Teaching the Basics, Finally

Charlotte McCormick’s eighth-graders crack open their English books and once again prepare to study . . . the alphabet.

On this morning the 13- and 14-year-olds are tackling vowels with the aid of flashcards and word games.

“Say ‘quick,’ ” McCormick tells the students. “Now change the middle sound to A.”

“Quack,” they respond.

The exercise seems absurd in a classroom of teenagers preparing to enter high school. But this is Fern Bacon Basic Middle School, where 80% of the students read at the fourth-grade level or below.

At this campus, teachers have shelved “The Call of the Wild” and other classics in favor of rudimentary storybooks with three-letter words and friendly pictures, the sort of material found in first-grade classrooms.

“Our school is saying, ‘Stop. Get off the train. We are going back to the beginning from the ABCs,’ ” McCormick said. “Kids have been done an injustice because they have been passed from grade to grade without anyone asking, ‘Are you getting it?’ ”

For years, Fern Bacon’s students haven’t gotten it. Many flunked their way through elementary school, promoted year after year despite their failings.

Fern Bacon’s test scores reveal the depth of the trouble. Nearly half of the school’s 922 students landed below the 25th percentile in reading on last year’s Stanford 9 exam, meaning they lacked the minimal skills to read at their grade levels.

Forty students bottomed out in the 1st percentile; 14 others failed to even register on the scale.

“Our students will never improve unless we bite the bullet and choose to teach reading,” said Lynne Tafoya, the school’s reform-minded principal. “The first step to getting better is being honest about where we are now.”

Fern Bacon may seem like an extreme case, but it is not uncommon. Secondary schools across California are filled with students who can barely read or write.

The lapse is most acute in large urban school districts.

More than 50% of the middle school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the state’s largest school system, scored below the 25th percentile in reading on the Stanford 9.

Students in Sacramento fared almost as poorly. Nearly 40% of them scored below the same mark.

The dismal performance has prompted bold reforms in Sacramento.

Not only have elementary schools here revamped their reading programs to emphasize phonics, but the district is among the first in the state to address upper-grade illiteracy.

All of Sacramento’s eight middle schools have launched remedial reading programs. Fern Bacon, a campus with large numbers of poor students who speak limited English, has taken one of the most aggressive routes--requiring all its students to turn back the academic clock.

A neighboring campus, Goethe Middle School, has turned fourth period into mandatory reading for virtually every student and trained all of its instructors to teach beginning reading.

Middle School May Be Too Late

School districts across California also are beginning to train their teachers in the strategies adopted by Goethe and Fern Bacon, including some in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties.

But will the rescue efforts arrive too late?

Researchers widely agree that students who don’t learn to read fluently by the end of third grade are destined to remain behind unless they receive intensive help.

As a result, districts across the state in recent years have launched phonics-based reforms in elementary schools that are intended to prevent the kind of situations that exist at Fern Bacon today.

For students who didn’t acquire reading fundamentals, programs such as Fern Bacon’s can lift students to grade level, experts say. But even with intensive help, students may never fully regain their missed vocabulary, or catch up on all the history, math and science they missed because of their poor reading skills.

“There are lasting consequences for all that lost ground,” said Louisa Moats, a research director with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. “Closing the gap altogether is unrealistic.”

Fern Bacon may be the only hope for Lemar Powell, an eighth-grader who reads at the fourth-grade level.

The 13-year-old often guesses at words or skips them altogether as he labors over homework.

On one English assignment, he reads “sticks” as “stacks” and “sphere” as “spear.”

And after finishing a page about galaxies in his science textbook, he can’t summarize the main points. “I have to read it over,” he says.

Lemar gets help with homework every day in a special class for the school’s lowest performers. His teacher, McCormick, is frustrated that he was allowed to get so far.

“Everyone has passed him up. I think that’s where education has failed Lemar,” McCormick said. “He is the typical kid who has fallen through the cracks.”

Lemar is eager to improve.

He sits in the front row of McCormick’s class and throws himself into the daily phonics exercises.

McCormick conducted an exercise in letters on a recent day, holding alphabet flashcards aloft. While a couple of classmates fiddled with their pencils, Lemar stayed focused.

“Fff . . . Ttt . . . Hhh,” he chanted.

During silent reading a few minutes later, Lemar gazed into his textbook, mumbling each word to himself and pointing at the letters with the tip of a pencil--all this while a classmate in the next seat popped bubble gum all over his face.

“You can’t get a good job without an education,” he says.

When Lemar talks about school, you hear his mother’s influence.

Cynthia Powell sees a high school diploma as a ticket to escape the crack cocaine and gunfire that characterize life in the Franklin Villas apartments.

A few evenings each week, mother and son gather on the couch in their cramped living room and read from her favorite Stephen King novels.

“I refuse to give my children up to this b.s.” Powell said, recalling that Lemar’s cousin was shot and killed in the neighborhood a few months ago.

Powell’s daughter Angela graduated from high school last June. Her diploma hangs on the living room wall. As Powell gazes at the diploma she looks at Lemar on the couch. “He’ll do it,” she whispers. “I know he will.”

But a mother’s hope can accomplish only so much when her son’s school doesn’t know how to address his problem.

As secondary school teachers, Fern Bacon instructors were never trained in the fundamental skills their students so desperately need. The language arts instructors expected to teach literature.

And so year after year they assigned novels and asked their students to analyze poetry. And year after year they saw the same miserable results.

“It was always a mystery, how you take nonreaders and turn them into readers,” recalled Celeste Haarmeyer, a 16-year veteran of Fern Bacon.

The mystery began to unravel two years ago when the teachers learned about a specialized literacy program for older students. The Sacramento County Office of Education offered to provide training in the new program, known as LANGUAGE!

Last spring, four of Fern Bacon’s language arts teachers introduced the curriculum in their classes. Then last fall, the school expanded the program to all 15 language arts classes.

The heavily scripted method initially met resistance. Some teachers said they felt foolish teaching phonics. Others worried about boring their students.

But virtually all agreed on the need for change. Teachers liked how the program wove together phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and other skills.

“We realized that the kids were not going to make any progress unless we did something radical,” recalled Susan Warburton, a seventh-grade teacher.

The school created an extra class for reading by shaving seven minutes off of each period. Students would spend three consecutive periods a day with the same teacher, focusing on reading, language arts and history.

Spelling tests were administered, and for the first time students were placed in classes that matched their skills. Eighty percent landed in the lowest LANGUAGE! classes, where they would begin learning how words are composed of letters and sounds.

The LANGUAGE! program tries to bring students to grade level within three years. Tafoya, the principal, wants half of her students to meet that mark by June.

“There’s got to be a vision about where we want these children to be once they pass through Fern Bacon,” Tafoya said. “We’ve got to aim high.”

Fern Bacon will get its first batch of results this spring when students take the Stanford 9 and a second test the school uses to monitor its progress.

But instructors say the new curriculum is showing promise.

Sara Tellman sees a difference among her sixth-graders, some of whom arrived this fall reading and writing at a kindergarten level.

To prove the point, Tellman pulls out a stack of writing journals from last fall and opens one belonging to an 11-year-old. The boy had strung letters together so arbitrarily that even Tellman could not decipher the entry: “amoloeomnoseicomechommidomcesonicno.”

Four months later, the student had learned how to separate letters into words, and to combine the words into semi-legible sentences.

In an entry last month, he wrote: “I yote feel bad a bato my reading be cus I had a hrt time sonde them aot.”

Translation: I used to feel bad about my reading because I had a hard time sounding words out.

Tellman is a radical even by Fern Bacon standards. She devotes three periods to reading and writing by skipping history--with Tafoya’s blessing.

“If these kids don’t learn how to read, history is a moot point,” Tellman said. “So is science and math.”

Fern Bacon’s science and math teachers agree. They have watered down their lessons for years to accommodate their students.

Two Students, Two Approaches

Frank Tofell reluctantly reads the textbook aloud to his pre-algebra classes. He hands out study sheets that contain formulas--and answers--to be memorized, in the hope that his students will eventually grasp the concepts behind the numbers.

“Every lesson is reduced to their level by any teacher who wants the kids to make some progress,” Tofell said. “I’m very frustrated.”

Tofell stopped in the middle of a recent lesson on compounding interest and asked how many of his eighth-graders understood what he was talking about. Several shook their heads no.

Tony Gallegos failed to even acknowledge the question as he slouched at his desk, waiting for the lunch bell to ring.

It is little wonder. The 14-year-old didn’t understand half of the words in the textbook. Asked what “compounding” meant after class, he said sheepishly, “putting two things together?”

Tony is the flip side of Lemar Powell. He reads at a fourth-grade level, but he has virtually given up on school.

Tony doesn’t carry books or a backpack. His homework consists of a few pieces of paper folded into a jacket pocket.

There are only two books in his bedroom, both on the floor among scattered laundry--one of them a “Goosebumps” novel from school and the other a science text lying next to a garbage can in the corner.

“I just don’t like reading,” he says.

Discipline has become a problem too. Tony has been suspended three times since the beginning of the school year for fighting, intimidating a classmate and typing profanity on a computer.

His mother, Rosalie Gallegos, is troubled by her son’s behavior. She left work for three months--using all of her vacation time and sick leave--so she could be home with Tony and her other two sons.

But the single mother is back at work now, gone 12 hours a day commuting by bus to her job as an office assistant at the state Department of Social Services.

“I don’t want to have a kid who doesn’t know anything,” she says.

Tony and Lemar are buddies at school. They crack jokes on the stairwell between classes. They eat lunch together, and afterward play touch football on the blacktop.

But after school, the two head in opposite directions.

Tony walks home to play more football or skate with a friend in the parking lot outside his family’s bare-walled apartment. He may do homework while his mother prepares dinner. She will take his word that it’s done.

Lemar heads to his daily 4:30 p.m. tutoring session at the resource center in Franklin Villas. Then he goes straight home, his mother waiting for him behind a wrought-iron screen door.

There, on the couch amid his books, Lemar dreams of becoming a middle linebacker in the NFL, or a policeman or a teacher.

“I ain’t gonna drop out,” he insists. “I don’t want to end up like so many people around here with no education.”

Information about The Times’ “Reading by 9” initiative and how you can participate is available online at https://www.latimes.com/readingby9

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Basic Reading

A Sacramento middle school is going back to basics and teaching its students how to read by using words and concepts they should have learned in elementary school. Most of the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders are reading stories for beginning readers, such as the example on the left. A small percentage can read the most advanced text in the program, shown at right.

Source: LANGUAGE! by Jane Fell Greene and Judy Fell Woods