Struggling to Read, Struggling to Find Help

Once a week last spring, Kermaine Petty took a break from a busy professional and personal life and logged on to Zoom to review the rules of reading. During one session, Petty and his tutor, Tommy Baas, started with why a c sometimes softens to sound like an s—typically, when it comes before an e, i, or y.

They ran through a list of “nonsense” words to practice c and k sounds: cid, cy, cyb, kyb, cab, ceck, keck, kex.

Then they burned through the effects of the “silent e” on letter sounds; vowel–consonant patterns; some more c rules, including what happens when words end with a ce (such as in “Ever since Prince Lance went to France, I have not had a chance to dance on the fence”); spelling practice (concentrate, accident, accept, risky); and “fluency” practice (sight reading a passage about Henry Ford).

For Petty, 34, a skilled software engineer, the sessions provided the kind of rule-based guidance in how to decode words that, in a better world, he would have gotten more than 25 years ago as a schoolkid growing up on Milwaukee’s north side. But he takes nothing for granted, having searched months for a reading tutor who would work with adults for a fee: $60 a session. It’s an elusive opportunity to reclaim a long-lost education in how to read with ease.

“Ultimately, I want to have a love for reading,” he said. “It’s still a chore.”

For adults in Wisconsin who struggle with reading, help can be excruciatingly hard to find. One in four residents of Milwaukee reads below about a third-grade level; statewide, one in seven adults does, according to Holly McCoy, executive director at Literacy Services of Wisconsin, which provides free and low-cost reading tutoring for qualifying Milwaukee-area adults, among other program offerings. Race and socioeconomics play an outsize role in who gets the help they need before graduating high school: Year after year, Wisconsin posts the largest Black–white gaps in reading performance for fourth and eighth graders of any state in the country.

Wisconsin lawmakers in 2023 made an unprecedented and sweeping commitment to reading-education reform in elementary school, calling for broad retraining of teachers in science-backed reading instruction and phonics-based teaching in the earliest grades. Political wrangling over the new law is far from over, but the package, which included $50 million to support the transition, underscored a bipartisan commitment to change.

During the same session, however, legislators rejected a proposal that would have injected just a small fraction of that money—less than $750,000—into shoring up adult-education programs, some of which have long struggled to keep their doors open.

“It’s really hard to get folks on board to support adult learning,” McCoy said. Too few policymakers and lawmakers recognize the close connection between the educational background of parents, and particularly of mothers, and their child’s school performance, she said; they also underestimate the knowledge and training required to run a high-quality reading program for adults. People “don’t understand the expertise that goes into this field,”
McCoy said.

Federal help is reaching fewer programs

There is federal money for adult education, but the money has become more focused on workforce-development goals. That’s especially true since the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014 reinforced the idea that adult education programs should increase participants’ income in the short term. The money therefore reaches a smaller range of programs and adults in Wisconsin, said Michele Erikson, who until this past April led Wisconsin Literacy, an umbrella agency supporting community-based literacy organizations across the state.

A decade ago, nearly 20 of those programs received funding through the federal Adult Education and Family Literacy Act. That number recently stood at about six, with the state’s technical college system absorbing the lion’s share of the federal money, Erikson said. In many states, including Wisconsin, United Way has also changed its criteria for which adult education programs to support, requiring them to apply in the “income” category rather than “education,” and in many cases to show that their program graduates have accessed new—or better—jobs. “It can be hard to show improved income and workforce outcomes in the short term when what you’re teaching is basic reading and math,” said Erikson.

Indeed, national experts say that the emphasis on specific metrics—including job attainment and how many participants earn their GED (or high school equivalency credential)—disincentivizes programs from working with the most needy adults. Some centers try to force out students who aren’t showing quick progress and could jeopardize accountability metrics, and therefore imperil funding, according to a 2021 study by Amy Pickard, who worked in adult literacy centers and now researches adult education as an assistant professor at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Funding “expectations are geared to the demonstration of rapid, measurable returns on investment and are, by their very nature, impersonal and ill-suited to adult learners who have difficulty making rapid progress,” Pickard wrote in her study’s conclusion.

None of the adults I met over the course of a year reporting on adult literacy in Wisconsin saw reading classes as an easy path to a credential or a new job.

“There’s a level of isolation”

Kermaine Petty, introduced at the beginning of this essay, dreams of reading aloud someday with ease to his children (he is engaged to be married next year). Another Milwaukeean, Deonte Key, sought out reading help a decade ago in his 30s to improve his quality of life, including feeling more connected to his colleagues, friends, and family. “There’s a level of isolation you put yourself into when you don’t feel like you are as bright as your counterparts. I didn’t feel successful. I felt like I was squeaking by and almost hiding because they were going to find out I had trouble reading.”

Similarly, Milwaukeean Shawntell Fitzgerald has persisted with reading tutoring on and off for the last several years, not in search of a different job—she works as a home health care aide or in restaurants or housekeeping when she needs the income—but to strengthen her personal and religious life. She hopes to be a role model for her children and grandchildren; to get her driver’s license; to feel better about herself; to engage more fully at church.

“She wants to be able to read the scripture,” said Fitzgerald’s longtime friend, Lashawnda Hibbler. “Ministry has been the greatest factor as far as her motivation.”

Yet the net effect of decades of federal and state policy in Wisconsin is that there’s little public funding available to support adults who are struggling readers unless they are specifically looking to train or apply for a new job. That severely limits the available offerings for students who have no need—or desire—to shift jobs or careers. And it has left countless literacy programs across Wisconsin hanging on by a thread.

Running adult literacy programs on shoestrings

These days, most adult literacy programs in Wisconsin receive the same amount of public funding (federal, state, or local): zero.

The Literacy Council of Green County, in southern Wisconsin, serves about 85 adult learners, most of them immigrants working on farms or in cheese factories. Some of the students can read in their native language and focus on learning English; others need to learn to read in their native language first.

The council accomplishes this work on an annual operating budget of $20,000. About half of that goes toward salary for its executive director, Karin Monzón Krimmer, who also owns a small cleaning business. The council depends on a fleet of volunteers, free space at the public library, and donations small and large. In past years, an annual Scrabble event was a big fundraiser for the group.

More resources would definitely help: the council nearly always has a wait list—15 people hoping to improve their English literacy skills as of this past June.

Finding high-quality tutors who can both teach reading and connect with people from all walks of life can be a challenge for literacy programs even in the best of times. “I’m a little worried about how it is going to continue because we have lost tutors,” said Diane Opelt, who until June ran Page Forward Volunteers for Literacy in central Wisconsin’s Clark County.

The Buffalo Pepin Literacy Alliance in western Wisconsin used to receive money from its two counties but hasn’t in years, said director Stacey Hartung. “We have a very, very bootstrap budget” of $15,000 to $20,000 each year, she said. A future focus of the program will be “workforce literacy”—helping employers connect with prospective employees—partly because that’s where the funding is. “It’s a way for both the employer and the individual to win,” she said.

Literacy Services of Wisconsin, based in Milwaukee, is one of the largest, most financially successful community-based adult education programs in the state. Yet as recently as 10 years ago, the Milwaukee area had about 10 independent adult education programs; now it has half that number. Some of the programs, including one run by Next Door Foundation, floundered and closed; others merged. Milwaukee Achiever, overseen for decades by the nuns of the School Sisters of St. Francis, the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, and the School Sisters of Notre Dame, merged with Literacy Services in 2017, after Milwaukee Achiever realized that it wasn’t financially sustainable on its own. A few years later, Literacy Services absorbed Greater Waukesha Literacy as well.

The organizations had models “that were not sustainable,” said Holly McCoy. The merger “allowed us to be more thoughtful in how we use our resources,” which include a mix of government funding, private philanthropy, and foundation grants.

It’s that diversity of funding and, particularly, the private money that allow Literacy Services to serve a student such as Fitzgerald, whose tutoring sessions began with a refresher of the alphabet but who can now decipher many multisyllable words. Yet her progress doesn’t check a neat box when it comes to metrics based on workforce development and income growth.

“Our role is to help fix whatever the education system could not achieve, and that is a very wide variety of work,” said McCoy.

”Ultimately, I want to have a love for reading.”
Kermaine Petty

The legacy of what didn’t happen in grade school

All of the adults whom I interviewed for this story were denied critical opportunities to learn to read well at one point—or several points—in their education. Their stories underscore not only the long and devastating legacy of poor reading instruction but also the role that structural racism plays in determining who has access to the tools and supports needed to become strong readers.

Fitzgerald, 50, was promoted from grade to grade in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) without ever being taught to read. By the time she reached high school, in the late 1980s, it felt as if the teachers had given up on her, consigning her to a classroom for “MR” (mentally retarded) students at Juneau High School—in spite of her mother’s repeated protests that her daughter wasn’t “slow” but just struggled with reading. Fitzgerald’s classes emphasized life skills, not academics.

Lashawnda Hibbler and Kathy Erdman, a retired professor of speech pathology at Marquette who has tutored Fitzgerald off and on over the last several years, said their friend is a deeply intelligent woman who probably has an undiagnosed learning disability and never got appropriate support. “The system failed her,” said Hibbler. “I don’t see how they would pass her along when she couldn’t read.”

Howard Fuller, superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools at the time Fitzgerald graduated and subsequently a longtime school-choice leader, said in an interview that there’s a long history of shunting African Americans into special education classes where they were “labeled as mentally challenged and never taught how to read,” he said. “It isn’t that they were incapable.”

During his tenure as MPS superintendent, 1991–1995, Fuller prioritized ensuring every student took algebra, but he said that if he could do it over, that emphasis would go toward reading. “I took on the algebra wars instead of the reading wars,” he said. “Had I known what I know now about reading, I would have done things differently.”

Key, 45, and Petty, 34, both made it through not only high school but college with little confidence in their ability to read quickly and well. The role of race and socioeconomics was subtler in their stories, but still present.

At Benjamin Franklin School on Milwaukee’s north side, a teacher pulled Petty into the hallway with classmates for remedial reading sessions starting in first grade. Over the years, the group plodded away on a series about a tramp with a tin cup that Petty found remarkable only for how unmotivating it was.

Toward the end of elementary school, Petty learned that the remedial sessions would end—despite his continued struggle to decode new text. By this point, however, he had developed a strategy that allowed him to move forward as a student: relying on his memory and working exceptionally hard. Eventually, Petty recognized thousands of words on sight. He got good grades and accolades from his teachers for this behavior, regularly winning student of the month. In fifth grade, he was named student of the year.

After elementary school, none of Petty’s teachers ever again noticed his struggle with reading. He made it through Thomas Edison Middle School, Milwaukee School of Languages for high school, and Milwaukee School of Engineering for college through deep intelligence, sheer grit, and a punishing work schedule, relying on audiobooks and abridged versions whenever possible. “For five years [in college] every Saturday or Sunday, I was in the library either reading or writing,” he said.

Petty did not learn until his early 30s, when he sought out testing, that he had an undiagnosed learning disability: dyslexia, a neurological condition that makes it difficult to decipher and spell written words. It’s possible that Petty would have faced a rough road through school even if he had been a privileged white student in the suburbs. But my reporting, such as a lengthy 2022 feature in the Washington Post, has shown that schools with higher concentrations of white students are more likely to have designated reading specialists on staff.

That disparity holds true in the Milwaukee area, according to Carrie Streiff-Stuessy, executive director of the reading tutoring program Forward Scholars, who has worked in both the city and suburbs. “I came back to [Milwaukee Public Schools] deliberately to do the work in the city because students in the city do not have equal access to interventions,” she said. “In the suburbs, there are [reading] interventionists at every
school. . . . In Milwaukee, only some schools and students have access to interventionists.”

Moreover, within many Black families there’s a longstanding mistrust of special education and disability diagnoses—for good reason. Over generations, they have seen Black students misdiagnosed as intellectually disabled, like Fitzgerald, or written off as behavioral challenges, and shunted into inferior schools or programs. “With kids of color, their behavior challenges are seen as more of a behavior problem than an academic one,” said Camillia Whitehead, a social worker and parent advocate in Maryland.

Steve Dykstra, a Milwaukee family and child psychologist, added that for children of color, especially, “schools are very tied to the idea that ‘if he behaved better, he would learn better.’ And they are much less tied to the idea that if he learned better, he would behave better.”

The challenges of getting help as adults

While systemic inequalities make it harder, in many cases, for Black students to access help with reading as schoolchildren, they are usually altogether on their own seeking redress as adults.

After his first tutor retired at the end of 2021, Petty spent over a year struggling to find a new one who would take him on, even for a fee.

Deonte Key went through a similar journey. In his 30s, he spoke with a therapist about his lifelong struggles with reading. She suggested that he seek out testing for dyslexia, and a costly assessment confirmed that he had the learning disability.

Key, a college graduate, had a thriving career in finance and technology and a rewarding personal life when he sought out help. “I was a gainfully employed father of two girls, so in hindsight someone would say I was fairly successful,” he said. “But there were things that seemed not to make sense. I didn’t always comprehend people, and they didn’t always understand what I was trying to communicate.”

“A large portion of my life, I thought that I’m not intelligent because I can’t do this or that,” he added, “and I could never write the same way that I can verbally communicate.”

Key reached out to different organizations, but found he was ineligible for most adult literacy programs, as someone with a career and healthy income. “It’s not as easy as you think it might be,” he said.

Finally, Literacy Services of Wisconsin suggested that he contact the Dyslexia Achievement Center, a private organization with locations in the Milwaukee suburbs (and at which Petty has found tutors as well). “I called and sent an email and was elated that they would work with me,” he said.

The two-plus years of reading tutoring were transformative for Key, completely upending his sense of his own potential. He returned to novels and other books that had previously seemed inaccessible. He read The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s plays. “Shakespeare never made sense to me but, after the tutoring, for whatever reason, it started to make sense.”

He read the sword-and-sorcery novel, Imaro, by Charles Saunders and Gregory Walker’s Shades of Memnon: The African Hero of the Trojan War and the Keys to Ancient World Civilization. He read The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, and fully understood the plot nuances for the first time. “There were undertones that I didn’t get from watching the movie that came through so clearly in the book.”

The improved reading skills and speed helped in all aspects of Key’s life. For the first time, he could read and process the fine print of an extended warranty when shopping. For the first time, he had confidence determining, based on conversations with a doctor and the listed side effects on the label, whether a medication was appropriate for him. For the first time, he was able to listen to, read, and understand in depth a political candidate’s agenda.

As a father, he could better support his children, including recognizing their dyslexia and advocating for the help they needed, much earlier in their lives than had been the case for him.

At work, he no longer felt like a pariah who needed to work third shift and avoid interacting with colleagues as much as possible. And he no longer feared taking on leadership roles. He’s currently a manager at a finance technology company and in late 2023 completed a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in entrepreneurship, with honors.

Improved reading “has given me a level of confidence I didn’t have and didn’t think I could aspire to,” he said. “The Bible says, ‘Give him a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.’ The tutoring taught me how to fish.”

Three major roadblocks to getting help

Yet returning to intensive tutoring as an adult is rarely, if ever, easy. One afternoon a couple of years ago in a weekly session, it was clear that Shawntell Fitzgerald was weary. She rubbed her eyes, trying to stay focused on the words on the page.

Against, always, said, says, today, Fitzgerald read, then stopped.

“I know this one,” she said. “I know this one.”

She scrutinized the word, l-a-u-g-h, holding her head in her hands, a pained look on her face.

“Sometimes if we give our brain a rest, it comes back stronger,” Kathy Erdman, her tutor, told her.

Fitzgerald was not so sure. There were many distractions preventing her from focusing on reading. That spring, she was trying to secure a spot at one of Milwaukee’s stronger public high schools for her daughter, an eighth grader. She was juggling a part-time job cleaning and stocking at a Cousins Subs store. And she was looking for a new place to live, her sixth move in a decade. The stress of the rushed hunt for a safe apartment that takes rental assistance had caused her blood pressure to spike; throughout class, her head throbbed, and her hands tingled.

Fitzgerald never guessed the word laugh.

There are three major roadblocks for struggling adult readers in getting adequate help: Lack of time. Lack of offerings. And shame. There might not be much that we can do as a society about the first: Both Fitzgerald and Petty have taken long breaks from reading tutoring over the last few years amidst lives that are all too full.

But we can certainly do more when it comes to the dearth of programs as well as the gaping holes in terms of whom any programs serve. Wisconsin could become a leader in the field of adult education by directing to adult ed even less than one-ten-thousandth of the public dollars the state spends on K–12 public education (compare the earlier-described ill-fated quest for $750,000 for adult programs with an education spending budget of about $7.8 billion). While $750,000 might not meet the needs of every struggling adult, it would allow the state’s overburdened community-based programs to professionalize their operations, including paying qualified tutors, and to expand the profile of adults they serve.

And we can also take steps to end the shame that many adults feel over reading struggles. That struggle is almost never the result of individual failings; it’s the result of pervasive inequities and shortcomings in our K–12 education system. Fitzgerald, Petty, and Key all graduated from high school without having been taught how to read well. In conversations about illiteracy, we tend to focus on high school dropouts, but every year Wisconsin’s high schools graduate thousands of students, many of them with decent grades and college ambitions, who struggle deeply with reading. They are disproportionately Black. Nationally, 30 percent of 12th graders scored below the basic level in reading in 2019, the most recent year high school seniors were tested as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP; this means they lacked even partial mastery of fundamental reading skills as they approached graduation day. Among Black students, half of
12th graders scored below the basic level.

Collectively, it is we who should feel shame, over these dismal statistics and the individual stories that they contain. Even a modest amount of state funding for adult literacy programs is, quite frankly, the least we should do.

Illustrations by Robert Neubecker