Remedial Reading Program’s Failing Grade Disputed : Education: The four schools involved in the experimental classes say the program was helping. They vow to continue it in some form with their own money.

Teachers and principals who run an experimental remedial reading program for seventh-graders in San Diego city schools say it deserves to continue, and they strongly dispute a negative evaluation that school trustees used last month to kill the project.

Personnel at the four schools piloting the special one-semester reading classes believe the program both improves skills and boosts the desire to read, and they were shocked that school trustees decided to terminate the program effective this summer after receiving the evaluation department report on Dec. 5.

If anything, the teachers say that specially funded reading programs such as the pilot should be expanded, not reduced--since the number of students unable or unwilling to read adequately is growing disproportionately in the district, the nation’s eighth-largest urban school system. All four schools said they will continue some version of the pilot with their own money next year.

The disagreement over the evaluation illustrates the extraordinary difficulty of objectively rating the success of school programs. In part, this reflects a customary tension between those who work at individual schools and those who work in the central schools office.

The frustration also indicates a growing suspicion among many principals and teachers that evaluation department reports are used by trustees as political weapons in the debate over how to improve education, rather than by administrators to help individual campuses improve their programs.

Several San Diego trustees have passed the word privately to top administrators that they want more hard-hitting reports, and the school board expressed glee last month when the reading pilot evaluation concluded that the project should not be continued.

More than a month after the board action, no one at any of the four sites has received a copy of the report, nor has anyone from the evaluation department visited them to share the findings and discuss whether they make sense to those who are on the front lines of the project.

But, after learning of the report’s contents last week from a reporter, these teachers and principals strongly criticized its methodology, several statements of fact concerning the training of teachers and the nature of books and materials used, and the conclusions.

The principal of Correia Junior High School, after reading the report’s recommendations, said they struck him as having been written “by someone on a teeter-totter, they’re just so silly.”

At issue is the 3-year-old seventh-grade reading pilot at four schools picked to reflect ethnic groups and income levels: Bell Junior High in Paradise Hills; Correia Junior High in Point Loma; Standley Junior High in University City and Wilson Middle School in East San Diego. It was funded by $101,000 annually.

Students found to be reading two or more years below grade level--as measured by a standardized test and teacher evaluations--are given a special one-semester class to build vocabulary and improve reading comprehension and to encourage reading for enjoyment.

Special reading materials and teacher training, and small classes--15 students or so, fewer than half the number in typical junior-high classes--are key elements for the pilot, which at an hour daily involved about 90 hours of instruction across a semester.

The sole measurement used to determine improvement was an old standardized test for comprehension and vocabulary, no longer given for general reading assessment in the district, but used in the pilot because of ease in administering and grading.

Positive Results

During the first two years of the program, evaluations were uniformly positive, with the second-year report concluding that, “for two consecutive years, (the pilot) has produced consistently positive results, in student achievement and attitudes as well as in teacher and parent satisfaction.”

Yet evaluators took a much more equivocal stance in their report last month.

It did state initially that “results for all three years have shown consistently that students receiving extra reading instruction significantly improve their achievement on vocabulary and reading comprehension in one semester--and that those not taking reading do not improve.”

But two pages later, in comparing test scores of students who took the course and those who needed the course but did not take it, the report found that those in the class “did not perform (significantly) better (statistically) than those not taking” the class.

The evaluation also criticized teachers for not having a uniform method of teaching the course, for not being sufficiently trained in the latest research on how students learn to read, and for not having sufficient reading specialist backgrounds.

The department’s bottom line was that the pilot had not proved successful enough to be expanded to other schools, and that student achievement should have been greater for the program to continue.

Top administrators, after looking at the report, felt “there is not enough evidence to support a districtwide approach” using general funds, said assistant schools Supt. Al Cook, who oversaw the program. Asked about the strong criticism coming from the schools, Cook said, “As you know, the evaluation department has built up a lot of credibility over the years . . . and a lot of board members have been critical of reports citing students and teachers saying good things about programs.”

He added, “And we know that some schools will continue their own reading classes” using their own discretionary funds.

Indeed, all four sites will do so in some form, but the principals and teachers say the district should continue providing extra funds because the evaluation report is flawed.

“The evaluators always asked, ‘Why can’t you get scores higher?’ ” said Jean Payne, the reading teacher at Correia. “But there’s usually much more involved with these kids than just reading problems, and you first have to persuade the kid that he’s not a total academic flop, which he’s been told over and over.

“That takes a while to overcome, and yet we only have them for one semester. How can the evaluators make such precise measures? Why didn’t they measure the fact that several of my students went out and got library cards on their own? That could be much more important long term, that they want to read, that some have checked out more books on the same author we used in class.”

Both Payne and the teacher at Standley, Carlene Barros, were highly praised by Maria Benedict, a Standley vice principal on leave this year to help run a leadership academy for the San Diego County Office of Education.

“They might not have specialized credentials but they are both exceptional and certainly brought these kids much, much further along they they would be otherwise,” Benedict said. The students in Barros’s class put together a class magazine at the end of the semester.

Payne’s principal, Mike Lorch, said that evaluators did not ask “whether kids got into reading, whether they enjoyed it? That is as important, especially when we have so many families today who don’t read and it’s up to the schools to instill the willingness.”

Lorch mocked the report’s recommendations that call for schools to continue to help students improve in reading, try to keep class sizes small and train teachers in reading remediation based on next year’s language arts curriculum, which emphasizes literature for kindergarten through eighth grades. “That was being done anyway,” he said.

In fact, Kermeen Fristrom, district basic education director who helped pick the books and training methods for the pilot, said the materials and teaching methods were along the lines of the latest research.

“I believe some unwarranted conclusions were drawn here” by the evaluation, Fristrom said. Fristrom himself did not see the report until the day it came before trustees.

Research Data

At the time the report came to the school board, trustee Shirley Weber asked in frustration, “The report says that we should use research-based strategies . . . what were we doing here if we weren’t doing that?”

The district evaluator who wrote the report, Donna Davis, told the board then that the new curriculum “may show better ways” of teaching reading. Told last week that pilot administrators say they were using the latest research data, Davis said she had assumed that the pilot was using books and readings different from those planned for the district next year.

Davis said that evaluators must remain objective about the programs they are required to review and, although she does not discount comments from teachers and students, “objective measurements” carry the most weight.

Another assistant superintendent, Eloisa Cisneros, said: “I agree with the teachers here . . . and I wonder if the evaluation department is on the same wavelength with those in the classroom. There is no evidence that the new language arts adoption will address the needs of these (at-risk) students any better . . . we’ll be right back to look at the same type of class we have now.”

In saying that students in the course failed to show wide enough overall gains over those not taking the course, the evaluation threw out results from vocabulary tests because those gains were too significant. Schools such as Wilson, with large numbers of students needing reading help, put their lowest-scoring students into first-semester remediation classes, thereby skewing comparisons, the report said.

Wilson Vice Principal Beth Limoli called the criticism unfair, saying she and Principal Kimiko Fukuda should not be expected to withhold help for such students for an extra semester so that evaluators could enjoy a cleaner methodology.

“No one came out and told us this was a major problem, and we still don’t know how our kids tested regarding any comparisons,” Limoli said.

Scores Skewed

Davis conceded that the comparisons between the two groups of students are not precise because those students not taking the course scored higher on earlier tests than those who later took the course.

“That does make it more difficult later to show significant differences” for achievement between the two groups of students, she said.

Wilson’s Fukuda said, “You don’t need a study to know that smaller class size and individual attention have an impact.” And she agreed with principal Bernie Calderon at Standley, who said that any criticism of the pilot should focus “on the fact that it is only a Band-Aid. . . . I’m not surprised if there wasn’t more success given the (pilot’s) limitations.”

Calderon began a second reading class last fall with his own school funds, in addition to Standley’s one pilot class, because of increasing numbers of students reading below grade level. Jody Bruhn, principal at Bell, also set up extra classes.

“The concept of the pilot limiting us to just one single way of teaching is unrealistic,” said Gail Marshall, Bell reading teacher. “And it’s criminal to do it only for one semester.”

Although chances for reinstatement of the pilot appear dim, Fristrom said the “willingness of teachers to talk on the record pleases me because the most important people, the teachers and the kids, have seen this program as worthwhile, and that is not always the case with programs.”