'Invisible' disability now visible on campus
BACK TO SCHOOL / One in a series
Sunday, September 05, 2004
By Bill Schackner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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Days after enrolling as a college freshman, David Carson had to admit to a stranger that he couldn't spell the name of the school he was attending.

An employee watching him struggle to write out a check couldn't believe he needed her help to spell "Indiana," "University" and "Pennsylvania."

"Just write IUP!" she snapped, flashing a look so cutting he remembers it to this day.

"I felt very small," says Carson, who took to carrying a prepared list of the spellings he'd need to survive each day. "I thought I was dumb."

Turns out he had a learning disability affecting his spelling, one that drove him from IUP and two other schools but one he overcame in time to graduate from La Roche College in 1992 with a near-perfect grade average of 3.91. Now a college recruiter who speaks to those with similar disabilities, Carson is watching as this latest group of once-excluded students becomes increasingly visible on America's college campuses.

He knows their growing ranks mean more will ultimately succeed. But he also knows many will struggle with self-doubt and embarrassment as he once did, or simply give up.

About one in 25 college students is learning disabled, up sharply from the 1980s, as more students who have been diagnosed with such disorders set their sights beyond high school, according to a June report by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Higher Education Policy. The most common among this group of disabilities is dyslexia, a difficulty acquiring and using language that often translates into poor spelling,
writing or reading.

Nationwide, students with learning disabilities are the fastest-growing segment of all disabled students in college and are part of what some say is the newest wave of campus diversity. Just as laws brought more
working-class students, racial minorities and women onto campuses, disabled students are gaining access they were once denied.

But unlike other disabilities, those that involve learning are "invisible," experts say. Some argue that, once on campus, the biggest obstacle these students face is skepticism as to whether they are using
special classroom accommodations as a crutch or, worse, want to game the system.

"It's not like someone who is in a wheelchair or is blind where you are immediately aware of the disability," said Thomas Wolanin, a higher education policy expert and co-author of the Institute's report. "There is this kind of extra burden of proof or extra suspicion that greets students with learning disabilities."

Is it fair that someone with normal intelligence but an impaired ability to write sentences gets permission to deliver essays orally instead of on paper? Are professors obliged to adjust their teaching style because one student processes information differently from the rest of the class?

"That's the debate. Are we giving them an advantage or are we just leveling the playing field?" said Eileen Henry, who works with learning disabled students at Muskingum College, a small Ohio campus known
nationally for its work in the field. "I happen to believe we are leveling the playing field and I'm still not sure the Americans with Disabilities Act actually does that.

"I have heard other teachers say things like, 'I'm not going to change my teaching style just for them. They have to adapt to what I do.' "

Judging by sheer volume of programs, colleges and universities are doing more than ever to accommodate -- and in some cases actively recruit -- these students. A 500-page guidebook published by
Thomson-Peterson's profiles 1,100 campuses that offer help, ranging from tutors to special software to substituting a class most at odds with a disability.

"I see more and more campuses making a serious commitment," said Lydia Block, an educational consultant in Columbus, Ohio.

But others argue that even as these programs proliferate, the quality of help varies widely. And what limited information exists on the subject indicates these students are significantly more likely to drop
out.

Forty-six percent of them did compared with 33 percent of students without a disability, according to one study by the U.S. Department of Education.

"These kids tend to go from college to college," insists Trea Graham of Mt. Lebanon, an advocate, consultant and mother of a learning disabled son. "They almost always go to more than one school because they aren't successful."

Under law, certain classroom accommodations are available, including extra time to take tests, books on tape and help with note-taking, but only if a student with a documented disability identifies himself as
such and seeks help.

Many do so and benefit from it.

Graham's son, David, is one of them. He earned a chemistry degree last year from Muskingum, where students pay up to $4,850 a year extra for specialized tutoring and other assistance.

Graham, 23, who was diagnosed in junior high school with a written expression disorder, struggles to translate thoughts into written sentences. When he tried, he said, "I would make six sentences into one
incredibly long sentence" without punctuation.

Getting permission to take essay exams on a computer rather than in his own handwriting "allowed me to go back and put in the punctuation and divide up the sentences," Graham said.

Also helpful was the extra time he received to finish exams and the option of taking them away from class in a room with less noise and distraction.

Encouragement from professors and others buoyed him, too. It was different from what he remembered about high school, where he said getting classroom accommodations sometimes meant being treated "like you were a pain ... or you were retarded."

At Muskingum, said Graham, "They were used to dealing with stuff like this. It wasn't a big deal."

The problem, say some advocates, is that such experiences are far from universal.

Ian Swayne, 20, of Franklin Park, was so turned off by his early college experiences he wants to enroll this winter at Vermont's Landmark College, a school that charges up to $43,000 but is renowned for working
exclusively with attention disorders and learning disabilities like the dyslexia Swayne was diagnosed with in 10th grade.

Swayne said he didn't appreciate being berated by one instructor for copying a term off a classmate's worksheet. It didn't make sense to search the textbook for the term, he contends, because his disability
makes it impossible to scan pages of text at any reasonable speed.

But the instructor wasn't buying his explanation.

"Her thing was, she thought I was cheating," he said. "She patronized me by saying her 6-year-old was able to look stuff up."

Sometimes, say campus administrators, the real problem is a student's own reluctance to seek help. Intent on escaping labels placed on them in high school, some will shun the very assistance that can be the difference between thriving and flunking out.

"It's not unusual for me to talk to a freshman who says, 'I don't want the accommodation. I want to do it on my own. I want to be like everyone else,' " said Larry Powell, who works with learning disabled students at Carnegie Mellon University.

Knowing they are flirting with disaster, especially on a campus with such a punishing workload, Powell gives the same advice over and over. "It's best to arm yourself," he tells them. "Take the accommodation."

At Carnegie Mellon, where there are about 125 learning disabled students, Powell said professors are respectful. But sometimes a parent's ultimate opinion of his operation comes down to simply how well
the child did.

And often, that depends on how well the family or the high school prepared that student for a world where they suddenly are responsible under the law to secure whatever special assistance they require.

"I've had students who come in here and can't tell me what their diagnosis is," said Muskingum's Henry.

"When I ask them how they think it influences their life, they look to their parents to answer the question. They haven't even thought of it."

In speeches he gives to college-bound students with learning disabilities, Carson, of Upper St. Clair, emphasizes the need to be one's own advocate. He has self-published a 100-page survival guide for
them that borrows heavily from his own tortuous diploma hunt, which stretched from 1975 to 1992.

Articulate in conversation, he uses complex thoughts that flow easily from one to the next. But not so on paper. His written expression disability reduces those ideas to brief, halting sentences that seem
almost childlike.

"Everybody says to me, just write the way you talk. But it doesn't work like that," said Carson, 47, now an Allied Health recruiter at the Community College of Allegheny County. "I wish that it did."

But in a point he makes over and over to students, Carson has come to believe those words and sentences don't reflect the ideas behind them.

"I can't spell at all, I read very slowly, I write like a fifth-grader and I am very smart," he says in a typical opening to audiences. "And so are you."

(Bill Schackner can be reached at bschackner@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1977.)