State: Bush hooked on reading model

TALLAHASSEE -- Faith Kirn sits opposite four kindergarteners at a crescent-shaped table. The youngsters giggle and fidget but straighten their spines and drop their hands in their laps when she signals with her right index finger.

"Get ready," Kirn says. More than just a warning, those words are part of a script that Kirn follows precisely.

"Say it fast," Kirn says, her finger still raised in the air.

"Hats," the students say, their own little fingers in the air.

Kirn is a reading teacher at Hartsfield Elementary, a Tallahassee school with a high percentage of poor and minority students who have made significant improvements in reading scores.

Three years ago, nearly a third of its students were reading below grade level. Two years later, it was just 14 percent.

Those numbers so impressed Gov. Jeb Bush that he plans to use Hartsfield as a model for his ambitious goal to get every student in Florida reading at grade level within 10 years.

That's not a simple task: Some 47 percent of elementary students can't read at grade level. The numbers are even worse for middle and high school.

It also is not cheap: Bush plans to spend $48-million in federal dollars plus about $50-million or more in state dollars, depending on how he fleshes out the initiative.

Part of his plan includes using the Hartsfield approach to retrain every elementary teacher in the state within three years and middle school teachers within five.

Bush's plan is likely to encounter resistance from teachers, some of whom object to the detailed scripts used by many of the reading programs the governor supports.

Critics say the "research-based" methods Bush favors are simplistic and ignore creative approaches in favor of teaching styles that are more easily measured with standardized tests.

But Bush says it is time to make reading the top priority in schools, and to use teaching methods that research shows will work. The Hartsfield approach, also embraced by his brother, the president, still gives schools and teachers plenty of choice in instruction, Bush said.

"We're not talking about a homogenized, sterilized approach," Bush said.

Supporters say those methods move beyond the decades-old debate between phonics and whole language by combining both in a very specific style and script that teachers follow. (Phonics stresses sounding out letters while whole language teaches kids to recognize whole words.)

For years, phonics was the chief reading method, but that began to change about 30 years ago when whole language came into vogue. Bush and others bemoan that shift.

But some educators are watching the Bush plan with a wary eye. They worry that it swings the pendulum too far toward phonics. Phonics, they say, works for some kids but not for all.

"What Bush is proposing is going back to one method, one kid," said Joan Kaywell, an English education professor at the University of South Florida.

And he's doing it at the expense of other solutions, Kaywell said.

"We have beaucoup research to suggest that reduced class size has a huge effect on improving reading," she said.

At Hartsfield, teachers use specific verbal and hand cues to drill the youngest students in recognizing the difference between the name of a letter and the sound it makes in a word. That continues in first grade as students learn to recognize whole words by sight, said Hartsfield principal Scotty Crowe.

After first grade, teachers build vocabulary and fluency. Then comes comprehension, or how well students understand what they read, Crowe said.

Some teachers say such methods are so regimented they take the art of teaching away from teachers, who simply parrot a script instead of tailoring instruction to individual needs.

Hillsborough County received $920,000 in state money to teach a specific program that drills young students in recognizing sounds. But it asked the state for permission to spend two-thirds of the money on other materials because so few schools wanted the program.

Nancy Millichamp, the librarian at Madeira Beach Middle School and a former reading teacher, said Bush's program should be optional. If it works, teachers will line up to learn the methods, she said.

Mandating a program or even a set of parameters ignores the intricacies of learning, Millichamp said.

"It seems like there's always an attempt to do a quick fix without considering the complexities of reading," she said. "You start to become cynical when the politicians become experts."

Crowe said even some Hartsfield teachers were slow to accept the changes. But those teachers jumped aboard once they saw their struggling students pick up books, he said.

"The idea there is to give teachers help in being focused on simple language" when they teach kids to read, said Joseph Torgesen, a psychology professor who runs a Florida State University research center that is a cornerstone of Bush's initiative.

"You cannot assume that (students) will learn things on their own. You have to teach them," Torgesen said. "Teachers need a sequence of how that is to be done."

Textbook companies have published numerous programs that follow the method Bush has embraced. Some of the training the governor wants would come from those companies, which have a "handshake agreement" to provide up to 100 hours of training per teacher, said Elizabeth Carrouth, director of the state's office of instructional materials.

But the governor's reading initiative will require money, which is scarce this year.

Besides $48-million in federal money, Bush wants to spend $10-million in state funds to retrain teachers and another $36-million already planned for general professional development. He wants more than $2-million for intensive summer sessions and a new teacher certification program.

As details of the initiative are worked out, more money could be identified, Bush said.

But school districts may have to do more than just retrain. They might have to hire new teachers at a time when many are considering hiring freezes or layoffs.

Bush said schools that get federal help will be the first in line for his initiative. But even schools that don't qualify for federal assistance can, and in some cases already have, hired reading teachers.

"The resources are there," Bush said.

Hartsfield teachers report to parents every two weeks on how well their children are doing. Any child who shows problems learning letters is identified early and given extra instruction using a method proved to work.

"This school absolutely believes that every child can and will learn to read," Crowe said.

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Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk