A Bitter War Over Words : Backers Swear by Booming Remedial Reading Plan, but Critics Question Its Cost and Methods

Seated beside her teacher-turned-tutor, an impish first-grader named Irma pages through a picture book about bears, using the illustrations to guess at the words.

Behind a one-way glass, 10 veteran Los Angeles teachers--with several master’s degrees in reading among them--watch and take notes, looking for tricks to help them with their own struggling students.

The teachers will return to study the scene through the glass every week, and practice their techniques each day with four of their schools’ most confused first-graders.

And at the end of a year, they will be 10 more recruits for Reading Recovery, an internationally celebrated remediation program that is marching across the state into schools that are desperately seeking a safety net for failing students.

After five years of phenomenal growth, however, Reading Recovery has begun to meet resistance and become the most contentious front in California’s bitter philosophical war over how to teach children to read.

Although many teachers who have completed the yearlong training by Reading Recovery boast of dramatic gains made by their most difficult students, a growing number of critics are raising questions about the program’s cost, its long-term effectiveness and the soundness of its methods.

“This approach will do something, but it’s not going to take a kid as high as we could take them with a hard-core, systematic phonics program,” said Assemblyman Steve Baldwin (R-El Cajon), who chairs the Assembly’s Education Committee.

Created in the 1970s by a now-venerated New Zealand reading specialist named Marie Clay, Reading Recovery is used in 49 U.S. states and in other English-speaking countries around the world. In Clay’s view, a reader need only search for “what he thinks the text will say,” then check that interpretation by looking at the letters and words.

Advocates of phonics instruction say Clay downplays the essential difference between good and poor readers--their ability to instantly recognize words. Reading Recovery’s lessons are at odds, they say, with widely accepted research showing that what poor readers need most is practice in using letters and sounds to unlock the alphabetic code.

Moreover, critics say, the rush to embrace Reading Recovery--

for which California school districts are spending $80 million or more this year--is diverting attention from the central issue of improving classroom instruction so children will no longer need to “recover” from not being taught to read.

“I have a general frustration that it is our method of teaching reading that is setting up the kids to need a program like Reading Recovery,” said Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos).

Earlier this month, a joint legislative committee endorsed a request by Firestone and state Sen. Bill Leonard (R-San Bernardino) to have state officials examine the program, which school districts say costs as much as $7,000 per student--

more than tuition at most private schools-- because each teacher tutors only four students a day.

The high cost is leading some districts to pull the plug on the controversial program. “We have too many students who need support to become fluent readers, and for us to invest a large amount in a few doesn’t make sense to us,” said Leslie Pulliam, assistant superintendent of educational services in the San Bernardino City Unified School District, which decided this spring not to continue its Reading Recovery program next year.

Advocates contend that the actual cost of Reading Recovery--which is a trademarked, nonprofit program operated by a network of licensed, university-based training centers--is closer to $2,500 per pupil, if savings on remediation costs down the line are considered.

They say 70% to 80% of students who complete at least 60 of the daily half-hour tutoring sessions achieve the program’s goal of catching up to their peers and sustain that gain after the one-on-one help ends. Based on those results, the program is endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education.

“Reading Recovery is extremely, almost unbelievably effective in taking first-grade children and moving those children up with an accelerated program . . . in a very short time,” said Gay Su Pinnell, an Ohio State University professor who pioneered the method in the United States after studying it in New Zealand.

But independent researchers paint a different picture. Timothy Shanahan, director of the Center of Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, coauthored the most comprehensive review of Reading Recovery and concluded that its claims were inflated.

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As many as a third of the students who succeed in the program would have done so unaided, simply by virtue of growing older, he said. And other studies have found that many of the poorest readers are simply excluded from the program.

All but a handful of those who do gain from the program initially, Shanahan reported, fall behind again as they are asked to do more demanding reading.

“Reading Recovery isn’t a bad thing,” Shanahan said in an interview. “You just have to understand what it can do for you and what it can’t do. . . . Don’t make it an ogre or symbol of something, but don’t buy all their salesmanship and ads either.”

In California, however, Reading Recovery has already come to be seen as much more than it is--a relatively successful remedial reading program.

For advocates of returning more phonics to classrooms, Reading Recovery is a symbolic vestige of the state’s ill-fated plunge into the “whole language” philosophy, which relies more on literature and writing, rather than phonics drills, to teach reading skills.

And the furor over Reading Recovery has caused legislators who would normally advocate allowing school districts the discretion to chart their own course to seek, instead, to step in and dictate curriculum decisions.

“I’m not crazy about putting on mandates, but if I’m going to mandate anything, it’s going to be in favor of not funding processes and methodologies that we know do not work as well as others,” Assemblyman Baldwin said.

Statements such as that have caused Reading Recovery teachers, unaccustomed to debating curriculum issues in Sacramento, to rise to the program’s defense.

“We’re working with the most at-risk populations in the most at-risk schools, and . . . in my 18 years of teaching, this has been the most powerful intervention for children,” said Cindy Jacobsen, a Visalia Reading Recovery teacher trainer.

She was among legions of Reading Recovery advocates who wrote to Baldwin objecting to his efforts to prohibit the state’s schools from spending any public money on the program.

Baldwin, under pressure from parents and teachers, dropped that effort, but set the stage for a battle later this year by inserting language in the state budget being signed this week that outlaws spending on any program that teaches children to guess words instead of sounding them out.

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Reading Recovery proponents say that provision will not affect them. “Nobody would ever encourage children to skip and guess,” Jacobsen said. “One of the things we work very hard on in early lessons is teaching children to look at the print.”

Also in Reading Recovery’s court is state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, who kicked off the state’s reexamination of reading instruction a year ago, after national tests showed that 60% of the state’s fourth-graders were reading at below basic levels--leaving California tied with Louisiana for last place among the 39 states tested.

“I’m fascinated by [legislators] . . . who would inject themselves in such an uninformed way into preventing districts from using a program that many of them have found very successful,” Eastin said. “This is really not a far out, weird approach, and I hope it is not falling into some kind of partisan backlash but rather is being thoughtfully debated.”

Sen. Leonard said he asked for the state audit, in part, because Reading Recovery has been promoted and partly financed by the state Department of Education, with little independent proof of its worth.

“If the state is going to promote a program as a panacea, there should be a testing mechanism in place to determine if it is cost-effective and whether it produces what it promises,” said Leonard, in a letter to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee.

The questions being raised about Reading Recovery come just as the state’s yearlong effort to reshape reading instruction, teacher training and textbook selection gathers momentum.

A panel convened by Eastin last September concluded that the state had gone astray in the late 1980s when it downplayed the importance of teaching children to use letters to sound out and recognize individual words.

Now, reading instruction in the state is undergoing a sea change, as the State Board of Education, the governor’s office and the Legislature embrace the drive to bring phonics back to the classroom.

That has intensified scrutiny of Reading Recovery, which was brought to the state five years ago and now involves 2,500 teachers serving 18,500 first-graders in more than 400 California school districts.

“I’ve believed all along that we have some classroom instruction problems and that’s why Reading Recovery is such a booming business,” said Stanley Swartz, a special education professor at Cal State San Bernardino who helped bring the program to California and who now directs Reading Recovery statewide.

“A number of us were looking for an early intervention program, and Reading Recovery was the best one going,” he said, “and so far we haven’t changed our minds.”

The retreat from the program has dismayed and perplexed Reading Recovery teachers up and down the state, many of whom “become zealots to the point that it’s almost scary,” Swartz said. Teachers say the program has helped them experience a sort of professional epiphany--allowing them to help students thrive who, in the past, languished.

In Poway, referrals to special education dropped by half at some schools that were using Reading Recovery. In Long Beach, officials said students in the program, on the whole, were reading better than the class average even four years later.

And they say the year spent watching students through the glass helped them learn more about the reading process than they had throughout their teaching career.

Teresa Johnson, a teacher leader at Miramonte Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles, said the campaign against Reading Recovery is “an attack and an inquisition.”

Johnson was the first teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District to become a Reading Recovery teacher, and she led the training session featuring Irma and her tutor, Myra Zimmer, a teacher at Wilmington Park School.

The district came to Reading Recovery relatively late. It trained its first cadre of teachers this year and plans to train 72 more next year.

“I don’t recall that Baldwin or his committee have ever taught in South-Central or had a child cry and cry because they can’t write their name. And yet they can tell me how to teach children?” Johnson said. “How dare they do that.”

When Irma started receiving tutoring four months earlier, she did not know all of her letters and was barely able to recognize any words. Now, she can read simple texts.

“She’s getting meaning out of the story,” commented one teacher watching her recent lesson through the glass. “Thank goodness for pictures,” said another, aware that Irma still has far to go.

For example, when Irma came to a word that was difficult to figure out from the picture--the noun “things”--she was stumped. She studied the picture, then tried “flower.” Then “stuff.” Zimmer asked her about the “th” sound. Finally, Zimmer told her the word.

“This word pushes her use of the ‘visual’ to the limit,” said Johnson, using the term Reading Recovery uses for the alphabet. To be successful, Johnson said, Irma will have to get better at recognizing and using letters.

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But G. Reid Lyon, who oversees reading research for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and will supervise the first-ever scientific study of the program next year, said such a lesson represents “a departure from what we know” from dozens of research studies.

“The part of the brain that responds to picture cues is not the same brain system that responds to [letters],” Lyon said. Encouraging students to “roam around the print to get at the meaning of words they don’t know is a dangerous element. They need to go after them phonemically and figure them out.”

The battle over Reading Recovery has had the unfortunate effect of alienating teachers who, in many districts, will be at the forefront of efforts to revamp the entire reading curriculum. It also has angered administrators of many school districts, such as those in Poway, San Diego and Long Beach, who find themselves battling the Legislature to keep a program they believe is working.

The dispute also has split former members of Eastin’s reading task force, who are prominent on either side of the issue.

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Help for Weak Readers

Reading Recovery is tutorial program aimed at briefing the lowest 20% of first-graders up to the class average in reading, using 12 weeks of daily, 30-minute one-on-one reading sessions.

Elements of a Standard Reading Recovery Session

* Child rereads a familiar book, Reading Recovery relies heavily on short “predictable” books with repeated phrases and colorful pictures. The phrases--such as “Daddy cooks ...”--and pictures help beginners feel they are reading.

* The teacher takes a “running record” of the performance, noting which types of words give the student trouble.

* The pupil spends a few minutes using magnetic letters to spell out a problem word or two.

* The pupil makes up a sentence and dictates it to the teacher, who writes it out by identifying the letter sounds in each word.

* The teacher then writes the sentence onto a strip of paper, cuts it up and directs the pupil to rearrange the words in the proper order and then read the sentence.

* The teacher introduces a new book, talking about the story and words the pupil might encounter. The child reads the book using a combination of cues--sounding out words, looking at pictures and determining whether the words make sense.

Pros

* Starts early, before children think of themselves as failures.

* Teachers are well trained, undergoing a year of weekly observation sessions.

* More successful than other types of remediation at bringing pupils back to class average.

Cons

* Costly, as much as $7,000 per student.

* Not consistent with widely accepted research on how children learn to read.

In Dispute

* Success rate.

* Whether gains persist over time.

Level of Acceptance

* In 1995-96 in California, 2,500 teachers in 400 school districts served 18,500 students.