School Excels in Reading by Sticking With What Works

From outside, Seaton Elementary School doesn’t look like a national model for anything, except maybe urban decay. The windows of the beige brick building are barred, the garden out back is littered with beer bottles, and the adjacent blocks are scarred by the crumbling hulks of once-graceful brownstones.

But after being buzzed in past the security doors, a visitor can see reading taught with an intensity and structure that the Bush administration wants to replicate across the country.

Test scores have soared at Seaton, as has enthusiasm for reading. That has happened despite characteristics that have been barriers to learning elsewhere: Virtually all of Seaton’s students are poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized meals, and English is not the first language for a third of them.

“These kids can do it . . . regardless of what people think, as long as they’re given appropriate instruction,” said Seaton Principal Willy Lamb. “Not that they don’t come with some issues. But what we’re trying to do is deal with those issues while still teaching them.”

The school is being used to bolster the argument that the nation’s schools should stop embracing instructional fads and begin teaching lessons grounded in cognitive and educational science.

That culture shift is laid out in the education reform bill signed by President Bush in January. The Education Department will hand out more than $5 billion over the next five years for states to promote teaching reading based on what the legislation calls “scientifically based reading research.”

Not philosophy. Not instinct. Not hope. Science.

At Seaton recently, preschoolers clamored over an inflated plastic doll called “Miss F” and begged for the chance to write the letter on the chalkboard. Then they all stood and stretched, touching their “fingers” to their “feet.”

Such a lesson is based on research that has found that even 3-year-olds enjoy learning letters and sounds, giving them an early and fun start on skills crucial for actual reading.

Here, children begin reading in kindergarten. In one class, the children gathered around teacher Mary Hale could barely contain themselves as they repeated phrases such as “Andy Apple is an acrobat” and read in unison words rhyming with “at.”

Second-graders during a recent visit were writing a response to a story using words such as “quarrel” and “warrior.” And in a fifth-grade class, every student was able to flawlessly and passionately read his or her lines in a play about the Underground Railroad heroics of Harriet Tubman.

None of that was happening five years ago. That’s when Seaton became one of nine District of Columbia schools in a federally sponsored study of the effects of a structured phonics program bolstered by intensive teacher training.

The difference, said veteran fourth-grade teacher Mary Woods, is “almost like night and day. These kids have a cockiness and a self-confidence because they know how to attack words.”

That pleases Susan B. Neuman, assistant U.S. secretary of Education in charge of overseeing the overhaul of reading lessons nationally.

She began her career three decades ago in Berkeley, teaching in an open classroom of first-, second- and third-graders. Back then, she said, the dominant progressive philosophy held that children’s natural curiosity would help them learn to read more or less on their own. Neuman and colleagues didn’t so much as teach, she said, as they “trailed the children as they went through activity, activity, activity.”

Some children did learn to read. But many did not. And they suffered the consequences, Neuman recently told educators gathered in Washington from 23 states to learn about the administration’s Reading First and Early Reading First programs.

She left teaching after eight years for what was to turn out to be an illustrious career as a reading researcher. But she used the experience of seeing her students struggle as she sampled different techniques.

“We do have evidence. We do know what works,” Neuman told the educators.

The evidence was summed up in 2000 by the National Reading Panel, mandated by Congress. To tap into the new federal reading money, states will have to agree to promote teaching consistent with its findings.

The money is far more than has ever before been made available. California alone stands to receive $134 million from the program this year and $147 million next year.

Typically, the federal government has left such decisions to the states. And, reading policy varies greatly. California, for example, already mandates phonics in early reading lessons. Other states, such as Connecticut, leave such decisions up to local districts.

In addition, for at least 50 years, the dogma of how best to teach reading has swung from one extreme to another, often amid rancorous debate.

Recently, “whole language” approaches that encouraged children to intuit the nuts and bolts of how words worked have been losing out to the direct teaching of the sounds associated with letters.

Neuman said the administration’s approach cannot properly be labeled either “whole language” or “phonics.” Rather, she said, it is comprehensive and stresses direct teaching, as opposed to the student-centered activities common when she began her career.

To read well, children need to know phonics and how letter sounds combine to form words, the reading panel concluded. But they also need lessons focused on vocabulary, reading fluently, writing and techniques to boost their understanding.

Neuman and other administration officials point out that neither phonics nor whole language alone has improved reading results. In fact, reading achievement has stayed pretty much the same for decades.

The most recent national snapshot shows that 68% of the nation’s fourth-graders, for example, are not proficient readers, meaning they cannot analyze challenging materials. Among children from low-income families, that figure soars to 86%.

Though some say the standard is unrealistically high, the Bush administration wants all children to be proficient readers within 12 years.

But some experts say the practices the administration promotes go well beyond what the reading panel recommends.

P. David Pearson, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education, said the research cited by the panel says phonics lessons are effective in kindergarten and first grade. Beyond that, he said, there’s little evidence to support their use.

Pearson said he also worries that the administration is putting too much emphasis on what’s known as phonemic awareness, or the skill of being able to detect the individual sounds within words. The panel’s research suggests about 18 hours of such lessons are all that’s necessary, he said. But widely used commercial programs devote far more time than that to such training.

Donna Ogle, an Illinois professor who is president of the influential International Reading Assn., praised the administration for spotlighting reading. But she said better teaching by itself is not enough.

Where test scores are the lowest, she said, students move frequently, they come to school hungry, discipline is lacking, class sizes are large and buildings are often in disrepair.

“What we’re doing to teachers and principals in the worst schools is ignoring the context in which they’re educating kids,” Ogle said.

But the plan also has supporters, including major education groups representing urban schools, school boards and teacher unions.

President Bush announced this month that the American Federation of Teachers volunteered to work with the administration to spread the word.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which began emphasizing phonics from kindergarten to the second grade in 1999, is being cited as a success story.

Ronnie Ephraim, administrator in charge of the L.A. Unified reading program, told the group in Washington that most schools now spend more than three hours daily on reading-related lessons. The district has invested millions in training primary teachers, and students’ progress is monitored every six weeks, he said.

Reading scores for first-graders are now above the national average, up 21 points in two years; second-graders’ scores are up by 50%; third-graders’ by 30%. Such progress is winning over critics.

Anna Maria Martinez, principal of Murchison Elementary School in East Los Angeles, said first-graders are talking about metaphors and writing “at levels we had never seen before.”

“For us, it was phenomenal,” she said. She said veteran teachers, initially skeptical, now are true believers and say “they’ll never go back.”

The district is using a phonics-based program called Open Court that is gaining notice nationally. But Martinez said the investment in training teachers has been as important to its success.