Debbie Meyer

Debbie Meyer is a founding member of the Dyslexia (Plus) in Public Schools Task Force, a small group of community leaders working to help students with dyslexia and related language-based disabilities thrive in their neighborhood schools. She also serves as a board member of both the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children and Harlem Women Strong, and is a member of the Arise Coalition Literacy Committee. Most recently, she was appointed as a contributor to NYC Mayor Eric Adams Transition Team. In 2018, she was named as an A’leila Bundles Community Scholar at Columbia University to look at the intersection of dyslexia and mass incarceration and the role of universities in changing the trajectory of struggling readers. Debbie’s lengthy professional career is in nonprofit management and fundraising. She lives in Central Harlem with her [dyslexic] husband and son.

Posts By Debbie Meyer

Special Education

Bookmonsters Offers Helpful and Important Advice For Parents, But Here’s What It Won’t Tell You

There is no shortage of reading material on what parents can do to help their children learn to read. For some useful information, Natalie Wexler has authored “The Knowledge Gap” as well as a blog...

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Special Education

You Don't Just 'Raise' A Reader, You Have to Teach Kids to Read, Too

When I give presentations about dyslexia, I often illustrate how neurodiversity works by showing a chessboard. Some people can easily see all the patterns of moves on a chessboard and can play out a...

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Literacy

I Was There When Lucy Calkins Shifted Toward Cognitive Science

In October, national media reported on the remarkable shift toward phonics and away from 3-Cueing now under way for noted reading curriculum leader Lucy Calkins and the Teachers College Reading and...

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Special Education

I Learned How to Fight for My Child When He Couldn't Read. Now I Help Other Parents Do the Same.

Advocating for your own kid, or teaching other people—doctors, dentists, teachers, etc.—about your kid, is something you learn as you go along. Even if you don’t work with any single barrier for...

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student achievement

When It Comes to Teaching Reading, When Will We Get It Right?

This summer, it seems like nobody took time off from the debate about how best to teach children to read. Emily Hanford’s latest documentary explores how a debunked theory of cognition is still...

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School Choice

My Kid Had Tons of Background Knowledge, But He Couldn't Read Without Learning Phonics

When our son was born, my husband and I knew a lot about how to prepare him to be a reader. We knew how to speak parentese—the exaggerated, higher-pitched language that helps babies and toddlers...

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