directly on the Humphrey precedent from 2021, a California Supreme Court decision that first held wealth-based detention unconstitutional and a case I helped bring.
I know how hard these victories are to win. I also know how easily they can be ignored.
Even after Humphrey was decided, across Santa Clara, San Mateo and Alameda counties, judges asked about a defendant’s financial circumstances exactly once out of nearly 250 observed cases. In more than 95% of hearings, judges cited no legal standard at all when ordering detention. More than 90% of people jailed pretrial were charged with offenses that didn’t even qualify for detention under the California Constitution: shoplifting, driving without a license, vandalism. These findings came from Silicon Valley De-Bug, a community organization whose members spent years watching what happens in arraignment courtrooms.
The system didn’t follow the rules set out in Humphrey. We must ensure the system makes good on the unanimous ruling in Kowalczyk.
Start with public defense. California is one of just two states that contributes no funding to trial-level public defense, leaving the 58 counties with no state standards or oversight. The result is a patchwork of wildly unequal and inadequate representation. Last week’s ruling requires courts to make individualized findings about flight risk, public safety, alternative release conditions and ability to pay — which means defense attorneys must be present at or before arraignment, prepared to make ability-to-pay arguments, demand findings and challenge unaffordable bail on the record. In counties where public defenders carry caseloads of 100 or more, that is not happening. It cannot happen without resources.
Then there is the question of alternatives. The ruling requires judges to consider conditions of release — drug treatment, check-ins, social services referrals, in serious cases ankle monitoring — before resorting to money bail or detention. But these options exist only where counties have invested in pretrial services outside of law enforcement, programs such as San Francisco’s Pretrial Diversion Project. Most haven’t. A constitutional right to alternatives is hollow without alternatives for judges to choose from.
Finally, the Judicial Council, which makes policy for California courts, should establish monitoring standards, reporting requirements and training protocols that ensure courts no longer impose unnecessary or unconstitutional pretrial incarceration.
Kenneth Humphrey spent 250 days in jail for $5 and a bottle of cologne. Gerald Kowalczyk spent months inside for a hamburger. Behind each of them are tens of thousands of Californians who spent similar time behind bars unjustly, who lost jobs and homes and custody of their children, because the system treated their poverty as grounds for imprisonment.
The Supreme Court has now said clearly what our Constitution has since 1849: Pretrial liberty is the norm. Pretrial detention is the carefully limited exception. There is a good reason for the presumption of innocence: 1 in 3 California arrests does not lead to any conviction, and upending people’s lives by jailing them pretrial is so destabilizing it actually increases future crime.
Let’s ensure this presumption of innocence means something in practice if you, or your loved one, need it.
Chesa Boudin is the former district attorney of San Francisco and the executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at UC Berkeley School of Law.
Twenty-nine people were busted with fake IDs inside a sushi restaurant on California’s Central Coast on April 23, according to the San Luis Obispo Police Department.
Undercover agents with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control busted the underage drinkers at HaHa Sushi and Ramen on the 1000 block of Olive Street. Inside the restaurant, agents saw “a large group of youthful-appearing individuals” ordering and drinking alcohol, the San Luis Obispo Police Department said.
“In accordance with state law, agents contacted and identified the members of the group, discovering no one was 21 years old and every person was in possession of a fake identification card,” police said.
During the investigation, 29 people were cited and released for possession of a fake ID. Six of these suspects were arrested for being minors in possession of alcohol. All of the suspects were cited and released from custody at the restaurant.
“Preventing the sale of alcoholic beverages to minors helps increase public safety by reducing DUI arrests and collisions,” the San Luis Obispo Police Department said. “Statistics have shown that young people under the age of 21 have a much higher risk of being involved in a collision than older drivers. About 25% of fatal crashes involve underage drinking, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.”
California
California junior college athletes speak out on trans controversy that’s now in the Trump admin’s crosshairs
Santa Rosa Junior College was just supposed to be a stepping stone for Madison Shaw. Instead, she stepped right into a transgender athlete scandal that is now being investigated by the federal government.
With her graduation coming up, she has to move forward without being able to chase her dream of playing NCAA volleyball, which was the whole reason she went to Santa Rosa in the first place.
“It was the only plan I had,” Shaw told Fox News Digital of transferring to an NCAA program.
“I was planning on going to Chico [State University] and transferring, and getting set up through the recruiting process in that. And I wasn’t even able to upload any film or have a coach come out for my sophomore year. Because that year I was forced to be off the team.”
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Shaw had to step away from her volleyball team in the fall because she didn’t want to share a locker room with a biological male, and felt her Title IX rights to privacy, safety and equal opportunity were being violated. She had to throw away her plans for her sophomore season, and any chance of making it to an NCAA program.
Because Santa Rosa, as a junior college and not affiliated with the NCAA, and did not have to comply with the NCAA’s updated policy to prevent biological males from competing in women’s sports, Madison and her teammates ended up on the same roster as a trans athlete.
The California Community College Athletic Association (CCCAA) allows transgender athletes to participate based on their gender identity. Biological males can compete on women’s teams after one calendar year of testosterone suppression treatment.
Santa Rosa and the CCCAA as a whole have been under Title IX investigations by the U.S. Department of Education, and the federal Title IX task force, since January, after Madison and two teammates sent an S.O.S.
SANTA ROSA WOMEN’S VOLLEYBALL PLAYERS OPEN UP ON TRANS TEAMMATE’S ALLEGED SPIKES TO THE HEAD
Madison, and her freshman teammates Brielle Galli and Gracie Shaw, Madison’s sister, filed a Title IX complaint last September that brought attention to what was going on with their team.
Once the complaint became public, and garnered national media attention, multiple tense on-campus incidents allegedly occurred.
The three women allege Santa Rosa President Dr. Angélica Garcia led a pro-trans rally before a volleyball game, handed out packets to attendees.
“The president of our school had a rally to support our male athlete and had packets that were being hand handed out that said that our school is a gender inclusive closet,” Gracie Shaw alleged, with Madison Shaw and Galli corroborating the allegations.
INSIDE GAVIN NEWSOM’S TRANSGENDER VOLLEYBALL CRISIS
Santa Rosa Junior College students Gracie Shaw, Brielle Galli and Madison Shaw (Fox News)
Teammates who had once been friends began distancing themselves, and in some cases, they said, actively excluded them.
“We were completely ostracized,” Gracie Shaw said. “We were left in the dark.”
They said teammates created separate group chats without them and held meetings they were not invited to, effectively cutting off communication.
The players said they received backlash on social media and, at times, felt uncomfortable on campus. In one instance, they recalled being recorded and photographed by other students after being recognized in connection with the complaint.
The incident occurred when two other students set up a table with a sign that read “We are Christians, ask us anything.”
The women claim that the two men at the table were being told by other students that they were “hateful people.”
And soon, the anti-Christian crowd realized who the three women were, and two other students allegedly began to record Gracie Shaw and Galli, non-consensually.
The women say the only time the college and its administrators expressed concern for their well-being was in an investigative interview after news of their Title IX complaint had gone public.
“Those interviews really rubbed me the wrong way,” Galli said.
“They kept pushing the same questions on us trying to get a different answer and trying to make us say something that wasn’t true. They kept stating that or they wanted us to state that it was our choice when really we were left with no choice with the way that we were made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe…
“They kept in bringing up the fact that there are so many resources available to us, so many counseling options and just so many resources that are just the school will provide for us. And that was a little ridiculous to me because throughout the whole season when we were participating, we had made it clear to our coach that we didn’t feel safe coming to the games.”
Santa Rosa Junior College provided a statement to Fox News Digital responding to the three women’s statements.
“Santa Rosa Junior College is committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive environment for all students and employees. The District complies with California Community College Athletic Association regulations, which govern student eligibility and participation in our athletic programs,” the statement said.
“We respect the legal privacy rights of all students and cannot discuss individual circumstances. What we can affirm is that SRJC takes all reports seriously and responds through established procedures.”
But there were some moments when the women felt they were being supported, not by administrators, but male athletes at a competing school.
When Santa Rosa Junior College faced Sierra College in Rocklin, California, weeks after the complaint was filed, a “save women’s sports” protest broke out outside of the gym.
One of the protesters, local women’s sports activist Beth Bourne, handed out protest signs to students who attended the game and said it was the first time she’d seen college students protest the issue in person.
Sierra’s men’s athletes even joined in on the protesting.
California college students protest the participation of a transgender volleyball player at a women’s game. (Beth Bourne)
“There were men that were college students… that were holding those signs in support of us. Even though they probably didn’t know who we were. They knew that this was something that, that they could, even if it’s a small thing, just like just holding a sign up, they knew that it would make an impact,” Galli said.
It was a rare bright moment in an otherwise grueling school year. But now the summer is coming.
The women can at least move forward knowing their activism caught the attention of the federal government, as the Title IX investigations into the college and the entire CCCAA press on.
And as the three women look to regroup and determine the next step in their education, they each expressed gratitude for President Donald Trump’s administration for having their backs.
But they’re still dealing with the irreversible effects on their futures, and are now navigating life after missing a chance at their NCAA dreams.
Madison Shaw said she is currently working three jobs as she tries to save up for tuition.
“Coming from a very athletic family, we all played sports,” she said. “For them to see this opportunity taken away was very hard on them, knowing that I wasn’t going to get the same opportunities they had when they played sports. And even just financially, this was a way for me to move on past the JC, so it was hard for them to watch.”
Galli found herself in the same situation.
“I saw it as my opportunity to pursue [NCAA sports],” Galli said of her decision to play at Santa Rosa. “I wanted to reach out and try to get recruited, and like Madison said, we didn’t really get the opportunity to play so we didn’t have any film that we could send to the coaches.”
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Gracie Shaw did not step away from the team right away, and continued practicing, but wouldn’t play in games as a form of protest. But eventually she just couldn’t take it anymore. she stepped away from the team as the situation progressed, and more national attention befell the team.
“I always wanted to get recruited and play at the next level, that was the plan,” Gracie Shaw said.
Madison Shaw continues to work her jobs and explore opportunities outside of playing sports, while Galli and Gracie Shaw are currently set to do another year of junior college.
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