Interview with Barry Greenstein: NPS Special Education

Fig City News recently spoke with School Committee member Barry Greenstein, who announced in an Op-Ed last month that he is stepping down from the Committee due to his family moving out of Newton. Originally aimed to be an “exit interview” similar to that with Chris Brezski, touching on many topics, this one-hour conversation instead focused almost exclusively on Mr. Greenstein’s views on special education. He spoke about his personal experiences as a former Newton Public Schools student (Newton South HS ‘97) and as a parent of a current student with an Individualized Education Program (IEP).

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

FCN: According to your Op-Ed you’ll soon be moving out of Newton, your hometown. Was this big decision driven by your son’s education?

Yes, 100%. I actually never intended to come back to Newton. I didn’t have the best education experience in Newton, and it felt weird because everyone talks so much about how amazing Newton’s education is, but I didn’t get much out of it [compared with] what I saw from my peers. They were succeeding in unbelievable ways, getting into colleges and programs I could never imagine, and having real choices about their futures. I had options, but as far as I could tell were just related to coming from an affluent suburban town, not the fact that I was being educated in a specific way.

Later in life, my wife and I were living in Marblehead because we wanted to be close to the water, and we loved it there but it was inconvenient. We settled on Newton because of convenience, and for me it was familiar. People are probably not going to like to hear this, but I think we were one of the few families who did not move to Newton for the schools.

FCN: Why did you think your education was lacking?

I wasn’t able to verbalize that until recently. Three years ago, when I obtained my student file from Newton South, it opened up a wealth of information that I either had forgotten or was previously unaware of. I realized that I’m dyslexic (since confirmed via testing). It was obvious that I was screaming for attention, trying to convey to educators that they’re not teaching me correctly. I was vocal about it, and at every corner there was an educator who was directing me to do work the way they wanted me to.

I was almost always placed in the lowest-level academic group, and I was constantly saying that I’m in the wrong level, I’m not getting what I need. I wanted to test out of the groups I was placed in, because what happens a lot with people like myself, and like my son who is also dyslexic, is you’re being taught to read incorrectly, but your IQ is average or above average. So you’re very aware that something isn’t connecting and you don’t feel in the right place.

This isn’t meant to be offensive, but I was with students whom I felt like I was able to surpass in terms of some of the concepts that we were working on, but then you would put a book in front of me and I wouldn’t be able to prove my understanding of concepts via reading comprehension. So the teacher would say, “No, you’re in the right group,” and the testing at the time “confirmed” that I was. That’s the trap dyslexic kids fall into. 

From 4th grade to 12th grade, reading and comprehension of text were very challenging for me, so I wasn’t able to push myself to learn advanced concepts in many classes. Even in classes that weren’t reading-intensive, I understood the material well, but I was still in the lowest-level group, and I became bored. At some point I was on an IEP, but I found this out only through my file as an adult. As a student, I just knew I was getting some help. By the time I left Memorial Spaulding and went to Brown in seventh grade, I told my parents I’m not going to school anymore unless things change, and they were impressed with my self-awareness, and the educators said that’s fine. I opted-out of my IEP. But I had a learning disability diagnosis, and I shouldn’t have been able to opt out of my IEP. I received no extra support from 7th until 12th grade.

My teachers’ comments stated things such as I didn’t apply myself, didn’t try, didn’t care, …and if [I] just cared, I would do well. It wasn’t until I was able to select my own academic path in college that I started to try and figure things out, but essentially I gave up on my education in Newton.

FCN: So as an adult, you saw your student file, which included documentation about your IEP. You were aware that you were getting extra help going back to elementary school through 7th grade, but you didn’t realize it as a formal plan?

Yes, I remember going for extra help as early as probably first grade. I just was told you’re going to need reading help. And I remember getting tested. My brother was on an IEP too, and as a family we didn’t talk about it. I was not aware of it. 

FCN: Were your parents aware of it?

Yes. I’m the middle, and my older brother, academically, everything just came to him. So my academic experience was new to my parents. I don’t know that they even fully knew that they had formally signed an IEP document. It was a brand new thing for them. At that point, there was a lot of trust with educators. My mom is an educator (Kindergarten and nursery school), and my grandmother was an educator, and my mom in third grade was very aware that they were teaching me to read incorrectly, and she said something to someone [at Memorial Spaulding].

She got a very clear message back from my third-grade teacher that was essentially, “Stay in your lane. This is not your business. I will teach reading how I want to teach reading.” That’s not to say that parents at that time couldn’t push back, but my mom gave her that trust, and it was, unfortunately, the wrong thing to do.

Irene Fountas was the reading specialist at Memorial Spalding at this time, and later had significant influence across Newton Public Schools. 

FCN: We’re surprised, with so much written and said about the Fountas and Pinnell reading curriculum in Newton, that we’ve never heard that she had that connection to NPS.

Yes, she was the NPS reading specialist and highly regarded. She administered the literacy part of my IEP. I think a lot of people really idolized her concepts, and I think that’s part of the reason my third-grade teacher was so firm with my mom. 

[Note: The Fountas & Pinnell reading curriculum has been the subject of widespread national, and local, debate. The local group Newton Literacy Collaborative has advocated against it, with some success. The curriculum’s authors have defended their work.]

FCN: You say that your parents signed your IEP forms but may not have been fully aware of their context. This was before NPS had electronic communication with parents. As parents they went to school one day to sign something, but then didn’t have the communication there is now?

Even looking at my son’s own IEP experience, my wife and I missed some key things that you should be aware of when you’re trying to advocate for your child. It’s a lot of information. I can only imagine what it would have been like when you don’t have access to as much information at your fingertips. You have this meeting and then you just kind of think that things are going according to plan.

FCN: You wrote in your Op-Ed that you felt your son wasn’t getting the proper help. Can you describe what not getting the proper help means today, by contrasting it with what you just described historically at NPS?

My son had issues from the get-go. In November of his kindergarten year, which was 2021, so the first year back in-person after Covid, his teacher came to us and asked if we had dyslexia in the family. However, he got denied for an IEP the first time. We hired an advocate, and It took until November of second grade (2023) to get his IEP approved. It should not have taken that long.

[Note: The current NPS Superintendent Anna Nolin began at NPS in the summer of 2023.]

Once I saw my NPS student file, I realized the issues my son was facing were the same ones I did. He was getting some reading help and brought home one of the books they used. It was a Fontas & Pinnell early reader book. I thought you just have to be kidding me, this is the same curriculum that failed me. We know way more than we did back then, but my kid who you think is dyslexic is still receiving this. 

By the time he got to second grade, as I noted in the op-ed, he stated that he hated school, and felt that others were smarter than him. We knew from the testing that wasn’t accurate, but he was being put in a position that if he continued along that trajectory, he was going to go down a similar path as me: giving up on his academics, and waiting until adulthood to figure out what works for him. Therefore, if we wanted to get to the level of support that he needed to turn him around, to get him to love school, to get him to know that he’s smart, it would have required us pushing so hard on the school and the district, and they just don’t move that fast. 

He was getting 30 minutes of Orton-Gillingham, I think five days a week. At the private school that we moved into, he gets 90 minutes of literacy every day, and I think 30 minutes of that is one-on-one with an Orton-Gillingham tutor. 

[Note: Orton-Gillingham is an alternate literacy curriculum with an emphasis on phonics and multi-sensory instruction.]

I don’t know how long that level of advocacy would have taken within NPS. He has an academic life to achieve, and a child reaches a tipping-point age where you’re going to either make it a positive turn or make it a negative turn.

If the system doesn’t get it early, you reach that tipping point at third or fourth grade. Now that student may become a burden on the system because we missed the opportunity to address what is fairly simple: teach them to read.

FCN: To readers who aren’t expert about dyslexia or these different curricula, what is it about Fountas & Pinnell that you think doesn’t work for dyslexia?

I’m not an expert on either, but I know enough to explain it to the layperson. Fountas & Pinnell is like sight reading. They removed a lot of the phonics. You look at a text and you guess how to read it based on context. There’s a sentence, and then there’s a picture next to it. Let’s say the picture is of an old man with a little kid sitting on a bench. The sentence reads “Max is sitting with his Papa on a bench.” So maybe you can figure out that that is an old person, and that’s a young person, and can assume that that word is Papa.

FCN: Why specifically in your view is that more problematic for someone with dyslexia than someone without? 

If you don’t learn phonics, you never learn how to sound out the word Papa. So when you come across other words that are similar, you don’t know how to sound those out either. For a neurotypical person that’s ok, because they’re going to learn to read anyway. For a neurodiverse person who is dyslexic, if they don’t get the phonics, then they’ll always be guessing. As an adult, most of my initial reading, for words that I’ve never seen before, is a straight-up guess. I’ve butchered some words pretty badly. It’s because I don’t have the foundation in phonics to know how to sound out a word, and so I’m looking at it and taking my best guess from other words that I’ve seen that look similar, but I come out with a completely wrong interpretation.

FCN: Someone could read your description about how someone with dyslexia has a tougher time deducing words and pronunciation from pictures, and think that just means they’re not as smart as others. Not all students are equal, so why is this a curriculum failure?

I think that you accurately highlight the problem: With education in America right now, we value neurotypical learners. I would say that if you test every single kid, you would find there’s a larger amount of neurodiversity out there. Our education system is just set up for the straightforward learner. Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Thomas Edison, and other inventors were all neurodiverse. Their brain wiring gets them to see things in a different light, and then they adjust and innovate in ways that a neurotypical person cannot.

So I think we have it backwards. I think that our education system should be built for the neurodiverse, and the neurotypical will fall in line because for them teaching styles don’t really matter. Their brains are going to be able to handle it. So if you can adjust for the neurodiverse community, you encompass everybody.

To your question that not everyone’s smart, If you just look at straight IQs, neurodiverse ones are also spread among “above,” “at,” or “below average,” just like neurotypical ones.

FCN: What does that mean in practice when you say we should reorder the education system to be centered around the neurodiverse?

On the basic level, my theory is we should be teaching everyone to read in the same way that we would teach someone who’s dyslexic. I understand it’s an expensive endeavor to have Orton-Gillingham certified educators and purchase a curriculum as such, but we have a new reading curriculum in Newton, which I think is doing really well.

FCN: Why is it more expensive? Why can’t teacher training programs just cover these kinds of methods to educators the way they do other methods?

It’s a different level of certification, a more intensive way of teaching. From being on the School Committee for a year and a half, I can tell you that a simple idea like this has way more implications to the average education administrator than I could even be aware of. So when I say things like that, I’m aware that I’m not an everyday educator. I’m saying just teach everyone the way that works for everybody.

I can’t speak to the specifics, but I like to drop idea bombs. I know there’s huge implications to that idea.

FCN: Should School Committee members be dropping “idea bombs”? Is there a risk that they may raise constituents’ expectations, and make voters think that some transformational outcome is possible when it’s not?

You need to think about what you’re going to say, but I do think Committee members should do that. Our duty is to come in and drop ideas that maybe someone hadn’t considered or bring to attention something that could be changed. We have a diverse group of backgrounds in the community, and me coming from digital and biotech might offer something relevant that others hadn’t considered. Someone else coming from finance or any other background might have something to share. 

I’m not entrenched in the day-to-day, but It’s my goal to point out that I see an inefficiency, or I see an opportunity. Then I’ll ask: ‘Superintendent Nolin, how do you and your administration feel that you could potentially make this happen, if you think it’s also a good idea?’ So, yes, I think we’re there to shake it up and give perspective. We have plenty of people within NPS and the education system in general who are deeply entrenched on how our system works. If we wanted more of that, we wouldn’t need a separate body like a School Committee.

FCN: A reader might consider your background, and conclude you were a student that got a lot of resources, had an IEP, yet you still call your NPS experience a failure. At a time when spending on student support services is a large topic in NPS budgeting, is there a risk taxpayers throw up their hands and say special needs families are never going to be satisfied no matter what resources they receive?

Well, I’d say I was impacted by the wrong lens put on dyslexia back then. Regardless of the fact that I got the IEP, I wasn’t necessarily getting the right support. This goes back to Dr. Nolin’s emphasis on Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, and trying to find the right funding to get that in place. If you look at any sort of data, early intervention prevents later issues. You spend $500 now, or you spend nothing now and you spend $1,000 later. If you get it early, a lot of these issues can be nipped in the bud.

In my experience, regardless of the amount of money that was spent on my IEP, actually not giving me the right support made me a drain on the system – both academically and on society – because I had no idea how to navigate my career nor my disability. I spent a good 10 to 12 years post-college meandering around jobs, not knowing why I couldn’t settle or why I was making mistakes. I made very obvious dyslexic mistakes early in my career, inverting letters and numbers. I had managers look at me and say, “Why did you do that?” And I had no explanation. I would get defiant and say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I did it right. You’re the one who’s wrong.” 

The correlation between not knowing how to read and ending up in prison later in life is high. Funding a prison is not free, it costs us money. So if you just look at it from that perspective, invest the money.

FCN: You said your son gets significantly more support in his new school, 90 minutes per day. Is that something that’s feasible at NPS? Should a future SC member cite this interview, and interpret Barry Greenstein as saying kids who need reading help should have access to 90 minutes per day?

I don’t want to prescribe what each kid needs. That’s what’s working for my son. I think we do have the ability to get it right. If we look at the right model. What I like about the model that my son is doing is that he’s in a mainstream class and then he moves with a small cohort of kids who are like him, and he does literacy separately.

Right now at NPS we have specialized programs in different schools. There’s one that, had my son qualified, he could have moved into, but that would have entailed moving schools. Instead, I think that if you were to properly diagnose and evaluate the need per-school, that you could get a small cohort in each building. It might be multi-grades, but that would be more impactful, in my opinion, than the way it’s being handled now. We do have some good programs, but personally speaking, they’re hard to find and to know much about what it takes for your child to qualify. 

I fully trust that Dr. Nolin has the right plan. She understands where we need to improve as a system. I’ve seen the educators getting behind her and agreeing with her vision. So I think we’re on the right path, and that Newton hopefully under her stewardship will become the school system that we all feel like it used to be or has the potential to be. Unfortunately, it was just too late for my son, and this was the decision that we made as a family.