Reading Recovery Revisited

School Administrator, Sept, 1997 by Richard Lee Colvin

Pinnell specifically disputes Shanahan's conclusions, saying he improperly eliminated evidence that showed Reading Recovery was working. But she acknowledges the program on its own is not enough to guarantee a successful reading program.

"It's going to take a comprehensive effort" that includes high-quality instruction in kindergarten and intensive training for teachers in grades 2 and 3, she says.

Still, Pinnell explains, the program is "extremely, almost unbelievably effective in taking 1st-grade children and moving those children up with an accelerated program ... in a very short time."

Convincing Evidence

Officials in the 5,500-student Adams County/Ohio Valley Local School District, 65 miles east of Cincinnati, don't need any convincing. The district was among the first in the country to use Reading Recovery 11 years ago. Last year, the district analyzed the performance of its former Reading Recovery pupils on the state's 4th-grade proficiency test and found that 70 percent of them passed all four parts of the test--a far higher passing percentage than among students in the district as a whole.

After seeing results such as those, district administrators decided to require all newly hired 1st-grade teachers to complete the year of intensive training needed to become a Reading Recovery teacher.

"Most Reading Recovery-trained teachers will tell you their attitude about teaching changes dramatically with the training," says Sheila Roush, the district's supervisor of elementary school curriculum and instruction. "They look at what the child can do more consistently, as opposed to looking at what the child cannot do and try to remediate that."

Steinhauser, an area superintendent in Long Beach, Calif., says his district this summer began requiring 3rd-graders who had not met the district's grade level standard for reading to attend a five week summer tutoring program. Few children required to attend the program came from the ranks of children who completed Reading Recovery.

Program advocates bristle at the implication that Reading Recovery is less successful than is claimed. They say that numerous studies have fond that the progress achieved by students while they are in the program are still noticeable at least two years later, although they acknowledge that by the 4th grade the benefits appear to recede. Still, they say that even though the program is costly, its track record justifies the expense.

Anne Allen, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is a Reading Recovery trainer who helps coordinate the program throughout the state. She says the program s cost is one of the first issues that comes up when she meets with superintendents. Rather than simply telling them how much they will have to spend to get a Reading Recovery program going, she helps them analyze how they currently spend their state and federal funds for remedial education and asks whether they are satisfied with the results. "Most of the time," she says, Reading Recovery services can be paid for "from existing funding sources."