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Schools seek early reading on
low scorers
Literary efforts place emphasis on lower grades
by Gail Spector, Boston Globe, 12/1/2002
For more articles visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
Nobody is surprised when Newton
students perform well on the MCAS exam. Average test scores
are consistently high, the percentage of students who fail is
low, and the school system ranks among the top in the state.
Still, somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of Newton students
are not reading at a proficient level as defined by the MCAS.
And, the nonproficiency rate for students of color and
students receiving subsidized lunches is more than twice the
rate of the general school population.
''For us, it seems unacceptable in a system such as Newton
that we should have students not reading well with
understanding,'' said Carolyn Wyatt, assistant superintendent
of curriculum and instruction.
To address the problem, Wyatt has spearheaded a systemwide
program for identifying pupils at risk. That literacy
initiative received a boost this year when 71/2 instructional
positions were created with funds from the Proposition 21/2
override that passed last April.
For the first time since 1973, each of Newton's 15 elementary
schools now has a full-time literacy specialist.
''In Newton, when you talk about 17 percent, that's a lot of
kids,'' said Gregory Hurray, English language arts coordinator
for kindergarten through eighth grade, referring to the number
of Newton third-graders ranked nonproficient readers in 2001.
MCAS results have shown that ''there was a whole pocket of
kids who were truly needy who we had missed,'' Hurray said.
''The goal is to identify those kids as early as possible, not
wait until the MCAS results come out.''
It is easy to presume that Newton children ''are reading with
understanding from the beginning,'' Wyatt said. Because they
are growing up in ''literature-rich environments,'' children
can demonstrate superficial routines, such as holding a book
properly or guessing meaning from pictures.
''The state requires a tracking system for every kid [whose
score is in the warning range],'' said Hurray, who implements
the literacy initiative with Lisa Robinson, his counterpart in
early education. ''We require it for any child who is not
proficient.''
The system defines nonproficient as anyone who scores below a
specified level on the MCAS, which includes those who score in
the ''needs improvement'' range. For younger children who have
not yet taken the standardized test, benchmarks recommended by
the Department of Education are used to measure grade-level
performance.
Superintendent of Schools Jeffrey Young's budget for this year
contained few program changes, but one that he stressed as a
priority was improving the reading programs in the elementary
schools.
''We had collected data that indicated some weaknesses in some
groups of kids. Too many kids ... were not reading at a
proficient level. It was real and we wanted to respond,'' said
Young, adding that it was a big step because he was adding
personnel.
''It's going to take a couple of years of study and data
collection to see results,'' he said. ''The staff is really
excited. What more can you ask for than having your teachers
enthused about teaching reading and writing?''
Because the literacy specialists no longer divide their time
among schools, they are better able to focus on training
teachers to assess pupils' reading strengths and weaknesses,
and supporting ''balanced literacy,'' an integrated approach
that emphasizes reading real texts, comprehension, phonics,
and skill and strategy instruction.
Wyatt said that, after a three-year curriculum review, ''we
decided that following a balanced literacy approach was better
than strictly following a whole language or phonics approach.
Balanced literacy is about using the best practices we know.''
Literacy specialists take a ''train-the-trainer'' approach,
Hurray said. Teachers are taught different diagnostic tools
and, beginning in kindergarten, children's reading skills are
assessed throughout the school year.
''Assessment drives instruction,'' Hurray said. ''It allows us
to get to know each kid as an individual. Every literacy
specialist is monitoring the progress of every single kid.''
''You don't want to take the entire class of kids and place
them all in the blue- or black-diamond zone,'' said Hurray,
drawing an analogy to levels of ski slope difficulty. ''You
want to assess their skills and then meet them where they are
comfortable.''
Donna MacDonald, who taught second grade at Burr Elementary
last year, took the job of literacy specialist after it became
available as a full-time position.
''I felt it was a much more doable job,'' she said. ''Working
at two schools seemed like an overwhelming task.''
MacDonald knows every child in the school who is not
proficient, she said. ''Our goal is to look at those kids who
are not proficient and figure out what systems are in place
[to help them].''
Hurray has, in his office, statistics on every child in
kindergarten though fifth grade who is not reading at grade
level. Some, in the younger grades, had already been
identified and placed in the Primary Intervention Reading
Program, but, Hurray said, some had not.
For example, he said, ''there are a number of kids who reach
fourth or fifth grade with excellent decoding skills - the
ability to translate symbols into recognizable words - but
they don't seem to comprehend well.'' They could have
difficulty evaluating, interpreting, or analyzing texts. Other
children may not be able to make inferences or predictions
about characters and motives, he said. Without these
strategies, children may perform poorly on the MCAS.
In Deborah Sullivan's first-grade class at Zervas Elementary,
a full-time specialist means children get more one-on-one
attention from an adult. During independent reading, she said,
''normally, I can see about four or five children. With
another adult in the classroom, we can double that.''
There is a wide range of reading skills in this class,
Sullivan said. ''They range from not knowing the alphabet to
children who are reading chapter books'' such as those from
''The Magic Tree House'' series, considered to be second- or
third-grade level.
''The balanced literacy initiative does meet the needs of all
the children,'' Sullivan said. Years ago, she said,
''everybody read out of the same anthology, no matter what
their level, and if you couldn't read it, you were told to
just try and keep up.'' At the same time, other more advanced
readers were bored.
''It's really teaching to the student instead of to the
program,'' said Anne Feyerabend, literacy specialist at Zervas.
''We try to incorporate everything. We do some phonics. We do
some small group instruction. We do whole group instruction.
It's the whole picture.''
A big difference, said Feyerabend, is that ''we're not really
scratching the surface anymore. We really want the children to
invest themselves in the book, to think, `This is how I felt
when I went away to camp.'''
Hurray said the curriculum review also showed ''slippage in
time'' spent reading and writing in class. ''Only five hours a
week was happening,'' he said, adding that primary grades
should spend 10 hours per week on literacy instruction, and
grades 4 and 5 should spend eight hours per week.
''Our goal was to create a systemic way of identifying kids at
risk of not reading well at grade 3 and making sure that we
can fix that,'' Wyatt said. ''This is about student
outcomes.''
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