Reading Moves to Front of the Class

The 500 experts and education leaders representing all 50 states attracted little attention last week when they assembled for a “reading summit” in Washington, a city obsessed with scandal.

But the national crusade their conference represented may ultimately affect more people’s lives than the headline-grabbing saga of President Clinton and his pursuers. Teaching children to read has moved once again into the preeminent spot on the nation’s crowded education reform agenda.

From New York to California, governors, legislatures and school boards have launched a dizzying array of efforts to boost what many now agree are intolerably poor reading scores. Many initiatives target teacher training. Others focus on getting more books in schools, requiring phonics lessons and instituting after-school tutoring programs.

Big cities have been among the earliest and most aggressive reformers. Houston is gaining attention for adopting a model of instruction that allows schools great flexibility, while Baltimore has required every school to purchase the same textbooks for the early grades.

That focus on the earliest grades, stemming from the recognition that lags in reading ability only worsen over time, is a common theme of reading reform.

So is an impatience with the ideological battle of how best to teach reading--which is often oversimplified as a struggle between an emphasis on phonics and an emphasis on the joys of literature. Rather than try to settle that war, politicians and school officials have turned to scientific studies to broker a truce.

“At the core, we really know enough that we can’t fight about it anymore,” said Catherine Snow of Harvard University, a summit participant who helped write a report on reading issued earlier this year by the National Research Council. “The research is too clear.”

A focus on the latest research served as the starting point for the assault on poor reading launched two years ago in Houston.

Now, every elementary school is required to devote at least 90 minutes to reading lessons and practice. More than 5,000 teachers and hundreds of school principals have been trained in the importance of the sounds within words as well as in the meaning of words and the enjoyment of literature.

Houston Supt. Rod Paige, who launched the reading campaign in 1996, said that, although slow, progress is occurring. “We’re here for the long haul,” he said.

“It’s just going to be a long-term process,” said reading specialist Sam Stringfield of Johns Hopkins University, whose research in Baltimore and nationally has convinced him that no quick fix is possible. “The demands of the public are just completely out of sync with reality.”

In Baltimore, another city that has directed tremendous energy at improving reading instruction, the experience demonstrates that obstacles to success are especially severe in schools serving poor, urban children.

Pressure from state officials, community leaders and even the local newspaper led educators to attack the district’s dismal performance in reading with a renewed focus on phonics lessons. In spite of that, the latest city test scores show that progress is disappointingly slow.

It is Clinton who is credited with spurring much of the current wave of concern over reading when he highlighted the issue in his reelection campaign two years ago. He vowed to spend billions to form a volunteer army of tutors to make sure that children were reading well by the end of the third grade.

Since then, legislatures have enacted at least 25 bills related to reading, according to Frances Patterson, an assistant professor at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Ga.

Congress too has jumped into the fray. Skeptical of Clinton’s call for massive tutoring, Congress is wrapping up work on a bill that proposes to spend more than $200 million to promote teaching methods that are “scientifically based.”

Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said the focus on reading reflects the recognition that 15 years of education reform have failed to have much impact on student performance. “What we’re doing now as a nation is asking . . . which issues do we need to move forward with on a broad scale, and reading is one of the critical ones,” he said. “If we can get this one nailed down, students are going to do better.”

20% of Fourth-Graders Can’t Keep Up in School

The most recent national assessment, conducted in 1994, found that two in five U.S. fourth-graders read too poorly to keep up in school. The proportion of failure is far higher among nonwhite students and the children of poorly educated parents.

Educators are anxiously awaiting results from a new reading survey, due out later this year, hoping they show that their recent efforts to bolster reading instruction are paying off. But data from another source--the widely used Iowa Test of Basic Skills--suggests that the reading skills of third-graders has declined every year since 1990.

To be sure, reading is not the only educational reform getting attention these days. But educators agree that toughened academic standards, an end to “social promotion” and greater accountability are linked in some way to the ability of children to read.

“Reading is the power skill, the gateway skill,” Phyllis Hunter, Houston’s “reading manager,” said during the Washington summit. “If children are going to win in life, they’ve got to win at reading.”

So intense is the focus on reading at Houston’s Edgar Allen Poe Elementary School that Principal Anne McClellan can walk into any classroom and name each of the students on her “target” list. She knows which kindergartners don’t know their ABCs and which third-graders aren’t reading books on their grade level.

That way she knows which students need tutoring--provided by expert teachers--and which ones need to be given more challenging assignments. At Poe, the emphasis is on tailoring lessons to each child, rather than locking students and teachers into a one-size-fits-all program.

Some reformers across the nation are trying to cure reading problems with a single prescription for instruction. But Houston--wisely, observers say--is giving principals such as McClellan greater latitude.

That is, as long as they stay true to the district’s bedrock philosophy and test scores improve. That philosophy has been boiled down to a six-point list that now hangs in every elementary classroom. First, children need to read a lot. They also need to learn about letters, spelling, the sounds within words, how to read from left to right and the importance of thinking about what they read.

The list was the work of a committee appointed by Houston Supt. Paige after members of the business community, parents and teachers raised concerns about the hodgepodge of reading methods across the district’s 210 schools. And it’s shorthand for what officials say is a “balanced” approach, one they hope steers them through controversies that have long plagued reading instruction.

“We’re not going back to skill and drill,” said committee Chairwoman Barbara Foorman, a researcher on leave from the University of Houston who has conducted influential studies comparing instructional approaches. “We’re really trying to create a balance here so that kids master the alphabet and then have every opportunity to use that in reading texts and being read to.”

The district’s framework is broad enough to accommodate the vast differences among schools, Paige said.

So, at Poe, near the district’s affluent “museum district,” you won’t see much of the old-style phonics drills in which whole classes chant the sounds of letters. Instead, the emphasis is on working with children in small groups, tailoring lessons to their strengths and weaknesses.

Children vary greatly in their skills, McClellan said, especially at a school where half of the students come from homes below the poverty line and 40% are largely affluent Anglos. Those who already can read fluently should not be subjected to phonics lessons they do not need.

To make sure that reading lessons are as effective as possible, reading specialists who tutor the children also work with teachers.

That reflects the other half of McClellan’s approach, which has earned the school an “exemplary” rating from the state. Teachers, she said, must be well trained and then entrusted with making critical decisions in their classrooms.

“If the teacher is empowered and nurtured, learning will follow,” she said.

To make sure the wall charts were not simply decorations, the district is spending $3.5 million a year on training seminars and follow-up visits to classrooms by 50 experienced teachers.

Last week, a group of about 35 new teachers spent three days in the district’s reading “boot camp.”

“It is required to have 90 minutes a day of reading. It has to be on your lesson plans,” Celeste Humphrie told the recruits. “This is why we are training all of you who are new. Other districts don’t have this, but we do. If you do it, all kids will be reading on grade level.”

Lessons Can’t Always Come First

Lockhart School, which serves a mostly African American community a dozen miles southeast of Poe, has chosen a structured method to carry out the district’s mandate. Every classroom starts the reading period in exactly the same way: with the students sitting cross-legged on the floor listening to their teacher read a story for 20 minutes.

For the next 70 minutes, every first-, second- and third-grade class will follow the same routine--every day.

Teacher Mary Colbert said she loves the approach because “it keeps me on track” and because children are succeeding.

Indeed, the test scores at Lockhart, where 66% of the children are from families below the poverty line, have risen dramatically. This year, more than 90% of the students passed the state test.

Similar stories can be found across the district. Houston has a higher percentage of schools ranked highly by the state than any other urban district in Texas.

Nonetheless, students in most grades remain far below national averages.

The numbers do not discourage Paige, however. “This is a commitment,” he said. “The battle may be long to be won, but it’s going to be fought well at every front.”

As principals of two of the most troubled schools in the Baltimore school system, Linda Chinnia of Liberty Elementary and Sarah Horsey of Pimlico Elementary understand the need to improve reading.

They are solidly behind a systematic phonics program called Open Court that, for the first time, is being mandated for all children in kindergarten through second grade.

The problem is that when the bell rings on a new day, Chinnia and Horsey feel they have to put first things first. And, in what should serve as a cautionary tale for Los Angeles and other urban areas, what comes first is not always reading.

Baltimore’s current push on reading grew out of a series of lawsuits in 1996 and 1997. A reform-minded state education chief, Nancy Grasmick, demanded changes in the city’s failing schools, and the city, in turn, demanded more money. The result was a settlement in which the impoverished, predominantly black city got $254 million in new funds over five years from a legislature dominated by white suburban and rural interests. In return, the state got a larger role in managing the city’s schools.

Mistrust and political arm-wrestling continue. And the city’s major newspaper, the Sun, which is published by Times Mirror--as is The Times--played a large role. In scores of stories, it documented the problem, described successful programs elsewhere and kept the focus on reform.

With 88% of the city’s third-graders failing Maryland’s reading test, it seemed clear the old way of doing things would not work.

At Pimlico, a Herculean effort in 1996-97 produced incredible gains: The percentage of third-graders reading at a satisfactory level jumped to 22.1%, up from only 5.1% in 1995-1996. That still left a dismaying 77.9% of Pimlico third-graders failing the test.

At Liberty, only about 5% of third-graders had satisfactory scores in 1996-97. Chinnia plunged her school into Open Court in 1997-98. She hopes for improvement when new state scores come out in December.

Such results raise pressure on the schools even though experts say it takes three to five years or more to achieve significant gains under the best conditions.

And conditions at Pimlico and Liberty are by no means ideal.

Faculty turnover tops 25% a year. Most replacements are beginners. Also, since Open Court depends on teachers being trained in special methods, turnover is especially damaging now. Baltimore teachers received one week of training this summer. More is scheduled. But it won’t be enough.

Many teachers are also jaded by years of what one calls “the fad of the day.”

‘A Big Secret Had Been Unlocked’

Still, when Open Court was installed at Liberty last year, Chinnia said, children “could figure out new words because they understood the rules of the language. It was like a big secret had been unlocked.”

The problem is that some of the biggest obstacles to progress lie outside the school.

At Liberty, before the first pupils arrive, Chinnia must be sure custodians have swept the drug syringes and liquor bottles off the playground and shooed lingering addicts out of the nearby woods.

Many parents use drugs. Children often shuttle between parents or get passed around among relatives. Many live with grandparents so exhausted “it’s all they can do to get the kids to school every day,” Chinnia said.

“No one has ever read to them. No one has ever told them what a letter was. It gets worse every year,” said veteran teacher Faye Augins.

In such an environment, focusing tightly on academics is easier said than done.

“I can’t separate the child,” Chinnia said. “It would be very nice if I could just teach the brain, but you can’t separate children that way. They come with all these problems.”

At Pimlico, drug dealers are also just a pistol shot away. A neighborhood of narrow, trash-strewn streets and crumbling houses, some fire-gutted and others boarded up, it is among the most dangerous in the city.

Horsey, now in her third year there, remembers dealing with 400 fights her first year. “The police came so often they thought they were living here.”

Jeff Grotsky knows all that. An administrator charged with turning around Liberty and the city’s 13 other lowest-performing grade schools, he’s a missionary.

This summer, he told his principals: “We’re going to teach three things. We’re going to teach reading, and we’re going to teach reading, and we’re going to teach reading.

“For the kids in these schools,” he said, “we’re their last best hope.”

“We can do it,” he added, pointing at the small figures swarming out of Liberty at day’s end. “We have to do it, don’t we?”