Science of Reading: The Podcast

Spring Special '26: Fighting for people with dyslexia, with Teresa May, Ph.D.

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan is joined by executive director of the Margaret Byrd Rawson Institute, Teresa May, Ph.D. Teresa shares her powerful story, from being a student with dyslexia to fighting systemic barriers in education. Teresa and Susan also discuss Teresa's legal advocacy for her sons' right to appropriate dyslexia education; the legacy of Margaret Byrd Rawson, a groundbreaking activist who dedicated her life to helping students with dyslexia success; and the importance of early intervention and understanding each child's unique learning needs.

Show notes:

Quotes:

"There's no time to waste. A child only gets one childhood." —Teresa May

"You teach this complex language as it is to the child, as he or she is. If you do that, you don't leave anyone behind." —Teresa May

"There is a science and an approach that we can take to help kids learn how to read." —Teresa May

"[People] remember the kindness of a teacher or the meanness, but they don't remember the explicit way they learned [to read]." —Teresa May

Timestamps*:
00:00 Introduction: Fighting for learners with dyslexia, with Teresa May
04:00 Teresa's childhood struggles with dyslexia
07:00 The moment of discovery: Finding Margaret Byrd Rawson
09:00 Meeting Margaret: "There is a key, but not many people hold that key"
14:00 The legal battle begins—fighting for her sons' education
19:00 Taking the case through courts and starting parent advocacy
22:00 Margaret Byrd Rawson as an educational pioneer
27:00 Margaret's biological background and the start of her longitudinal research in the 1930s
30:00 The 55-year study following 56 boys: groundbreaking research without technology
33:00 The human impact of good teaching
39:00 The Margaret Byrd Rawson Institute's mission and current projects
44:00 The complexity of dyslexia remediation
45:00 Final thoughts on advocating for children with dyslexia
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

[00:00:00] Teresa May: I went to her house, Margaret was in her nineties, and I knew something very special was happening, but I didn't know what. And she said, "There is a key, but not many people hold that key."

[00:00:17] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. We've wrapped up our Comprehension season, and today I'm excited to bring you something that's a little different from our typical episodes. 

Today's guest, Dr. Teresa May, is a sociologist by training. And on this episode, Dr. May brings the lens of a social scientist to explore some of the past and present of dyslexia research. As you'll soon hear, Dr. May became heavily involved in the literacy world. She was mentored by the dyslexia pioneer, Margaret Byrd Rawson, whose longitudinal research dates back to the 1930s, and Dr. May is now the executive director of the Margaret Byrd Rawson Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring every child has access to proper language education, and she has fought for equity and education from local schools to the steps of the US Supreme Court. I hope you enjoy this unique edition of Science of Reading: The Podcast.

Dr. Teresa May, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode. 

[00:01:32] Teresa May: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being a part of this really special podcast that you have. 

[00:01:39] Susan Lambert: Oh, thank you so much. Well, we are going to talk to you about a very special and important topic of dyslexia. You are currently the executive director of the Margaret Byrd Rawson Institute.

But I would love if you could share with our listeners just a little bit about your story and your background. 

[00:01:58] Teresa May: I would love to, and thank you for this opportunity. I come to this as a trained sociologist who taught for many years in higher education, undergraduate, graduate-level courses. I'm dyslexic myself, the mother of two dyslexic sons, and I went through various legal battles all the way up to the Supreme Court, headed a school for dyslexic students, and I was blessed to be mentored by Margaret Byrd Rawson. I've spent a lifetime now in this arena and I'm very happy to share. 

I'll start with, I grew up in Falls Church, Virginia, in Fairfax County, and my first memory that I have. I wasn't aware at the time that dyslexia ran through the family.

I wasn't even aware of that word, dyslexia, and trust me, to a dyslexic, that is the most bizarre-looking unspeakable word. 

[00:03:00] Susan Lambert: Oh my God, I never thought about that. 

[00:03:02] Teresa May: Oh, trust me. Yeah. Anyone who's dyslexic is grinning because they know that is not a word to easily be read or spelled by any stretch. But my first memory was in elementary school, I was in the second grade, but I had to walk down the hall to the first grade to go back down into the reading group in the first grade. And my mother was speaking to the principal who had a rule that you had to spell the name of the school, Belvedere. So to a dyslexic in the second grade, to spell Belvedere was like a near-death experience.

And she, my mother was asking her what was going on and she said she needs to be taught phonics. She whispered, "Phonics." And I remember that. It was weird to me. And she told my mother that she could order these little records that practiced the phonics sounds and principles, I guess. My mother ordered the records, handed me in the second grade this box of records, and I proceeded to only listen to one record and never listen to it again, because I didn't know what to do with them.

But what I came to find out was that in Fairfax County, phonics had been removed from the form of teaching reading. It had gone to a very whole language method at that time, in the early sixties, and I used what they called SRA readers. It was a total whole language program. But the bottom line is, I had that memory. I never knew what it was. Filed it away, couldn't spell. Went on to get my PhD. Cracked the reading code.

But that stuck with me and it became something I understood later when I had two boys. I was teaching at Hood College and they were in the public system, and my husband, it turns out, of course, that he was dyslexic. He didn't realize that until I found his report cards that his mother had given me, and it showed that he really struggled with reading and he could never spell. He was a land surveyor. 

But one day I was volunteering at the public school and my oldest son was in the second grade, and I had these little word cards, with words like and, the, a, was, and the teacher had me hold the cards up and send out students to read those cards. They were reading the cards fine, until my son came up and he couldn't read any of the cards. I thought he was joking with me. I thought he was trying to be difficult with me, but it turns out he was really struggling and I didn't know what to do, because the teacher said to me, "It'll just kick in in December," 'cause this was early. "It'll just kick in. Just wait." Right? 

At the time I was teaching a course on aging, at Hood. It was a graduate course, and I had read an article about a woman, Margaret Byrd Rawson, in the Washington Post. They were doing a review of her book on the lifespan of dyslexia. At the time that I read that Washington Post article, and it said she had been a sociologist at Hood College like I was, I thought, oh, I need to find her and invite her to speak to my class on aging.

[00:06:33] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:06:33] Teresa May: So I was driving my youngest son to preschool, and I got this, it's a mother's intuition or inner voice, that said to look for the woman in that Washington Post article. I didn't even remember her name, and I could not pronounce dyslexia that I read in the paper. Honestly. It was just one of those things.

So I went into this preschool and said to the woman in charge, her name was Pat, "Do you remember that article in the Washington Post about some woman who taught at Hood College and something with reading," and she goes, "Oh, Margaret Rawson. She was my teacher at Hood College when I was at Hood College." So she looked her up. We looked her up in the phone book. 

[00:07:17] Susan Lambert: The good old days. 

[00:07:18] Teresa May: Honestly. So we get Margaret on the phone. Her book had just come out. She said, "Well, if you come over here right now, I can speak with you about this work that I do." And I drove to her house just a couple miles away from where I lived, and that was like walking into a whole new world for me. 

Anyone who knew Margaret, her home was called Fox's Spy. It was an ancient little house that was built in the late 1700s. I mean, it was this... 

[00:07:52] Susan Lambert: Wow.

[00:07:52] Teresa May: Like walking back in time, into this little stucco home that was over a spring, and, walking in and Margaret was in her nineties. I knew something very special was happening, but I didn't know what. I didn't know she was the matriarch to the International Dyslexia Association. 

I remember very well. She said, "There is a key, but not many people hold that key. And I want you to go..." At the time she said for me to go and there was a school in Baltimore that she helped found. It was called Jemicy School, and she wanted me to go there and to see what real teaching for dyslexic students looked like.

And she said, "The way through the door is going to be phonetics, phonics." And it's interesting, 'cause my response to her was, "We don't hear those sounds in my family." It's hysterical to think about because that's like the phonemic awareness test, without having the phonemic awareness test. We just don't hear those sounds in my family. 

I knew she was right about a key. I knew she knew something. 

[00:09:09] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:09:10] Teresa May: But I didn't know what. Now she was a sociologist too at Hood College, so we had, and she had two boys like I, so we bonded, we really, and she took me under her wing and became my mentor and my dearest friend, and took me up a huge learning curve.

An amazing journey that changed the course and direction of my life, totally, and helped my boys. They made it through because she taught me what to look for. And I think that's the key. 

[00:09:42] Susan Lambert: Taking a step back all the way to when you were young, learning how to read, do you recall how you learned to crack the code?

[00:09:51] Teresa May: See that is a great, that is a great question because the answer is no. So if you ask most people, they don't remember. 

[00:10:01] Susan Lambert: That's true. 

[00:10:01] Teresa May: It's an invisible shield of experience of how we learn to read. What I remember is things like that conversation in the hallway. And I remember weird things, like, I would say the word key chain, and I would say chicane. I would flip it around. I remember I could never remember how to spell their, T-H-E-R-E or T-H-E-I-R, all the way up through graduate school. It was a very weird thing. I thought, what is that? I didn't want to even talk about it. There were certain things my brain just could not do, but I definitely did not remember that.

I just remember the embarrassment of not spelling. 

[00:10:47] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That makes sense. And so you never got explicit instruction then in the code? 

[00:10:53] Teresa May: Never. Absolutely never. 

[00:10:56] Susan Lambert: What happened to the records? I want to know what happened to the records. 

[00:11:01] Teresa May: And this is... We are trying to collect literacy stories, memories of people for how they remember how they were taught reading, and they really don't remember. They remember the kindness of a teacher or the meanness, but they don't remember the explicit way they learned. 

[00:11:19] Susan Lambert: Hmm. So then were you able to get... I mean, first of all, this sounds like every parent of a dyslexic child or somebody that's dyslexic themselves. It's like a classic story.

[00:11:33] Teresa May: Oh, classic. 

[00:11:34] Susan Lambert: Like my son. It was, "Oh, he's going to be fine. He'll outgrow it. It'll all catch up." Oh, whatever. Anyway. So frustrating. 

[00:11:43] Teresa May: It's so frustrating. It really is, because then you're driving on your intuition. That inner voice speaks you to that something's wrong here. Like, this is not going, this is not going well.

Because you know, your child is smart and capable. My mother was Armenian and she was raised in Rhode Island in a very ethnic community. They were all poor, but they were all learning to read and write. And why were they learning to read and write? Because the way they were being taught worked.

So my mother would always say to me, "Break it down in syllables." And I'm like, "What is a syllable?" I didn't know what she was talking about. So she had access to the code, even though she was poor in a family where no one spoke English. Her library card was her best friend. She would hang out in the library. She cracked the code. She could spell, but here she had a daughter who couldn't do that, but she didn't know that the teaching methods had changed. 

[00:12:47] Susan Lambert: Right, right, right, right. 

[00:12:48] Teresa May: She was unaware of what she was in the middle of, just like I was unaware of what I was in the middle of, where they're saying like, what they said to you, "It just kicks in. Don't worry." And I knew something was wrong. But I didn't know what it was. 

[00:13:03] Susan Lambert: We're going to dig in a little bit more into Margaret Rawson and how she became this matriarch to the International Dyslexia Association. I love how you use that, but I wonder if you could, I mean, you just sort of dropped the comment that you went all the way to the Supreme Court to fight for your boys.

[00:13:22] Teresa May: True. 

[00:13:24] Susan Lambert: I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that. That's kind of a big thing. 

[00:13:30] Teresa May: Yeah, it's been a long journey and thank you for circling back to that, because what happened was, in that initial meeting with Margaret, what she basically showed me was, "There's a way that your child needs to be taught."

I didn't know that. It gave me some language, some language to ask for this. So, Margaret had helped shape something called the Dyslexia Project in Frederick County Public Schools. It started in the second grade, and these were dyslexic children who had a form of Alpha-Phonics. It was a program that was set up, and there's a lot to this story, but they watered down the program, essentially.

It was a public school trying to do the best they could, but they watered this down. So it's like giving my children a piece of the antibiotic rather than the full dose of the antibiotic, and it wasn't working. 

[00:14:33] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:14:34] Teresa May: And I also ended up tutoring at that Jemicy School in the summer, which was one of the hardest jobs I ever had because I didn't know the structure, but I had to learn it to teach it. It helped me know what to look for. So when I woke up and I'm looking around, I could see that my children couldn't learn in the public system, and they were being passed along. And think of this. You had to fail to get help. You had to wait till the second grade to get help. 

[00:15:05] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Wow. 

[00:15:05] Teresa May: Right? There's so many elements to this that we ended up going to court to ask the school system to place my sons, because this had gone on now for a couple years and my son was in the fourth grade, totally unable to read, and his brother was following in his footsteps, unable to read.

And we ended up going to the administrative court level, the first level, and losing the whole way. We lost in the courts, and get this, the judge ruled that because the teachers spent more time with my boys, they knew more than the experts. Now that'd be like saying to me, "If a parent spends more time with their son and they don't think they need to have their appendix removed, and a doctor who's an expert says, 'Remove it,' you go with the parent who spends more time with the..." I mean, it was this insane situation.

So we went to the administrative court and then we appealed. We went to the US District Court of Appeals. I had a very kind, wonderful attorney, Michael Ike. He took it to the next level and we ended up with a judge, and you cannot make this stuff up. You just couldn't. This judge had a big case with Baltimore City Public Schools where children had been denied their special ed hours. They had not received the hours they were supposed to get, so this judge had offered to the parents appliances, washing machines, dryers, stoves, to make up lost special education hours.

[00:16:50] Susan Lambert: Oh my goodness. 

[00:16:50] Teresa May: This is the judge we had for our case. And I was like, what? So, anyway, we ended up going and appealing. Took it to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, because the US District Court referred to the court below. That's the language they use. Okay. So then we went up to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and they referred to the court below, and then we appealed that and we got nowhere.

And then I ended up writing... You know, there's papers that prisoners use. You fill it out for pro se, where you're taking it yourself. And so I filled that out and I found an attorney to help at the Fourth Circuit Court level. But for the Supreme Court, I wrote a pro se. Then the court did not take the case, even though Shannon Carter was a case ruled about schools having to provide adequate education for dyslexic.

That Shannon Carter case, I went to see the attorney who had taken that forward in one. The school systems couldn't provide it. They didn't have it to offer, but we took it all the way up to the Supreme Court, all these things, and this cost, you know, like, over a hundred thousand dollars in attorney fees. My children needed help. I mean, it was this huge life experience.

So, what happened was a Baltimore Sun reporter saw this case somehow and contacted me, and they did a story. It ended up on the front page of the Baltimore Sun about a parent advocating for her children and I had hundreds of parents calling me.

[00:18:34] Susan Lambert: Oh my goodness.

[00:18:35] Teresa May: From all over the state, and it would always go the same. "I think there's something wrong. They're telling me everything's fine. I don't think it's fine." And we started a parent advocacy group called PAGER, Parent Advocacy Group for Educational Rights, and we stomped around the state. 

We went to hundreds, hundreds, if not thousands, I don't know, just endless IEP meetings for free, for parents, to be a presence and listen to the repeated stories. I tried to bring reporters into IEP meetings. We even brought a TV crew. They wouldn't let anyone in, of course, because we wanted it exposed, what was going on. 

[00:19:17] Susan Lambert: Yeah. When was this? 

[00:19:18] Teresa May: 30 years ago. This is a long time ago. And I still go to IEP meetings to this day, and I know it'd be hard to hear, but in some ways things are worse than ever. It's heartbreaking what's happening and unless you get in these schools and really see this going on... It's heartbreaking for the teachers who mean well but don't have the tools. It's heartbreaking for the parents and the children.

So the reason, thank you for asking, because it's one thing to know the Science of Reading. There is a science behind this. Margaret showed me that a lot of this knowledge has been around for decades, a long time. 

[00:20:06] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:20:07] Teresa May: But unless you're the parent of a child suffering and you see that you're losing your child in a system that isn't set up for them, and you don't know what to do, it is the most heartbreaking, scary thing that you can go through. 

So that's what happened. Yeah, we took it all the way up. We had this advocacy group. They used to say, if we showed up to an IEP meeting, they had to have someone from central office be there because we just knew the questions to ask and to look for, but we weren't trying... It was done with love, but we were trying to change the system. 

[00:20:51] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:20:51] Teresa May: And we realized that this painful experience isn't, it's not set up to remediate the dyslexic learner. And that's where I had to really learn with Margaret where those systemic barriers are, because they're there, and they can be reformed. 

[00:21:09] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And even making that shift to starting to think about not waiting for kids to fail, but what's the preventative instruction that needs to happen, and we'll probably get into that in a few minutes. 

But I do want to hear a little bit about Margaret Rawson, because I suspect that many of our listeners don't know who she was and her work. It was new to me, so, really amazing, and how long she had been doing this work. So, maybe you can just give us a little bit about her history and her work, including the longitudinal research that she's done. 

[00:21:50] Teresa May: Yes, absolutely. Because what's so important is that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, giants, the educational pioneers that existed, like Margaret, like Anna Gillingham and the neurologist, Samuel Orton. These pioneers in the early 1900s, when you had a system that was requiring students now to go to into public education. I mean, that's new in human history.

It's new in human history that you want everyone to learn to read, and, because we didn't understand history, we thought reading and writing was as natural as speaking. It's not. We're not neurologically wired for reading and writing the way we are for speaking. You can even look back at letters that soldiers wrote in the Civil War times. Their handwriting and what they were writing was incredible.

And then you look at children today. You can't even compare. And poor immigrant children coming from all over the world learning to crack the code. But why can't we teach children today? Like it becomes an issue. So Margaret is a shoulder that we're standing on that does get forgotten, but not with us.

So thank you so much for allowing us to help share this piece of this very amazing woman, because when she said to me, "There's a key, but not many people hold that key," that was a very, her words were just way over my head in a way. Like, what? What would that key be? And she was talking about a method of teaching reading, this Orton-Gillingham method. She did that before the National Science Reading Panel report even came out in the year 2000. 

[00:23:44] Susan Lambert: Sure. Yeah. 

[00:23:44] Teresa May: Which substantiated what these people had been saying since the 1920s. Hold on one second. My dog is barking. I don't know if you can hear the dog. Can you hear the dog?

[00:23:54] Susan Lambert: A little bit, but it's fine. We love dogs. 

[00:23:56] Teresa May: I'm going to go check one second on that one. All right, so one of the things that Margaret told me early on is that you teach the language as it is to the child, as he or she is. And that kind of just went in one ear, out the other. I didn't know what that meant, but basically it can be interpreted on a kind of superficial fast-pass understanding.

But what she's really saying is you have to teach the entire structure of the English language. You have to teach the structure of the language as it is. Now most of us are not educated on what the structure is from the phonemic awareness, the phonics to morphology, how the word is created, the meanings.

So there is a complex, very evolved understanding of the language as it is, to the child, as he or she is, meaning you'd have to know the emotional, the psychological, the academic abilities, the brain architecture of how that child learns. So you teach this complex language as it is, to the child, as he or she is.

And if you do that, you don't leave anyone behind. You can bring up someone's full life potential. And that's one of the things that Margaret really talked about. So she would explain to me, "There is a science regarding how we learn, and there is an art and a craft to teaching. And those two things have to come together." The craft, the art, with the science. 

And so, she talked about the complexity of the brain, and she was part of the pioneers with the Harvard Brain Bank and the research into brain and "how we learn" was her question and she was open to the nuance, the integration, and the reverence that she held for these disciplines coming together. She was so ahead of her time. 

Someone born in 1899 thinking like this was very unusual. So to give a little, just a quick pass on some of her biographical highlights, now Margaret was born June 30th, 1899, in Rome, Georgia. Now she passed November 25th, 2001, at the age of 102 in Frederick, Maryland.

[00:26:35] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Amazing. 

[00:26:36] Teresa May: It is totally amazing. She had her foot in three centuries. So she was in the first wave of women to vote, and she lived through the first pandemic of those times. 

[00:26:48] Susan Lambert: Right. Right. 

[00:26:49] Teresa May: She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College in 1923, so for a woman to have that. She also went on to earn two master's degrees from University of Pennsylvania, one in social work and one in education and psychology. She founded a school in Rose Valley near Philadelphia, and that is the school where she started her longitudinal study. She wrote a book, Lifespan of Dyslexia [Dyslexia over the Lifespan]. 

[00:27:22] Susan Lambert: What year did she start that study? 

[00:27:24] Teresa May: Oh yeah. She started with the boys in the thirties, but she followed them for 55 years.

[00:27:32] Susan Lambert: So the study started in the thirties from the school that you were just mentioning?

[00:27:36] Teresa May: Yes.

[00:27:37] Susan Lambert: And it was boys? Following just boys? 

[00:27:41] Teresa May: Yeah. There were girls, but she ended up following 56 boys over 55 years. And the thing... To back up about Margaret with the school in Rose Valley, when she was there, she was a volunteer in the library, and the teachers would send the children, often the boys, because they would misbehave in class.

Dyslexic girls tended to be quiet. Right? They tended to comply in that way. But she would get the boys who couldn't read in the library. And there was one boy in particular who was really struggling, and there was a new teacher from New York, and she heard of this neurologist, Samuel Orton. So it was from there that she took it upon herself.

The student went to New York to meet with Samuel Orton. He sent back instructions on how to, what kind of reading instruction he wanted the school to provide. Margaret became the tutor. She was informally trained by Paul Dozier, who was Paula Rome's uncle, and Paul Dozier taught and informed Margaret of these essential elements. She then later met Anna Gillingham and convinced her to give her some of the materials, and then Margaret took it upon herself to go to the libraries, learn all she could, meet all these people, and she came to know the Orton family, Anna Gillingham, and so forth.

But it all started there at the school in Rose Valley, with these particular boys that were essentially the more severe children, but her study followed 56 boys, and she was the first one to make a informal scale. She divided the group into high, medium, and low, kind of like public schools today have Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3.

Those children who are regular learners, readers, those that have some issue and benefit by some additional instruction, and then the more severe children, dyslexic children. And so she followed them in her longitudinal study. What made that study unique is that it was, she's multidisciplinary, and she did it at a time where there wasn't any technology.

[00:30:14] Susan Lambert: Right, right. 

[00:30:14] Teresa May: She's following these kids by writing letters or going to see them. And what emerged from her study essentially was an awareness that no matter what kind of learner you are, from the most highly wired to read to the least wired, you can learn, and you can move forward. 

And she found that over time they all were able to get advanced degrees, even the dyslexic students. And in fact, some of the more severe, with the reading issues over time, were able to compensate because they had a perseverance ability, you know, that they were able to work hard. 

And also, Samuel Orton had talked about a maturational delay, that maybe in place where some individuals, they developed their learning more over time, and that is what Margaret found, that some of these children, their best days weren't at their peak at the end of high school. They kept on going and developing over time, so they just kept getting better over time. And at the time, that was very valuable information to know, that these students weren't handicapped because of their dyslexia. 

[00:31:33] Susan Lambert: Yeah. It just took them more time. 

[00:31:36] Teresa May: Correct. 

[00:31:37] Susan Lambert: What do you think are some of the key lessons or takeaways that are relevant from that research?

[00:31:45] Teresa May: I think one of the things about Margaret's research and her ability to keep track of these students over time is that she was able to use a lens of not only an educator, someone who'd been trained to deliver this, but as a researcher, she was very meticulous and so rigorous in her approach, but she was also from the point of view as a psychologist or a sociologist, she was able to...

It wasn't just collecting data, because behind it, she knew that there was a human being behind each one of these data points. There were lives to be looked at and celebrated. There were challenges that needed different assistance, and what she also concluded basically was that that teacher, that parent, that person in your life, makes a lifelong imprint on your ability to move forward.

It just gives me chills thinking about it, because she knew that when we're touched by the life of a educator who really wants to help us, that changes everything. Margaret had a story about, she had gone to Hawaii, and there was a young boy that she was asked to test, and she did testing, and he was very bright. And he was in a situation where there was no one around to tutor him. There was nobody in that area. 

She was going to be leaving, and essentially she closed the door and told him, "I'm Dr. Rawson, and I want you to know you're very bright, but there's no one around here that's going to be able to teach you. It's not you. It's that they just don't know how. They just don't know the way you need to learn. But I want you to remember me telling you that you're very bright and capable, and you're going to be okay." 

Now, that person went on to have the biggest candy company in Hawaii, and when I met Margaret in her nineties, he was, every year, still sent her candy, in appreciation. And she would say sometimes with these boys in Rose Valley, "If you looked inside their brain, it would say, made by Margaret." That means, when you tutor someone and you put this into somebody, you can speak or help someone's whole future. 

[00:34:31] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:34:32] Teresa May: And I think one of the takeaways too from her book was she would say, "There's no time to waste. A child only gets one childhood." You know? "It's not like we need more research." She wrote this way back when. "We know what to do, so get going and do it because..." That was the takeaway for me on this study. It's that, that there is a door, there is a key, and we are really responsible to help get these children what they need. 

[00:35:08] Susan Lambert: Yeah. You know when we first chatted, and during the pre-call, and you were telling me a little bit about this longitudinal research, that it was way back in the thirties that it started, and you mentioned the book that she wrote, which I had never heard of, I mean, just for those listeners who... 

Teachers still are not adequately trained to help prevent symptoms of dyslexia, to help dyslexic kids get a stronger start, for them to know that this research goes all the way back to the thirties, that there's been years and years and years of research and it's affirming. 

What you said before, there is a science, there is an approach that we can take to help kids learn how to read. And I love that you talk about this as a, it's a key to opening the door. It's a gateway into. Right? 

[00:36:06] Teresa May: Yes.

[00:36:07] Susan Lambert: And it's a narrow gateway and a narrow window of time and how important it is to actually understand that, and do the work to teach the kids. 

[00:36:17] Teresa May: That's so well said. I mean, really. How true is that? And that this really requires us understanding the student as he or she is, and the language. And what are we waiting for?

All these children need access to this because to live in this world, you can't, you cannot move forward if you can't read and crack that code. So I know, when I had my school, I'll never forget, the Carroll County Public School had contacted me. They had a 12th grade student. He was 19 years old who...

The parents took them to court because he still couldn't read, and yet he passed with, you know, Bs and Cs the whole way, and he couldn't read. And when that mother came into the school that we had, she burst into tears, she said, "Oh my gosh. I always, I thought there should be something like this, but I didn't know it existed." So she took them to court.

And that's the sad thing. Like even for me, we going into court, thinking that the court would change something, only to find out the court adds to the problem. I mean, but he ended up, we tutored him and using very multi-sensory, Orton-Gillingham. And we were able to bring him up three grade levels and get him to a fourth grade level where he could function more.

He couldn't even get in... Here's the other thing. You know, back in the day, kids could go to vo-tech programs, they could go into the mechanics or the plumbing or whatever, and that's where a lot of dyslexics would end up. But now, you look at these manuals, these auto mechanic manuals and all this stuff. You have to read, you have to really be able to read, and so they don't have access to the hands-on type of jobs that they once had.

Honestly, I could still find students in any public school who can't read. Right? 

[00:38:19] Susan Lambert: Yeah. To make a little segue here, that's part of the goal of the Margaret Byrd Rawson Institute. Right? 

[00:38:27] Teresa May: Correct. 

[00:38:28] Susan Lambert: So can you tell us, as the executive director, tell us just briefly a little bit about the goals of the institute? How long have you been around? What are you working on right now? 

[00:38:38] Teresa May: Well, Margaret and I founded it, we co-founded it, in 2002, and we have morphed into different phases. Right after Margaret passed, that's when I headed a small school for 10 years, and then we then took the Rawson Institute online, because we felt that we can reach more people this way. 

And it's a slow process. But the goal of the institute, one was to preserve the history and the legacy of Margaret. We now are gathering stories, literacy stories, memories of Margaret's, and teaching tips. We're just beginning that phase. And it's just like you said at the very beginning of this discussion. People don't remember how they learned. They remember how they felt when they were learning, oftentimes. 

And then we did a webinar series and a telesummit interviewing people from across the country, and we offer CU credits for teachers if they're interested. We've linked up with VCU to provide those credits, but our goal is to create 130 YouTube lessons that a parent or a student or a teacher could watch, to reinforce, if you're a teacher, the training that you had, so you could see it, each piece of doing this, in visual practice, or a student could follow, or a parent could learn too what to watch for. And we're in the process of developing that. 

We also created a native, preserve native language program. We went to Pine Ridge Reservation where Anna Gillingham grew up as a way of giving back. We knew that she grew up on this reservation. Now she wasn't Lakota, but her father was Quaker. She grew up there. We like to embellish our concept of her learning multisensory by being on the Pine Ridge Reservation and the importance of that.

But we went in and we have a scholarship program where we'll help different native language speaking groups that want to preserve their language because they were outlawed from speaking their language. And so there's very few native speakers left, but we show them the principles of Orton-Gillingham to teach language.

Those are our goals right now, and that's what we're developing and working on. And our hope would be that if a child in India or somewhere in a country in Africa there, they wanted to learn how to crack the reading code, they could follow, but also that a dyslexic could, the elements of how to break language down could be translated by someone watching this into a deeper understanding for the teacher.

So that's our goal and, you know, our goal is to put that out there just as what we hope to leave behind. 

[00:41:44] Susan Lambert: Amazing. We'll make sure that we link our listeners in the show notes to the website, so they can watch and follow along too. That's an amazing goal to try to leave a legacy, but also provide resources.

[00:41:59] Teresa May: Absolutely. The interesting piece to Margaret, for you and I, and for the listeners to really absorb would be Margaret was all about creating an educated mind. She wouldn't even refer to it as training. She said, "You know, you train a dog, but you educate the whole person." To understand dyslexia is to understand many different elements and many different disciplines, to really walk away with a deep understanding of the individual's uniqueness.

We all have different brain architectures and ways of being in the world and ways of learning, but our public system, and, in fairness to it, I, you know, I had to process lots of children through it. It's kind of like a one-size-fits-all model, but now to be more sophisticated is to educate a teacher to understand that that child in front of them, that they can make that imprint on, only gets one childhood, one opportunity to get this and time is of the essence. 

Margaret really was about the importance of not giving that piece of the antibiotic, but giving the whole piece. In closing, too, I think what stands out for me is that parents need to understand the truth about what is needed to remediate a dyslexic child.

[00:43:36] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yep. 

[00:43:37] Teresa May: It is very complicated. It is labor intensive. It is "roll up your sleeves." And Margaret actually in her book The Many Faces of Dyslexia, she said something equivalent to, "This is not the job for amateurs." Now that may have stepped on toes, but here's the thing. This is not the job for amateurs.

[00:44:01] Susan Lambert: Right. 

[00:44:01] Teresa May: This is some heavy lifting that someone has to be able to do to work with that Tier 3, or what Margaret had as the most severe dyslexics. And when you have a well-trained teacher, the children can get through that door. They absolutely can. 

So I see this all as a very sacred work. Children can be misdiagnosed. They can be mistaught. They can be misunderstood. And what's behind that is the adult failure to fully comprehend what that child is going through, and they need us, the adults, to advocate and protect them. 

[00:44:49] Susan Lambert: Hmm. So true. 

[00:44:50] Teresa May: What I miscalculated in my experience with my school even was how burdened and often wounded the teachers were. And they needed a lot of help and support. And so, you have this phenomenon of need meeting up with each other, and that's where you have to have empathy. 

That's what Margaret said. You have to have empathy and fusing all of this. And so when we say this term Science of Reading, it takes place in the arena of human complexity and diversity, and so science is showing us that there is a way to do it, but then we have to figure out all the creative ways to help empower the teachers and the parents to get it. 

Otherwise, the children, it's just one more generation that doesn't get it. And now we look and it's heartbreaking what's happening structurally. Even kids who aren't dyslexic aren't reading now.

[00:46:00] Susan Lambert: Yeah, for sure. Wow. Well, Dr. Teresa May, there is a lot of great information you shared with us. We really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story, sharing a little bit about Margaret Rawson and the institute. We so appreciate the work that you're doing and we appreciate your time so much.

[00:46:21] Teresa May: Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

[00:46:27] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. Teresa May, sociologist, advocate, and executive director of the Margaret Byrd Rawson Institute. She's the author of "A Parent's Journey," appearing in Why Kids Can't Read, Challenging the Status Quo in Education. You can learn so much more about the Margaret Byrd Rawson Institute via the links in the show notes.

And by the way, if you haven't checked it out yet, can I recommend downloading our Dyslexia Support Power Pack? It is a free bundle of dyslexia resources, including a dyslexia toolkit, a dyslexia fact versus fiction ebook, a dyslexia infographic that summarizes key information about dyslexia and so much more. There's a link right in the show notes, or you can visit amplify.com/dyslexiapowerpack. 

Next time, I'll be joined by Dr. Stephanie Stollar and Kate Winn, authors of the new book Reading Assessment Done Right: Tools and Techniques for Data-Driven Instruction. 

[00:47:34] Stephanie Stollar: This should not be a compliance activity.

[00:47:36] Kate Winn: Small group doesn't even have to be as intensive as some people think, especially in the early years. In kindergarten, we can catch them so early.

[00:47:43] Susan Lambert: That's next time. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.