Secondary School Reading: Specialists in high school may be rare, but districts see great potential - Statistical Data Included

School Administrator, Jan, 2002 by Linda Blackford

Supply and Demand

While school districts soon may realize the benefits of putting reading specialists in middle and high schools, they may face a rather immediate problem. Plenty of elementary teachers are trained as reading specialists, but fewer high school teachers have the same forte. English teachers are not necessarily prepared to teach reading.

That's what Fayette County faced when it decided to place the specialists in secondary schools in 1999. It was an unusual dilemma for a school district that usually has an ample supply of educators but no money to hire them. The reverse was true this time.

School districts turned to their hometown University of Kentucky for help. They asked professors at the College of Education to design a short-term program for secondary teachers that would train them to address the unique reading problems in middle and high schools. The district paid for 18 teachers to take the classes.

To gain this endorsement, the reading teachers needed to complete a minimum of 18 hours of classes, including reading research, diagnosis of reading difficulties and reading remediation.

Mary Shake, an associate professor of education who helped design the program, says that most of the demand is still from the Fayette County schools, but she expects more teachers from outlying districts.

Part of the supply problem stems from the fact that nationally many reading specialists were laid off in the 1980s, said Vicki Jacobs, associate director of Harvard's teacher education program. But in recent years, she's seeing more students train as reading specialists and land jobs in middle and high schools.

In Texas, the supply may start to meet the demand, thanks to a legislative-funded program that encourages reading and language arts teachers to take a series of courses that allows them to become master reading teachers who can be hired at all levels, with the added inducement of a $5,000 salary bonus.

"It's an effort to raise the reading scores of all Texas schoolchildren, at all grades," says Carolyn Smyrl, who directs the Master Reading Teacher Program for the Texas Education Agency.

Shake, too, expects the demand for specialists to grow slowly as more educators realize how much help students need with reading. "Vocabulary, comprehension, the reading-writing connection--time and again, people are saying that students get to high school without these kinds of skills to be successful and that's having a dramatic effect on performance," she says.

While some critics want to blame elementary schools for not instilling those skills, Shake says that educators must accept that reading education must continue past elementary school. "We cannot make assumptions that students know everything they need to know about literacy by the time they finish 5th grade. We don't make that assumption about any other subject."

Linda Blackford is an education writer with the Lexington Herald-Leader in Lexington, Ky.