February 2006

New Perspective on Learning Disabilities

Almost all of the information about learning disabilities comes in books, notes Ben Foss, MBA/JD ’03. “Which, if you think about it for about 30 seconds, makes no sense.”

Foss, who is severely dyslexic, started the Initiative for Learning Identities (ILI) to develop a sense of community and self-advocacy in adults with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and other learning disabilities.

“The whole thing has been framed historically as an educational issue,” he says. “But it’s no more an educational issue than blindness is an educational issue. It has an impact on education and how you learn, but it’s not something you’re going to teach yourself out of.”

The objective of ILI is to build the identity of people with learning disabilities, put useful information into film and audio books, and work with business leaders to smooth their path in the workplace. ILI has completed three films. One, a half-hour documentary called Headstrong, will be used by the National Institute for Literacy to train government employees and will be distributed to local TV stations by American Public Television. Donald Petersen, MBA ’49, was a major funder of Headstrong, and Chloe Sladden, MBA ’02, documentary director for ILI, was co-executive producer.

The Stanford connection has proved important to Foss. The university provided the technology to download all his law and business texts into a computer that read them back. Foss was inspired by Charles Schwab, MBA ’61, arguably the Business School’s most famous graduate with dyslexia, and encouraged in his work at ILI by Dean Robert Joss and John Morgridge, MBA ’57.

Foss’s plans are ambitious. “Two years from now,” he says, “when a 15-year-old kid in Dubuque is diagnosed as dyslexic, I want his mother to know to go to iliweb.org and order a packet of DVDs that will tell him: Here’s the history of your community, here’s some technology that will work for you, here’s how you talk to your teacher, here’s what your legal rights are, here’s how frustrated and isolated and angry you are, and here’s why that’s OK.”

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