This article was written by Jessika Harkay and published by The 74 on November 17th, 2025.
Undiagnosed dyslexia can manifest as behavior issues, which can disproportionately harm Black and brown kids in school and their mental health.
When Clarice Jackson raised concerns in 2000 about her adopted daughter’s inability to read two or three letter words by the fourth grade, she was told by Nebraska school officials it was because of the child’s early home life and her misbehavior in class.
When Ohio mother Joy Palmer raised concerns in 2013 her daughter was already falling behind in first grade, she feared it was because of hearing problems caused by chronic ear infections. School officials told her testing revealed no concerns and her daughter was performing well enough – except for her classroom behavior.
And when Jackie Castillo-Blaber’s daughter was struggling in 2020 with grasping the alphabet and numbers in kindergarten, school officials in her upstate New York district told her many students were behind because of the pandemic and her daughter’s behavior was the biggest issue.
Three different mothers. Three different states. Three different decades.
Yet, the similarities are striking.
The three mothers of color felt dismissed when they raised concerns. When they insisted something was wrong, they were asked if there were issues at home or whether they knew to read to their children after school — which felt like an attack and criticism of their parenting.
“There’s this view that reading struggles are moral failures,” said Castillo, mother of Genevieve, 9, a fourth grader. “There’s just so much bias … when you look at parents and you say, ‘They’re probably not [doing] enough, that’s the reason why [their kid can’t read].’ ”
But in all three cases, the culprit wasn’t a bad parent or child.
It was undiagnosed dyslexia that began to manifest as frustration. For these three girls, acting out was a way to mask fears of falling behind or an inability to keep up academically with their peers – and later became behaviors that subsided once they received intervention.
A growing number of studies in recent years show students of color, particularly Black children, are more likely to be identified for mental health issues and underidentified for learning disabilities like dyslexia. And despite increased dyslexia screening in many states, many students are still not receiving the support they need.
While dyslexia affects about one in five people and it’s one of the most common causes for reading difficulties in elementary school children, only 10% of kids with dyslexia receive special education services and intervention, according to the University of Michigan.
It’s worse for Black and brown kids.
In 2019, one study found that Black eighth graders were 55% less likely to be identified with a learning disability compared to their white peers.
The mislabeling of Black and brown children influences the support and services they get in the classroom, with experts believing there’s a strong correlation between misidentification, disparities in reading scores compared to their white peers and disproportionate disciplinary action.
Disabled white students, said Jacqueline Rodriguez, chief executive officer at National Center for Learning Disabilities, are often identified with both a learning disability and mental health issues, but the emphasis “is always on the [learning disability].”
Yet, for Black and brown families “…we see a ton of emotional disabilities, but we don’t see the corresponding [learning disabilities,” Rodriguez said.
School officials then “spend so much energy trying to quell the emotional response to the inability to read or write,” Rodriguez continued, “that they don’t actually address the academic interventions that would remove those emotional outbursts.”
Researchers point to an overall lack of teacher preparation or training when it comes to recognizing dyslexia, but a slowing of teacher diversity and implicit bias may also be key elements in misidentifying disabilities for students of color.
A report released in 2019 by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found school psychologists often believe the behavior of a Black or brown child is “willful or purposeful and not related to a disability,” and under-identification could reflect “a bias by education professionals who tend to be more responsive to white parents, or professionals may hold lower expectations of Black students’ academic abilities which may lead them to ignore a possible disability and ‘problem’ behavior.”
Student impact
A 2003 study found 50% of dyslexic students reported being bullied and 30% said they felt lazy, stupid or less intelligent than their peers.
Between 2016 and 2020, the number of children diagnosed with depression and anxiety increased by 27% and 29% respectively. Students with learning disabilities, including dyslexia, were at even higher risks, around 40%, according to the University of Iowa.
And those numbers are likely even higher for Black and brown youth who go unidentified, said clinical neuropsychologist Karen Wilson.
“When kids don’t understand what they’re reading, and they don’t understand that the reason why they’re struggling is because of a difference in the way their brain is wired, they will form their own narrative,” Wilson said, who is also the psychology department chair at California State University, Dominguez Hills and expert with Understood, a learning disability advocacy nonprofit.
It’s an ongoing reality for Palmer’s 20-year-old daughter, Dey’Leana, who didn’t receive intervention or learn to read until she was 13.
“I couldn’t get the confidence back that this little girl had, no matter how much I tried to say, ‘Yes, you’re good!” Palmer said. “Even to this day, … she compares herself to her siblings about what she can and cannot do.”
Jackson remembers times when her daughter would hit herself in the head and repeat the words “I’m stupid,” at home. She would pretend she was sick to avoid going to school. She would break her glasses to have an excuse for why she couldn’t read the words on the page.
In class, she wouldn’t sit still. She became the class clown – a coping mechanism so her peers would laugh at her jokes instead of at her when she read, Jackson said. Her behavior became so disruptive that Jackson began to get daily calls from school officials to come get her daughter.
“She was trying to do anything she could to get out of the classroom to avoid reading,” Jackson said. “As a Black mother – a single mother – at that time, it just was a very traumatizing time for both her and I, especially … not knowing there were rules and regulations to special education, not understanding that they should have been addressing dyslexia.”
In Ohio, Palmer’s daughter refused to do school work. She would stare blankly at her teachers, walk out of the classroom or try to put earphones in.
“You can always teach a child to read, but once the self esteem is broken, it’s so much harder to repair, if ever,” said Resha Conroy, founder and executive director of the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children.
Misidentification of a child’s disability can be expressed in several ways, including externally like Jackson’s daughter, or internally like Palmer’s daughter who tried to avoid drawing attention to herself.
“If you don’t address the reading, the behavior tends to become worse,” said Monica McHale-Small, director of education for the Learning Disabilities Association of America. “No matter what color the kid is, if kids are unidentified, misidentified or late identified, you start to see all those behavioral manifestations. … There’s always that phenomenon where a kid would rather be perceived as bad than to be perceived as dumb.”
Data points from USCCR Report
For many Black and brown children, a broken self-esteem and externalizing behaviors “pushes them into the school to prison pipeline,” Jackson added.
“Why do I say pushed? Because the older they get, the more frustrated, the more anxiety, the more [they think] ‘I need to get out of this classroom before I am humiliated or the teacher calls on me … I’m going to do something that’s going to get me out of this pressure cooker,’” said Jackson, who founded the Institute for Black Literacy and has worked with several families because of her experience with her daughter, Latecia.
Black students with disabilities were nearly four times more likely to receive multiple out-of-school suspensions and twice as likely to be expelled than white students with disabilities, according to the 2019 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
The report also found Black children make up around 19% of all students with disabilities, but made up 50% of students with disabilities in correctional facilities.
Going forward
All 50 states have passed legislation around dyslexia, according to the National Center for Improving Literacy – including at least 41 states in 2023 that have mandated universal screening in kindergarten – but, there’s still concern about implementation.
“Apart from screening, there has to be action after that, so what do you do if you find that someone is at risk?” Wilson said, adding that legislation doesn’t always mean intervention.
“Even when we think about, the protections that are put in place when we think about IDEA and section 504 – they’re mandating equitable access – but implementation depends often on district capacity or on family advocacy,” she said. “Protection on paper means very little without accountability and practice.”
Black and brown children are more likely to attend under-resourced schools, where there’s higher turnover of staff and more young, or temporary, educators who may not know the signs of learning disabilities or have access to professional development.
General teacher preparation programs offer limited coursework in special education, usually only three to six credit hours, Rodriguez said.
“A school that is well funded with high-quality teachers [that have been in the school system longer] with professional development, … is more apt to identify differences between students that learn and think differently quicker, because they know the red flags,” Rodriguez said.
A first step forward toward more equitable dyslexia intervention for students of color is to create “more cohesive preparation” between general and special education teachers, she added.
Experts also called for comprehensive bias training and greater teacher diversity efforts to help with disparities in disability identification.
“Whether well intentioned or not, we do bring bias into the classroom with us, not just around expectations for academics, but also expectations for behavior,” Conroy said.
White educators may be more prone to implicit bias, and use how students of color are more likely to experience poverty or household instability as reasons behind misbehavior rather than think it’s a disability, according to the 2019 U.S.Commission on Civil Rights report.
It’s something the three mothers experienced repeatedly.
Jackson was told by Nebraska school officials at one point her daughter wasn’t able to read because her biological mother was incarcerated and she had lived with her grandmother.
“Their justification was they were doing the very best that they could do for her and that she wasn’t trying hard enough,” Jackson said.
Palmer recalled an instance where a teacher had asked if her daughter was “able to be taught by a male teacher or does she have daddy issues?”
“Everyone assumed I was a single mom,” Palmer said.
Most recently, when Castillo’s daughter began to have trouble in school, including crying out of frustration in class, she was referred to a social worker and asked about what things were like at home.
“There’s an overwhelming bias that a lot of us experience as parents of color … that there must be something broken at home, and that’s why your kid is acting out,” Castillo said. “Nobody had reached out to me to be like, ‘Hey, what have you tried with her? Have you noticed this at home?’ … There’s just this assumption that it’s a broken family.”
Although the three mothers eventually received some special education intervention for their daughters, which prompted some progress, Palmer and Jackson had to seek extra support outside the public school system with tutors or private programs.
“We need to ensure [schools] are working with parents and not against parents, that we are creating a team environment, … so [parents] feel safe and that they are in an environment where the children can get support,” Jackson said. “Children don’t have time to wait for systems to take decades to rectify and reframe education.”
Castillo is still navigating what more can be done for her fourth grader, who is receiving after-school tutoring in a neighboring county, paid by her school district.
Her daughter is “doing much better” and now is able to de-escalate her frustration “to the point where she’s not crying anymore, and is getting through it,” but she still struggles with reading and writing.
“It’s a work in progress,” Castillo said.
She worries the intervention isn’t enough. She also has had to provide transportation for her daughter’s tutoring sessions, and recently moved the meetings to Zoom “to save money on the gas cost, car repairs and tolls.”
She believes the tutoring would be more effective if it was during the school and worries about “the educational consequences my daughter will have to pay” if the intervention is not moved.
“[My daughter] needs to be able to write paragraphs right now and she can’t,” Castillo said. “All of these things that are going to lead up into what she needs to do to have a chance at a decent job when she graduates and I don’t see it happening. I see the gap only widening.”