The 25-Year Betrayal: How Political Tribalism Failed Dyslexic Kids and Children of Color

In the past three weeks, America's approach to literacy education has crystallized into three stark moments. First, the House Education and Workforce Committee passed the Science of Reading Act with unanimous bipartisan support—a historic affirmation that evidence-based instruction works and signals it's likely to reshape how we teach reading nationwide. Second, Minnesota Republicans moved to strip diversity and inclusion from their state's science of reading law—reducing literacy to pure mechanics and removing the humanities that teach us who we are. Third, Donald Trump proved both sides right and both sides wrong simultaneously: he attacked Gavin Newsom's fitness for office because of dyslexia, revealing exactly why diversity, equity and inclusion instruction matter, while highlighting Gavin Newsom - a success story who is the product of structured literacy instruction. These three moments aren't separate stories. 

Donald Trump said it plainly. Presidents should not have learning disabilities. Gavin Newsom, he argued, is unfit to lead because he has dyslexia. Let that sink in for a moment. Then consider Woodrow Wilson—28th President of the United States, commander in chief during World War One, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and president of Princeton University before that. Wilson didn't learn to read until he was twelve years old. Historians have widely agreed for decades that he had dyslexia. He struggled with reading his entire life. He led the free world anyway. Trump's argument doesn't just fail on moral grounds. It fails on the historical record.

Wilson is not alone. The people who changed civilization—who shaped science, art, justice, and culture in ways we can barely imagine living without—were whole human beings. Many were dyslexic. Many were racially marginalized. Many were both. Harry Belafonte. Sidney Poitier. These were not people who succeeded in spite of who they were. They were people whose full humanity—their neurodiversity, their cultural roots, their lived experience—was inseparable from what they gave the world. When we strip diversity from literacy materials, we don't just lose representation. We lose the stories that teach children what human beings are capable of.

Consider what Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier did in the summer of 1964. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ran out of money and Freedom Summer was in danger of collapsing, Belafonte raised seventy thousand dollars in two days. He and Poitier then flew into Mississippi—into the heart of what was essentially occupied territory—carrying that cash in doctors' bags to avoid suspicion. They delivered it to SNCC headquarters in Greenwood. On the way, they were chased by the Ku Klux Klan. They made it. Freedom Summer survived. Voter registration continued. History turned. These are the stories that belong in our children's reading materials. These are the stories Minnesota Republicans want to remove.

Republicans didn't invent the science of reading. The research came from neuroscientists, linguists, and literacy scholars across the political spectrum over decades. But Republicans were the first to champion it politically and push it into policy. In 2001, George W. Bush—guided in significant part by First Lady Laura Bush—was visiting a Florida school that was already rolling out early science of reading curriculum, replacing the balanced literacy approach that had dominated classrooms for a generation. The work had started. The evidence was visible. And, on that same day, September 11th happened, and the nation's attention turned elsewhere, and the momentum was lost.

Democrats saw what was happening in those Florida classrooms. The evidence was available. The results were visible as early as 2001. And Democrats chose not to engage—not because the science was wrong, not because they had conflicting evidence, not because they were concerned about kids in classrooms. They chose not to engage because Republicans were doing it. That is the honest, brutal truth. For twenty-five years, tribal politics overrode scientific evidence. For twenty-five years, the kids who needed structured literacy instruction most—dyslexic kids, kids of color, kids in under-resourced schools—were failed by a Democratic establishment that couldn't bring itself to champion something the other team had touched first. Two generations. Gone. And, I say that as a life-long registered democrat.  

This is not theoretical. I served on the curriculum and instruction committee for the English Language Arts department of San Francisco Unified School District, where we evaluated four competing literacy curricula. The choice we faced was not between a good option and a bad one. It was between two failures. The curriculum that most faithfully adhered to the science of reading had gone through a process to become culturally sensitive—and had failed that process catastrophically, producing caricatures of individuals from minority groups that were crude, derogatory, and appalling. Meanwhile, the curricula that were culturally rich and representative failed to meet the minimum standards of science of reading instruction. There was no good choice. Both sides of this debate had failed the children we were trying to serve.

Dyslexia advocacy organizations have long maintained political neutrality. The logic is understandable: preserve access across party lines, don't alienate potential allies, keep the tent wide. But political neutrality is a luxury that assumes good faith on both sides. When a sitting president of the United States declares that people with learning disabilities are unfit to hold office—when he says this openly, repeatedly, on the record—silence is not neutrality. It is complicity. When state legislators move to strip the humanity from literacy materials, looking the other way is not diplomacy. It is a choice with consequences for real children in real classrooms. Trump, and anyone else who engages in this baseless rhetoric, should be called out by name and forced to face consequences.

Here is the painful truth that Democratic families and DEI advocates need to reckon with. Twenty-five years of science denialism about reading instruction has consequences. One of those consequences is that we do not yet have the culturally responsive, science of reading aligned materials that our children deserve. The gap is real. The gap is the direct cost of Democratic resistance to evidence. We are told that publishers, educators, and advocates are building those materials now.  But we are starting from behind. And children are waiting.

The situation in Minnesota forces a question none of us want to answer. If diversity requirements in curriculum rubrics are functioning as a barrier to the adoption of science of reading aligned materials—as they did in San Francisco—then temporarily lifting those requirements may be the pragmatic choice while better materials are built. That is an almost unbearable concession to make. But the alternative is asking children to wait for perfect materials while they fall further behind in learning to read. We must build the airplane while flying it. And we must hold ourselves accountable for landing it right.

We need both. We need evidence-based reading instruction that reflects fifty years of neuroscience, and we need literacy materials that reflect the full, magnificent, complicated range of human contribution to this world. The science exists. The stories exist. Harry Belafonte exists. Woodrow Wilson exists. Gavin Newsom exists—dyslexia and all—as living proof that learning differences do not disqualify anyone from leadership, from greatness, or from the full rights of citizenship. What we need now is the political will to stop choosing sides and start choosing kids. The House Education and Workforce Committee showed us it's possible. The question is whether the rest of us are brave enough to follow.