Reading Recovery Revisited

School Administrator, Sept, 1997 by Richard Lee Colvin

The much-touted program for teaching readers at risk faces questions about its effectiveness and costs

To Chris Steinhauser, an administrator who is helping lead a multifront assault on poor reading performance in the 84,000-student Long Beach, Calif., Unified School District, Reading Recovery is an invaluable asset.

Teachers who go through the year of highly structured training that is the widely recognized program's hallmark learn to diagnose reading difficulties by watching their colleagues work with students behind a two-way mirror. And, he says, students who receive the program's intensive dose of tutoring in the first grade are less likely to be referred to special education, which keeps them from being stigmatized as failures while saving the school district money.

"It's the only program we have that I receive numerous letters from parents thanking us for it," says Steinhauser, an area superintendent in Long Beach, echoing the praise for Reading Recovery heard across the country from teachers and reading specialists who have been trained in the method.

On the opposite coast, administrators in the Wareham, Mass., school district on Cape Cod reached a markedly disparate conclusion. An independent evaluation of the program's effectiveness there found that fewer pupils were achieving Reading Recovery's goal of reaching the class average in reading skill than had been reported to the program's national headquarters at Ohio State University. Roughly half of those who completed the program still wound up in tutoring programs or special education--thus wiping out any financial savings that might have been reaped from catching those with reading problems before they fell too far behind.

As a result of that analysis, Wareham eliminated the program two years ago. The district replaced it with a mix of approaches for teaching reading in its three elementary schools, including one aimed at dyslexic children and one for those who need more help with phonics.

"Certainly, Reading Recovery met some of our students' needs," says Linda Medeiros Stevens, the district's director of curriculum and instruction.

The professional development component of the program continued to benefit teachers and their students even after the teachers returned to a classroom full of children instead of tutoring them one on one. However, Reading Recovery's overall benefits were not enough to justify its $2,500 per child cost, she says. And it has not been missed.

"We haven't lost any thing, we haven't gained any more, we're progressing with them as in the past," Medeiros Stevens says of her district's poorest readers.

Time for Scrutiny

That two very different districts--one large and urban and one small and suburban--in different parts of the country should have different experiences with an educational program might not seem all that surprising. But when the program in question has been touted by no less a luminary than First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, while claiming to have helped more than 100,000 students permanently overcome their reading difficulties, contradictory assessments of its effectiveness are worth sorting out.

Imported from New Zealand by Ohio State University in 1984, Reading Recovery has grown rapidly and in 1996-97 was operating at more than 9,800 public and private schools in 49 states, as well as in countries around the world. Driving its growth has been the hunger of school districts for more effective alternatives to traditional remedial programs as well as a way to reduce the rapidly rising costs of serving children identified as learning disabled simply because they are having difficulty learning to read.

But as the program has spread, it has drawn increasing scrutiny and criticism. In part, that's because of the program's rather astonishing promise that its tutors can take the lowest-performing students--children who enter 1st grade not knowing all of their letters, few if any letter sounds and only a handful of words by sight--and in the course of 12 to 20 weeks of daily, half-hour sessions bring 80 to 90 percent of them up to the class average.

Another claim made by Reading Recovery advocates in some of the program's literature--that most of those students who complete the program will not need further remediation--is all the more miraculous, if true.

Cost Factor

The second issue that raises eyebrows is the price tag. The teachers and university professors who are its acolytes calculate the program's cost at somewhere between $2,500 and $4,000 per student. But those who have looked at the same numbers in a different way--for example, by simply dividing a school district's expenditures by the number of children served--have come up with cost estimates of more than $9,000 per pupil over and above normal per-pupil spending.

Of course, such costs might be justified were they offset by savings elsewhere or even by gains in reading that could be sustained. Here, too, though, the picture is mixed. Some school districts have reported reducing special education referrals by a third or more and cutting the number of children retained in 1st grade. But others, such as Wareham, do not realize such a payoff. In fact, several studies have found that the gains made by children while in the program fade quickly and hardly can be detected by 4th grade.