LR schools to switch reading-aid program

1-on-1 tutors inefficient, Suggs says; teachers, board member question move

The Little Rock School District is changing the way it will work with struggling young readers starting in the 2014-15 school year, according to plans advanced by Superintendent Dexter Suggs.

With the introduction of the Learning and Accelerated Progress (LEAP) program, the state’s largest district will forgo its long-used, well-regarded Reading Recovery program in which 17 trained reading teachers work one-to-one with the lowest-performing first-graders at a dozen of the district’s 32 elementary schools.

Those same teachers also work with small groups of children who need extra help in reading.

“We’re going to keep the group concept,” Suggs said in an interview about the revamped reading-support program. “It’s just the one-to-one piece that’s gone. I wish we could keep it. If you can get anyone into a one-to-one situation, they are going to be successful. But it’s about the finances and being able to support the entire district, not just 12 schools.”

The Learning and Accelerated Progress program will result in the reduction of 25 jobs and save just about $2 million a year, he said.

Proponents of the Reading Recovery model are alarmed about the changes, and School Board members want some clarity about them.

Cathy Koehler, president of the Little Rock Education Association union that represents teachers and support staff members in the district, was fresh from the union’s Representative Council meeting last week in which she said there was no support among the teachers there for the reading program changes.

“They all believe Reading Recovery is the single, most beneficial program we have had for our students and that it is a shame that, instead of cutting it, we aren’t looking at expanding it,” Koehler said. “When money is more important than what is best for students, then we are in a really sad state of affairs.”

Linda Dorn, professor of reading education and director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said Reading Recovery has a national reputation for excellence and a 2-decades-old rich history of raising achievement and reducing racial achievement disparities in the Little Rock district.

“There is such a huge body of independent and district-level research that shows this is really working. Why would you replace it with this untested method?” Dorn asked.

Little Rock School Board member Norma Johnson late last week asked Suggs to add the issue to the School Board’s Feb. 27 meeting agenda.

“I need some clarity,” Johnson said. “If one-to-one and small group is working, we need it. I don’t think we should just limit it to small groups - one child might need special attention. A lot of parents and teachers have testimony that this works.”

Reading Recovery, developed by New Zealand educator Marie Clay, provides one-to-one teaching to the lowest-achieving first-graders for 30 minutes a day for 12 to 20 weeks.

Nationally, as many as 75 percent of children who complete the Reading Recovery program catch up with their classmates and achieve at their grade levels, according to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Reading Recovery Training Center report for 2012-13. A total of 1,466 students received Reading Recovery services in Arkansas schools last year and 60 percent met the criteria to be dismissed from the program, according to the report.

Suggs, who became the Little Rock district’s superintendent last July, said he began looking right away at the district’s elementary reading program and test score results in an effort to address the Little Rock School Board’s long-standing goal of having all children read at grade level by the time they complete the third grade.

He was complimentary of the Reading Recovery program and was anxious to expand services to all 32 elementary schools, including some of the district’s and state’s lowest-performing “priority” schools that currently do not have Reading Recovery teachers.

Currently, some of the district’s highest-performing schools have one or two Reading Recovery teachers. Those schools include the four elementary magnet schools: Booker, Carver, Gibbs and Williams elementaries as well as Roberts and Pulaski Heights elementaries.

But Suggs also noted that the number of pupils served by Reading Recovery had decreased from a high of 364 in 2010-11 to 175 this past school year. Of the 175, 72 children, or 41 percent, completed the program. Others fell into different categories: The district recommended them for special educational services; some moved away; or the school year ended before some could complete the program.

Suggs said he was dismayed that black children from low-income families who received Reading Recovery help still did not fare as well on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills as children from the same demographic group in the district’s general population.

The revamped reading-support plan calls for a concentration on kindergarten-through-third graders who score at “below-basic” levels, which is the lowest of four achievement levels on state-required tests. The goals will be to move those pupils through the “basic” level of achievement and into the “proficient” category,which is considered scoring at grade level.

The benefit of the revamped program, he said, is that the district will be able to track each pupil through the grades and provide him with supplemental instruction, not just in first grade but in multiple years to ensure that the child reaches and continues to achieve at proficient levels.

“We’re thinking systemic change,” Suggs said. “We aren’t thinking, ‘This is a reading program that sits over there in isolation.’ This is one of many things we are going to do to help transform our total district. We have to stop operating in silos and understand how the whole system works together for success. If we can improve reading and writing at this stage, then when the child reaches the middle grades, we won’t have the issues we are having.”

The Learning and Accelerated Progress program envisions groups of as many as nine struggling readers working in 35-minute sessions with a reading teacher.

One of the components of those sessions will be the use of headphones and electronic readers, such as Kindles. When not working directly with the specialist, children in a group will read or listen to e-books or learn vocabulary appropriate to their skill level on the e-readers.

The new program, Suggs said, will also feature ties to community partner organizations that will back up the schools in teaching children to read.

Suggs’ plan - already announced to the teachers - is to replace the 125 current Reading Recovery teachers, and math and literacy coaches.

In their place, there will be 32 reading teachers - one per elementary school, 40 math facilitators to cover all elementary and secondary schools, and 28 literacy facilitators who will assist all middle and high schools plus the elementary schools with the greatest academic needs.

He said he hopes the current Reading Recovery teachers will be among the cadre of reading teachers. All existing positions will be vacated and advertised in the early spring.

Any current job holder not rehired into new positions will be employed elsewhere in the 25,000-student district, Suggs said.

“The savings is an estimated $2 million, $9.1 million down to $7.2 million,” he said. “It’s a major savings, and we will increase the number of students we serve.”

The redesign of the plan comes at a time when the district is making preparations to absorb the loss of about $37.3 million a year in state desegregation aid that will end after the 2017-18 school year.

Dorn of the Center for Literacy at UALR, said in an interview that Reading Recovery teachers spend only part of their day working with individual students and the rest of it working with small groups of up to five children in grades kindergarten through fifth grade.

Last year a total of 724 Little Rock School District pupils were served in either one-to-one instruction or in small groups. As a result, each Reading Recovery teacher works with more than 30 pupils - exceeding the number of pupils served by an elementary classroom teacher.

“The kids they are serving are the kids who are most at risk [of failure] in literacy,” Dorn said, “and a large number of them are the kids who would end up in the special education populations and being retained [to repeat a school grade]. You get off into another issue of cost effectiveness there.”

Dorn, a Reading Recovery teacher trainer at the UALR, said there is widespread evidence of Reading Recovery’s success.

That includes the U.S. Department of Education’s five-year, $45.7 million grant plus matching money to expand Reading Recovery initiatives across the nation, including Arkansas.

There is also that federal agency’s What Works Clearinghouse finding that singled out Reading Recovery as having a positive effect on student acquisition of specific key reading skills.

Dorn also said that the Little Rock district’s own third-, fourth- and fifth-grade results on the Arkansas Benchmark Exam show gains of more than 20 percentage points for a six-year period, more evidence of success in the first grade. Seventy percent of Little Rock district students scored at proficient or better in both 2012 and 2013, up 21 points over the 49 percent proficient in 2008.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/18/2014

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