Turning the tide - Orange County, FL, school district raises reading scores of students by up to two grade levels annually

Instructor, May-June, 1999 by Patrick Daley

Find it hard to believe that a school district could raise the reading scores of struggling students by as much as two grade levels each year? Orange County, Florida, has - and the stunning achievement continues

Every time we turn around, we seem to be facing a challenging new educational mandate. In recent years it has been "all children must read by third grade." In the past few months, we've been hearing "no more social promotions."

For those of us working with struggling older students, mandates like these beg the question: What happens to the students who are past third grade and still can't read - or at least can't read anywhere near grade level?

Twenty years ago, as a new fourth-grade teacher, I was confident that my struggling readers would soon "unlock the code" to reading success. Years later, as a reading specialist at a junior high school, I realized that these older students were a lot less motivated than my fourth graders. The gulf between their reading abilities and those of their peers had widened dramatically, and their trust in the learning process had been deeply damaged. As many educators have come to realize, it takes extreme measures to change such students' lives.

The exhilarating news for all of us is that these kinds of measures are being developed all over the country - and they are working. One of the most stunning examples of reading intervention is Florida's Orange County Literacy Project. Its incredible success has far-reaching implications for any educator concerned with promoting literacy.

The project combines two main features. The first is the Peabody Learning Lab, an interactive software system designed by Ted Hasselbring, Ed.D., professor of special education at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, in Tennessee, and co-chair of the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt. The second is the literacy-workshop model developed by Janet Allen, Ed.D., associate professor of education at the University of Central Florida, and described in her book There's Room for Me Here (Stenhouse Publishers, 1997). The results of this combined approach: phenomenal.

Closing the Reading Gap

The statistics from the Orange County Literacy Project show that participating students have begun to close the seemingly insurmountable gap between their reading skills and those of their peers. Vanderbilt researchers collected data for the first two years of the project, in 1994-95 and in 1995-96.

In 1995-96, a group of 376 students in grades six through eight were tested using the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Tests. The mean score of the students rose from a grade level of 4.0 to 4.5 on vocabulary and from a grade level of 2.6 to 3.6 on reading comprehension. Grade-point averages for the same group of students rose from a mean of.00 in 1994 to 2.3 in 1996. Discipline and attendance improved dramatically - from 87.2 percent to 92.9 percent.

Starting in 1996-97, the program, previously used in 12 middle schools, was implemented in all middle schools districtwide. The Degrees of Reading Power, a standardized test, was administered to all 1,900 students in grades four to nine enrolled in the literacy project. The data from that year and 1997-98 show that these students have made almost twice as much progress as the national norm.

More than 10,000 students overall have participated in the Orange County program since its inception in 1994, gaining on average one to two years' growth in their reading grade level each year. For students who have never known success, this improvement is remarkable. How did it happen?

A Radical Solution

In 1993 Orange County administrators became alarmed by rising discipline and truancy problems. Rose Taylor, Ph.D., director of secondary education in the county, researched and reported: "We don't have a truancy problem. We don't have a discipline problem. What we have here in Orange County is a literacy problem." Illiteracy was identified as the root cause of failure in many subject areas, resulting in low self-esteem, discipline issues, and truancy.

Orange County set out to create an intervention program with the support of Drs. Hasselbring and Allen, and the literacy project was launched in 1994. The district's first initiative was to commit to 90 minutes of uninterrupted literacy work each day for participating sixth- to ninth-grade students, conducted in classes of 20 or fewer. Students combined their 45-minute language arts block with a 45-minute elective block. As Dr. Allen put it, "We can't go on 'business as usual.' These students have missed years of instruction. To close the gap, we need to give them more." Each classroom got five computers capable of running the Peabody Learning Lab software. Every teacher underwent three to five days of professional development, including software training.

The Program in Action

Typically, a 90-minute literacy-workshop block begins and ends with whole-group instruction for 20 and 10 minutes, respectively, including time for the teacher to read aloud to the students. In between the whole-group activities, groups of five students rotate through individual reading activities: instructional reading with the software, modeled or independent reading with audiobooks or paperbacks, and small-group instruction with the teacher, including reading and writing mini-lessons, guided reading sessions, and software and literature discussions.