Reading Reform: The answer for many districts: staff development and more staff development - Statistical Data Included

School Administrator, Jan, 2002 by Donna Harrington-Lueker

When it came to early literacy, Superintendent Eric Newton knew his Green River, Wyo., school district was leaving children behind. After all, until two years ago, the district's only intervention for young readers was the pullout program in its two Title I elementary schools. Teachers and students at the district's other schools operated largely without a safety net.

After careful research and months of ongoing professional development, though, the 3,400-student rural school district today has the ability to intervene early and often to help children who are struggling with learning to read. "We just knew it was important to intervene when problems started, not when a child was in the 3nd or 4th grade," says Newton.

Working with a professor at the University of Northern Colorado, the district has adopted an approach to early intervention that targets 1st-graders and draws on the work of New Zealand literacy expert Marie Clay, whose research helped to develop Reading Recovery.

Using surveys and techniques, some of which were developed by Clay, teachers at the beginning of the school year assess every 1st-grader's ability to identify letters, recognize vocabulary words or demonstrate basic concepts of print, such as where the top and bottom of the pages are. Children who score lowest on such assessments then work one-on-one with teachers for 30 minutes each day, five days a week, until they're reading on grade level with their peers. During these sessions, teachers track the child's progress and identify specific problems he or she may have, such as difficulty sounding out a word using phonics or figuring out the word from context. They then tailor their sessions to meet that child's needs.

The result of the new intervention: By the end of the year, nearly all students who have received the extra help have caught up with their peers, says Jan McIntosh, the Green River district's Title I director. And the K-2 teachers who have been trained in the intervention say they have begun to use the new strategies in their regular classrooms as well, reaching even more students. (Twenty of the district's 30 K-2 teachers have completed the training.) Teachers also have developed a common vocabulary for talking about reading, and that consistency is a plus for Green River s program, says McIntosh.

It's the reaction of 2nd-grade teachers, though, that has convinced the district that its commitment to early intervention has been on the mark. "They're telling us that the children are so much more prepared," says Joyce Hart, a K-1 teacher in the district.

High Hopes

Nationwide, districts like Green River are looking critically at their reading programs, and they're doing so for good reason: At a time when children are being asked to work harder and smarter and when high-stakes assessments carry significant consequences for schools and teachers, reading scores remain stagnant.

According to results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, reading scores among the nation's 4th-graders haven't improved since 1992. More disturbing, experts note, the gap between white students and minorities, rich students and poor, persists and appears to be growing. White students had an average score of 226 points on a scale of 500 on the most recent NAEP test compared to 197 points for Hispanic students and 193 points for African-Americans. Overall, too, slightly less than 40 percent of students failed to meet even a basic level, the lowest ranking on the NAEP scale. At the same time, the gap between the students who score highest on the test and those who score lowest continues to increase.

International assessments are also troubling. While U.S. 4th-graders rank near the top in reading scores in such assessments, by 11th grade students' cores put U.S. schools near the bottom of the pack.

"It's just a great concern with our districts," says Paula Egelson, literacy project director for SERVE, a federal education laboratory working with states in the Southeast. "If you're talking about student achievement, you're talking about reading."

States share that concern. According to the Denver-based Education Commission of the States, several states have passed significant literacy initiatives in the past few years. Among the steps they've taken are requiring schools to assess the skills of young readers, improving professional development opportunities for teachers and imposing consequences, such as summer school or extra reading classes, for students who don't meet state standards.

This year, too, Congress is expected to keep the national spotlight on reading by passing President George W. Bush's $5 billion Reading First initiative--a federal program that could leverage significant changes in the nation's classrooms, especially in Title I schools. At the heart of that bill, many say, is a commitment to making phonics an explicit and systematic part of reading programs in the primary grades (see related story, page 8).

Training Teachers

What steps have school districts taken to improve their reading programs? Some have opted for midcourse corrections. They've kept their basic approach to reading but invested in additional training or techniques that help them reach more children. Others are making wholesale changes and starting from scratch with new reading series, new training sessions, new approaches to reading. And all are finding that the effort involves considerable commitment, especially to ongoing staff development.