Board OKs Funds for Remedial Reading

After hearing pleas from elementary school teachers, the Los Angeles Board of Education agreed Monday to invest another $1.2 million in a controversial remedial reading program, to temporarily smooth out an unexpected conflict with kindergarten class-size reduction.

But because of board insistence that the decision not harm the kindergarten team-teaching concept, the 6-1 vote mandated that teachers can be freed to tutor only if their school finds a licensed part-time teacher to take their place in the classroom.

In addition, board members asked district staff to develop a comprehensive remedial reading plan for all schools, not just the 61 that have already contracted for the trademarked program known as “Reading Recovery.” Only one in three Los Angeles Unified School District third-graders reads at grade level.

“I have qualms, not for what [Reading Recovery] is, but for what it costs,” said board member Jeff Horton. “We’re dropping this money on [some] schools and nothing on others.”

In all, L.A. Unified has spent nearly $2 million over the past two years on the program aimed at the weakest 10%-20% of first-graders.

The school board found itself in a dilemma two weeks ago when it learned that its August vote to reduce student-teacher ratios in kindergarten by having morning and afternoon teachers work in each others’ classrooms conflicted with Reading Recovery.

On Monday, teachers such as John Steinreich at Sun Valley’s Roscoe Elementary stepped to the podium to tell the board what a shame it would be to cripple the reading program, which he said had dramatically improved his teaching.

“I can see each child that comes into the program now as capable of succeeding,” he said.

Though district administrators were aware of the conflict last summer, they never told the board that its class-size reduction decision would eat up the free morning and afternoon hours during which about 110 kindergarten teachers had worked as tutors.

After a Times story Sunday that detailed the lack of information provided to the board two weeks ago, district staff pulled together a few statistics for Monday’s meeting: 456 struggling readers have been served since the program began in 1995. Preliminary results of an evaluation of almost 100 of them found that 60% met or surpassed a sample of their peers in reading after up to 20 weeks of tutoring.

But staff members could not answer additional questions posed by board member David Tokofsky about which of the schools are poor enough to receive federal Title I money, which can be used to pay for such remedial education, or how many have held off on implementing kindergarten team-teaching because of the conflict.

“Starting tomorrow, I will ascertain that all schools are doing” the team teaching, said Supt. Ruben Zacarias. “If not, I’ll find out the reasons why . . . and deal with it.”

Reading Recovery trainer Adria Klein--an education professor at Cal State San Bernardino--acknowledged that the program is not cheap. Although it costs about $4,000 a student in early years, over five years the training costs decrease to about $2,600 a student, she said.

The program’s strongest supporters on the board said the cost is worth it to save students from academic failure and worse.

“The greater expense is what happens to children who do not learn to read,” said board President Julie Korenstein. “It costs about $30,000 to keep someone in prison for one year.”

Korenstein reiterated her belief that Reading Recovery is phonics-based and strongly disagreed with The Times for pointing out that although it does include some phonics--or learning words by sounding them out--the program’s base is in the “whole language” approach to reading instruction that has fallen from favor in Sacramento.

Under whole language, students are taught to figure out words in context by such methods as looking at pictures and reviewing repetitive phrases.

“I was really stunned that this created such a controversy,” Korenstein said, adding an apology to her board colleagues for allowing the conflict to surface at the previous meeting with so little background information.

The debate over Reading Recovery stretches around the world to its home in New Zealand, where some studies have declared it wildly successful but others have called into question that data because it is collected by the people who administer the program.

Even some of the more positive evaluations have suggested that the program’s greatest strength may be in its one-on-one contact between a trained teacher and a child. Board member George Kiriyama suggested that perhaps retired teachers could be lured back to tutor kids at a fraction of the cost.

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Tokofsky, the lone dissenting vote Monday, said that Reading Recovery fails to address the problems that leave first-graders with reading problems.

“The reason we’re dealing with this today . . . is because we don’t have a fundamental core reading program,” Tokofsky said. “We need a district reading program. We don’t need little pieces on the side.”

But Zacarias said that enforcing a districtwide reading program violates the school-based governance structure of L.A. Unified. When he was campaigning for the job last year, Zacarias said he wanted to see more consistency in programs and textbooks being used around the district but he has not yet made a proposal to do so.

“We may have a reading philosophy as a district, but we have never dictated the basal reader the schools should use,” he said. “Should it be different? That’s up to the board to decide.”

In other action, the board:

* Agreed to approve on Nov. 17 a proposal to extend the 6% raise negotiated for teachers to all top district employees, including Zacarias, who will make $188,680 a year--over $40,000 more than his predecessor. The salaries of the next tier of three deputies, all of whom received large raises when they took the posts over the summer, will be boosted to $146,000, the salary already paid to the finance czar recently hired. Employees, ranging from playground supervisors to the district medical director, also would receive at least 2% more in each of the next two years.

* Learned that enrollment this fall reached a record 681,505, up 2% from last year and reviewed a preliminary plan for future school construction to accommodate that growth.