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Because of money constraints, students who need help the most aren't necessarily getting it, officials say.
By KENT FISCHER
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 9, 2000
PORT RICHEY -- His Pokemon sneakers dangling three inches off the floor, the sandy-haired boy scrunched up his face and stumbled through a spelling test. The third-grader wrote "by" as "biy" and "bell" as "beelly."
The boy next tried to read a clever short story about a trapped snake who bites a helpful pig. He slipped on "cannot" and was dumbstruck by "laughed."
Fox Hollow Elementary School reading specialist Gail Diederich shook her head.
"It's scary what this boy doesn't know," Diederich said after the boy returned to class. "We tested him for special education, and he didn't qualify. I don't think he's in any special program."
Reading is the foundation upon which all other academic achievement rests and teaching children to read is the most important job for elementary schools. The third-grader who struggled to read "laughed" and the thousands of others like him throughout Pasco represent the single biggest challenge to district teachers.
Although no educator would dispute the overwhelming importance of reading, most Pasco elementaries:
Lack trained personnel who can identify and overcome specific reading problems early in a child's schooling.
Depend on $6-an-hour classroom aides to tutor the worst readers. The aides receive only a half-day of training.
Rely on a reading text that some experts say completely misses the mark with struggling readers.
"You're right, the children with the most distance to go need to be with the people who can help them," said Judy Moore, the district administrator in charge of reading programs. "We can't get the teachers. We're using our personnel as wisely as we can.
"This is not a simple process," Moore said. "If it were easy to identify exactly what is causing a reading problem, we would have done it. These things are complex."
Literacy skills are crucial to success on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, with two-thirds of the exam measuring reading and writing. Even the FCAT math test looks like a reading exam, with its complex word problems and rigorous vocabulary.
In 1998, the first time the state administered the FCAT, 47 percent of Fox Hollow's fourth-graders scored at the lowest level. Last year, it was 44 percent, and the low scores were the primary reason Fox Hollow earned a "D" grade under the state's new school rating system.
But Fox Hollow's reading problems are by no means unique. Schools throughout the county and across the state struggle to teach many children this most important skill.
For struggling readers at Pasco's 13 most-impoverished elementary schools, the picture is brighter. They have a reliable remedial reading program run by full-time, highly trained reading teachers. The expensive program is paid for with federal money designated for educating the poor.
But that aid is not available for low-performing readers at the district's 17 other elementaries.
Diederich, who joined Fox Hollow's faculty days before the school opened last August, acknowledged the problems and said she has a multipronged plan to fix them. But she likened the effort to steering an oil tanker: It takes time to turn the ship around.
"The mold has cracked," Diederich said. "I really believe that in two years we'll have a completely revised reading program here."
Classroom aide Irina Dare sits among five second-grade boys. Together they thumb through a 16-page, 30-sentence booklet about insects, a part of their daily Early Success lesson. Early Success is Pasco's primary remedial reading program for first- and second-graders.
One boy begins reading the bug story aloud and, almost immediately, he stumbles over a word he doesn't know, "Goliath."
"Guh . . . Guh," the boy says, haltingly.
"Does somebody want to help him?" Dare asks the other four boys.
"Golia," one of them says.
"Golia," the first boy repeats, not knowing that they have failed to decipher the word.
Dare moved to the United States from Russia five years ago and has learned to speak excellent English. But there are some English words and sounds that she has not yet mastered, and when she reads the word "bug" it comes out "bog."
Moments later, the boy is hung up again, this time on "itself."
"Chop it up," Dare said. "It's a compound word."
"Its . . . its . . ." the boy says before stopping.
"Sound it out," Dare urges. "Ssss. Llll."
The boy can't crack the word.
"Itself," Dare says after a few moments of silence.
"Itself," the boy repeats before continuing.
The lesson ends after the third trip through the book. The boys jump from their chairs. Dare hands each of them a sticker and shoos them back to class.
"I do the best I can, but I think the teachers are more qualified than I am," Dare said. "But the teachers are so busy, it's almost impossible for them to do it. I do feel that I am helping, but it would be a big plus if I was a qualified teacher."
It's a scene played out in countless classrooms across the nation, said David Chard, a University of Texas reading expert who has written about the use of teacher aides as reading tutors in low-income schools.
"I've seen some absolutely horrible instruction in these settings," said Chard, who was not speaking specifically about Fox Hollow aides.
Chard said he doesn't question the intentions of the aides he has observed but added that it's illogical for educators to expect aides to succeed where trained teachers have failed.
"It makes no sense at all," he said.
Yet that's exactly how many Pasco schools run their catch-up reading programs.
They do it because teachers often don't have the flexibility and time to give struggling readers the intensive help they need. If a teacher sits down with three poor readers for 30 minutes a day, who will watch and instruct the other 22 students?
The lack of focused, intense help early in a child's schooling creates monster problems later. A reading problem that can be corrected with 30 minutes of proper daily instruction in first grade takes two hours a day to remedy in third grade, according the National Institutes of Health.
"We know that it's more expensive the older they get," Moore said. "It's the need for additional hands and personnel" that prevents the district from doing more.
So the job often falls to classroom aides, who start at $6.05 an hour and who received only a half-day's training session in Early Success.
Even the Early Success manual states that the program is designed to be administered by professional teachers and reading specialists.
"Reading to a trained adult who will encourage strategic independent reading is the best possible practice," the manual says in the introduction.
Moore said Early Success is not meant to supplant the lessons of a trained teacher. Teachers, in fact, are supposed to be monitoring their aides' work. Teaching reading still is the job of the classroom teacher, not his or her classroom aide, Moore said.
Diederich said she hasn't kept tabs on the aides as much as she should have this year.
"I need to learn more about Early Success myself," she said. "We need experts (in the classroom) -- trained experts -- but when you can't get them, you have to go with a contingency plan."
And it's not as if Fox Hollow has made no improvements to its reading program this year.
Classroom aide Jackie Foster said of the 16 students she has tutored with Early Success, six of them have graduated from the program or will graduate shortly.
"They're making good progress," she said. "They're doing wonderful, and if they have a question that I can't answer, I'll always go to their teacher."
Diederich has worked with several teachers to help them improve their reading lessons and instructional techniques. Teachers ran an after-school tutoring program for about eight weeks that, in part, focused on the school's worst readers.
In January, Fox Hollow received enough grant money to hire four new teachers. Principal Arlene Moreno assigned them to work with struggling readers in first and second grade in an attempt to get the students more expert help.
This year, the school offered teachers several workshops on reading instruction and has booked a $6,000 three-day workshop with a well-known reading expert who will train teachers on how to design small-group activities that will give them more one-on-one time with struggling readers.
"You've goto to work with what you've got," Moreno said. "You've got to tap into the talents of individuals."
Publishing house Houghton-Mifflin is a giant among textbook publishers, and its Invitations to Literacy series is a bestseller. Two dozen Florida school districts use the series, and Pasco recently spent about $2.5-million to get the books into every elementary classroom.
Invitations to Literacy molds its lessons around award-winning children's literature, and for many children who easily learn to read, it can be a superb program. But it offers little to struggling readers, some reading experts say.
Those experts say the biggest problem with Invitations to Literacy is that it lacks high-quality phonics lessons that teach children the crucial relationship between letters and sounds and how those sounds blend into words. Most children intuitively understand those concepts, but others -- about one in four -- need explicit phonics instruction.
Invitations to Literacy's phonics are a haphazard mishmash, several reading experts said. Unless teachers using the series know how to provide such lessons themselves -- and many do not -- Invitations to Literacy is a bad choice for struggling readers.
"The instruction in phonics is simply not explicit enough to help the child who is struggling to "break the code,' " said Linda Baker, a reading professor at the University of Maryland, who reviewed the textbook series for Baltimore schools. "I did not recommend its adoption in the early grades in Baltimore for that reason."
The Times contacted reading experts at three other universities who have reviewed the Invitations to Literacy series. None recommended the program be used with struggling readers.
Moore said the district has purchased supplemental phonics programs to bolster Invitations to Literacy. Teachers are supposed to use a variety of teaching methods and books to reach the varying abilities of their students, she said.
"I think it's an excellent (text) written for the average student," she said. "Some students do need other kinds of support. We do not want to limit ourselves only to (Invitations to Literacy)."
But are teachers reaching those children left behind by their textbooks?
Last fall, Fox Hollow teachers were asked to recommend students for a new after-school tutoring program. An informal survey of the referrals for 50 struggling readers showed that roughly a third of the children lacked sufficient phonics skills, according to their teachers' written comments.
Some find another problem with Invitations to Literacy.
Like a musician or an athlete, children progress in reading depending largely on how much they practice once they learn the basics. Chard said he found many of the readings in Invitations to Literacy are over the heads of young readers.
"The emphasis isn't on books the kids can read, but on good literature, and the kids don't get the practice they need," said Chard, who was hired last year by Houghton-Mifflin to help rewrite and improve the Invitations to Literacy series. "Many schools found that out the hard way."
To remedy the problem, Diederich has continually urged teachers this year to break away from the textbook series and to use books of varying difficulties in their classrooms.
By early March, Diederich said, she was seeing a big improvement in the types of reading materials teachers were using in their classrooms. The hundreds of storybooks and novellas usually stacked high in her office had started to dwindle as teachers increasingly borrowed them for use in class.
"People are really, more than ever, willing to let go of their reading texts," Diederich said. "I'm convinced that being bound to those books was a major factor in our low reading scores. Convinced."
-- Kent Fischer covers education in Pasco County. He can be reached at (800) 333-7505, extension 6241, or at 869-6241. His e-mail address is kfischer@sptimes.com.