Word of Honor

Charles Schwab, the millionaire discount stockbroker, doesn’t read for pleasure. Never has. Never will.

For him, letters seem like abstract objects scattered across the page. If he were to read an unfamiliar text, such as a novel, or this story, it would take him so long to tease the letters into a recognizable pattern that the meaning of the phrase or the sentence would likely escape the first few times he labored through it.

Schwab has dyslexia, by far the most common of the learning disabilities related to spoken or written language. But, growing up, he didn’t know he had a handicap. He only knew that he read terribly slowly and could barely write. Yet, he managed.

“I didn’t ever think I was stupid,” said the still boyishly handsome 58-year-old Schwab, who avoided the debilitating self-esteem problems experienced by many who have learning disabilities. “I’m real good at concepts and visualization. I get into a meeting with business associates and I can process all kinds of stuff and get to the conclusion much faster than other people who have to go step by step, processing things sequentially.”

In school, he was outgoing, enabling him to befriend teachers, who were patient with him because they thought he had potential. He captained the golf team at his Santa Barbara high school and his sweet swing attracted the attention of the Stanford University golf coach. There, he flunked French and, twice, basic English. But he made up for it by doing well in quantitative and technical courses, such as math, economics and chemistry.

A lifetime of quietly and successfully coping, however, came to an end a dozen years ago when Helen and Charles Schwab acted on their suspicions about their son’s learning difficulties in fourth grade. His teachers, expressing a common and misguided view, tried to convince them that he was developing slowly but not abnormally and that he would eventually catch up. But they had him tested anyway and found that he was dyslexic and two grades behind in his reading level.

It was only then that the elder Schwab finally had a name for his own reading difficulties. “I had all the same issues when I was a kid going through school but they didn’t have a name for it,” he said. “You put two and two together and think, ‘Wow, where did he get it?’ It doesn’t come through the water system.”

Now, new research is confirming a genetic link.

Schwab and his wife, Helen, try to preserve their son’s privacy by not using his first name. He is currently a sophomore at a Southern California college and continues to have difficulty with his reading disability--as do about 3% of college students nationally.

The Schwabs are anything but private, however, when talking about the difficulty they had finding teachers and experts knowledgeable about their son’s condition and arranging the help he needed. “It was a bewildering time,” Helen Schwab recalled. “It’s scary, when you think there’s something that can be done for your child but you don’t know what it is and there isn’t one place for you to go to for help.”

It took the Schwabs three years of tests, research, and meetings with teachers and other experts to find the school, tutors and related services their son needed. It was a frustrating process, even for a family as well-educated and well-off as they were. And it isn’t over yet. Coping is still difficult at times.

But out of it came a desire to help other parents benefit from what they had learned. So, in 1987, the Schwabs set up the Parents Educational Resource Center in San Mateo, south of San Francisco. Operating on a $1 million annual budget from the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, the center helps 1,000 families a month learn about dyslexia and evaluate schools and the tutors and services the public schools are obligated to provide.

Last year, the center began reaching out to parents beyond the immediate Bay Area by assembling “Bridges to Reading,” a $20, user-friendly package of pamphlets, audiotapes and checklists that offers the latest information on dyslexia as well as practical, well-tested tips and strategies.

Last month, the center and the Schwab foundation unveiled the nation’s first Resource Collection for Learning Differences in a public library at the new San Francisco Main Library. The collection includes audio- and videotapes, printed materials and an online database of information and referrals. Also available are voice-operated computers to make the library more accessible to the learning disabled.

Each of the projects is aimed at arming parents with information they need to be effective advocates for their children. “If a child is going to be successful, he or she needs a parent to really pave the road,” Charles Schwab said.

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Schwab’s father was an assistant district attorney, his mother a homemaker. The Catholic schools he attended growing up near Chico, before moving to Santa Barbara, emphasized drills and basic skills, the kind of instruction he needed.

At Stanford, he got by with the help of roommates and friends who took notes for him because he found it impossible to listen to a lecture and write down what was being said. He then attended Stanford’s business school, which he said was easier for him than the general curriculum because it focused on subjects for which he knew the vocabulary.

After graduating in 1961, he and two associates started an investment advisory newsletter, which grew into a $20-million mutual fund. The company fell apart after the stock market tumbled in 1969.

Schwab, then $100,000 in debt, borrowed money from an uncle to start a stock brokerage that eventually became the San Francisco-based Charles Schwab Co. In 1975, the company began discounting its fee and took off. Schwab sold it in 1983 to raise expansion capital but bought it back four years later for $324 million in cash and securities. Six months later he took the company public in an offering that valued it at $100 million more than he paid for it.

His holdings last year were valued at $825 million.

Schwab said he believed it was fortunate for him, in a way, that his disability was not identified until after he had achieved great success. “I just dealt with it,” he said. “I worked extremely hard at things and I didn’t understand what failure was about.”

Now, however, the competition to get into top colleges is far more demanding. Classes are large and teachers have little time to give students special attention. And modern instructional techniques that downplay basic skills may make it more difficult for dyslexic students to learn.

When the problems of their son--the youngest of five children, three of whom are from Charles Schwab’s first marriage--surfaced, Helen Schwab panicked. Then she set about to find out what to do, which involved visits to specialists, doctors, testing experts and others.

“If you sense that your child has a problem, you have to go after it and try to ferret out the best answers,” she said.

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But that is not easily done. Although learning disabilities are common, they are poorly understood. A Roper national survey released last year found that 80% of Americans associated learning disabilities with mental retardation although, in fact, there is no connection. Shockingly, the same survey found that 70% of teachers were similarly misinformed.

Another survey, by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, found that only 10% of the nation’s teachers believe they know how to help children with learning disabilities. And teachers say they feel most inadequate when it comes to dealing with the severe reading problems, or dyslexia, that is manifest in more than 85% of learning disability cases.

In the past, it was thought that dyslexics had vision problems that caused them to see the mirror image of some letters or numbers. Now, however, dyslexia is defined broadly as the inability to identify words.

G. Reid Lyon, director of learning disabilities research at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, says dyslexics have trouble breaking words down into sounds.

“There is no quick fix to this,” Lyon said. “Teaching children to read who have learning difficulties is extraordinarily difficult.”

What seems to work best, he said, is “explicit, direct instruction in the sounds of our language and phonics,” especially if it is begun in the first grade or even earlier.

Unfortunately, that type of instruction disappeared in many California classrooms in 1987, when the state introduced a new, literature-based approach to teaching reading.

Last fall, a panel appointed by California Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin called for a return of so-called direct instruction. But that idea is meeting resistance despite pressure from the Legislature and the state Board of Education.

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Meanwhile, parents continue to be duped into buying one miracle cure or another. Alexa Culwell, the executive director of the Parents Educational Resource Center, said desperate parents are being taken advantage of by entrepreneurs selling hope in the form of shaking beds, colored eyeglass lenses, chiropractic treatments and regimens involving staring at flickering candles. None of those work.

“Parents have no idea that this is a lifelong issue,” Culwell said.

Rather than seducing them with quick fixes, the center helps parents help their children develop a wide range of strategies, including alternatives to reading as a means of learning. For example, dyslexic students learn better if they develop their ability to listen carefully, ask questions, create explicit mental images of an idea and improve their memory by discussing or applying new information.

Lyon said the center’s comprehensive approach “has been a godsend to parents and kids” because it gives them expertise that teachers and administrators often lack. “Hopefully the awareness will sift on through to the teacher preparation institutions.”