A Lack of Knowledge at the Top

In the waning hours of the last Los Angeles Board of Education meeting, members were offered a Hobson’s choice: If they wanted to salvage a controversial reading tutorial program at 62 elementary schools that had already cost $2 million, they would have to spend another $1.2 million and dilute the impact of class-size reduction efforts in kindergartens.

The threat to such a program was a sensitive dilemma in a district where students need all the help they can get--a district in which only one in three third-graders reads at grade level.

But the dilemma did not have to occur at all.

The story of why the school board found itself in such a fix--one that it will continue debating at its next meeting Monday night--is a sobering lesson in the way decisions are often made in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

As is so often the case, district staff members gave the board only a scant glimpse of the problem at hand and, in essence, asked them to act on faith.

And as is so often the case, those board members who dared push for clarification encountered both criticism from their board colleagues and a lack of solid information from district staff.

For example, when board member David Tokofsky suggested that he couldn’t vote on the reading tutorial program without more information, he was accused by board member Vickie Castro of “micro-managing.”

Another board member, Barbara Boudreaux, argued that because Tokofsky and the other board critics had never taught elementary school, they didn’t know what they were talking about. (Tokofsky is a former high school social studies teacher.)

A similar lack of knowledge permeated the Board of Education’s rancorous debate last year over district policy for African American speech patterns, known as ebonics, which dragged on without ever including an evaluation of the district’s various methods for teaching mainstream English to African American students.

The same information void has plagued the board’s handling of bilingual education, which administrators say prepares Spanish-speaking students better for the latter grades--despite the fact that the district has never done an independent study of the long-term effects of bilingual education.

Although many school board debates include the rhetoric of making decisions “for the children,” school board members are far more likely to squabble about politics, budgets and buildings than about how specific decisions will trickle down to students.

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The Oct. 20 board meeting in question involved the fate of Reading Recovery, a remedial program aimed at improving the reading skills of the weakest 10% of first-graders.

The board was asked to spend $1.2 million to eliminate a serious threat to the tutoring program: Inadvertently, the very teachers trained in Reading Recovery techniques had been snatched away from the program because of a vote the board had made in August to add kindergarten classes to the statewide class-size reduction movement.

Only at the October meeting did board members learn of the consequence of that August vote: Once again, they had voted without enough information, and as a result their $2-million reading investment was in jeopardy.

What the board had done in August was to approve a plan to reduce student-teacher ratios in kindergarten this year by requiring morning and afternoon session teachers to help out in each others’ classes for half the day.

That left those Reading Recovery teachers--chosen from kindergarten teachers because they have more free hours than other elementary schoolteachers--with no time left to tutor needy first graders.

Discovery of this snafu led board members to ask questions about Reading Recovery: Was it worth the additional investment?

Once again, information was scanty.

Staff members characterized Reading Recovery as very successful. Then board President Julie Korenstein, exasperated that anybody would resist spending more on the program, added her own assessment, based on a visit to one of the five centers where Reading Recovery teachers receive a year of training:

It’s “truly extraordinary” and furthermore, it is a “phonics program,” she said. She insisted that the tutoring followed the back-to-basics direction the state now favors after years dedicated to a more natural “whole language” approach, which failed to halt the downward spiral of reading scores.

But Korenstein was wrong.

Although Reading Recovery includes some phonics--the skill of figuring words by sounding them out--it in fact lands firmly on the “whole language” side of the raging reading debate. The controversy over its merits revolves around its emphasis on helping struggling first-graders guess at words largely from looking at pictures and seeing them in similar phrases over and over.

Furthermore, while there are positive studies of the program’s effects, the endorsement is far from unanimous among academics who study such things. The most recent analysis conducted in Reading Recovery’s birthplace--New Zealand--declared that the program’s own statistics were inflated.

The five-year literacy investigation, led by New Zealand education professor William Tunmer, found that gains recorded by the remedial teachers exceeded the evaluation of those same students by their classroom teachers on their return. Many of the Reading Recovery students soon fell behind again after the 13-week program was over, he added.

Not even a hint of that international turmoil seeped into the Board of Education chambers during that evening of discussion.

Only when pressed by board members did the administrator in charge of elementary education, Geri Herrera, acknowledge that two years into Reading Recovery the district has not yet reviewed the preliminary data on the program.

In an interview last week, Herrera said she was unaware of the Tunmer study, though she did know something of the controversy.

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Reading Recovery training coordinator Teresa Johnson, the first district teacher trained in the methods, considers the oversight that threatens Reading Recovery shameful.

“I have worked with children who the teachers really had given up on, who were reading in the high group when they left Reading Recovery, and the classroom teachers were very amazed,” Johnson said. “It’s very intense and it’s daily--the low children don’t get that kind of attention. They are often pushed off to one side.”

Critics of Reading Recovery consider the inadvertent error a wonderful opportunity to do away with the program.

“So the Reading Recovery teachers are back busy in the classroom?” asked state Board of Education member Marion Joseph. “Who cares! It keeps them from further destroying children.” Joseph has fought on the phonics side of the reading-philosophy divide since 1989, when she discovered her grandson was having trouble learning to read under whole language tutelage.

Last week, no one in district administration could explain the failure to apprise board members of the conflict at the time of the August vote. Everyone involved agrees it was common knowledge both at headquarters and at the schools involved, as well as a topic of some discussion on the internal task force set up to iron out class-size reduction wrinkles before the school board vote.

“I don’t know why now it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, these schools have invested all this money,’ ” said Becki Robinson, the elementary vice president for the teachers union. District administrators “realized it right away.”

What staff members suggested at the Oct. 20 meeting was spending $1.2 million more to hire substitute teachers to periodically take the place of those Reading Recovery teachers.

That might work bureaucratically, but it would complicate life for kindergartners. In addition to their regular teacher, they would sometimes be taught by at least two other teachers off and on. That would be at cross-purposes with the class-size reduction program, which is aimed at giving students more personal attention to boost their future reading and math skills.

Board member Jeff Horton complained that even a consistent substitute would hardly be the same as the two kindergarten teachers sharing a room and sharing students. Others said smaller class sizes should be a priority and might actually lessen the number of graduating kindergartners needing Reading Recovery when they reach first grade.

Even without this complication, L.A. kindergartners were already getting a diluted version of the state-funded class-size reduction program, begun at the behest of Gov. Pete Wilson last year to scale back class size in the early grades. While third-graders were to have joined their first- and second-grade peers in classes with just 20 students to a teacher, LAUSD’s lack of classroom space led board members to opt for a one-year team-teaching solution in kindergarten.

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In grappling with whether to salvage Reading Recovery two weeks ago, board members were not told how expensive the program is.

Each school donates the teacher’s time and between $3,500 and $4,500 per teacher for books and other supplies, Herrera said. For the 120 teachers trained so far, that amounts to about $500,000. In addition, she estimated that the district had spent about $1.2 million over the past two years running the training programs.

That investment has helped fewer than 400 students, teacher coordinators estimated, which works out to more than $4,000 apiece for 13 weeks of help--about the cost of educating a student for an entire year in local public schools.

Supporters counter those arguments by saying the program is cheaper than other fates for poor readers, including special education services.

Because schools had to choose to buy into Reading Recovery with discretionary portions of their budgets, there is no logical pattern to the program’s distribution throughout the district. It is not limited to any one region, nor to the schools with the greatest reading problems. Only 15 of the campuses are on the bottom 100 list targeted for improvement by Supt. Ruben Zacarias. A few of those involved actually topped the national median for third-grade reading on the most recent standardized tests.

At the board meeting, Korenstein suggested that might be because Reading Recovery is working so well. “That says it all: It works,” she said.

However, the majority of the 62 schools had not implemented the tutorial in time to affect the 1996 test score data used to determine the 100 lowest-achieving schools.

As questions without answers piled up at the Oct. 20 meeting, Horton switched sides and became the deciding vote for postponement in a 4-3 split. He had originally announced that he would vote for the Reading Recovery bailout, but the more he learned, the more he shook his head.

“I don’t doubt the efficacy of the program,” he said. “But, to me, class-size reduction is more important. I’ve changed. I’ve decided I cannot vote for this.

“It’s too weird.”