A student with dyslexia does homework using a colorful overlay strip. Dyslexia is a neurobiological condition that affects up to 20% of the U.S. population.

Even as a kindergartner, my son knew something was wrong. 

Letters and words weren’t connecting the way they did for his peers. His brain struggled to link written symbols to their sounds, a process I later found out was called phonological decoding, which fluent readers do automatically and unconsciously. Every reading task was taxing and produced almost nothing. Eventually, he would shut down — overstimulated with instructions he couldn’t understand. He felt ashamed and would say, “I’m not smart” or “I wish I was dead.”

A specialist at his Oakland public school said my son wasn’t progressing and suggested he be held back in kindergarten during the pandemic. But no one could tell me why he was struggling.

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He later qualified for special education with an Independent Education Program full of goals and services — but none of these efforts were able to address the root cause of his learning difference. He made little progress.

In third grade, I asked his teacher, “Does he have dyslexia? He has cousins and uncles with it.” She effectively told me, “I know nothing about dyslexia.” It seemed she wasn’t trained to recognize the most common learning disability in America. 

At the beginning of his fifth-grade year, I pushed for an independent neuropsychological evaluation. The psychologist said it was the........

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