The children sit in neat rows on the floor, their legs crisscrossed, hands in their laps. In unison, they sound out the letters, their voices loud and clear, as part of the morning reading drill. In the singsong tones of a military cadence, they work their way through the alphabet:
“A, a, what do you say, ah, ah, ah ...,” they chant.
B, b, what do you say, buh, buh, buh. ...”
Next, the teacher points to colorful flashcards that line the top of the chalkboard, and the children follow her rapid-fire commands.
“Boys and girls, identify the picture on the card,” she directs.
“Monkey,” they answer.
“Say the sound.”
“Mmm.”
“Spell the sound.”
“M.”
They continue to speed through the letters. The teacher interrupts periodically with instructions on the shape their mouths should make or how they must blow air out when they say the letter.
During a brief pause, the activity is halted by the sounds of children in the next room reciting a similar drill. Pupils in all the surrounding classrooms, in fact, are engrossed in nearly identical activities as they prepare to read from the big storybook propped up on an easel in front of the classroom. The exercises are part of a highly scripted program designed to teach youngsters to read through an intense focus on explicit, systematic phonics.
This is kindergarten at Thompson Elementary School in one of this city’s poorest neighborhoods. As the school year winds down, children are immersed in structured reading tasks dominated by repetitive phonics activities and stories that correspond to each lesson.
Many of these 6-year-olds are conquering 1st grade books and vocabulary words with skill and enthusiasm, and in the process, working to dispel the common perception that the nation’s neediest children aren’t learning to read.
Officials in the 225,000-student Houston Independent School District have taken an almost militaristic stand in addressing the schools’ most fundamental task for ensuring academic success: teaching children to read. A 2-year-old initiative that administrators praise as a balanced approach has forced teachers in every one of the district’s 280 elementary, middle, and high schools to conform to a more uniform strategy for teaching reading that begins with basic skills.
The approach that Superintendent Rod Paige has emphatically declared as the best way to teach this city’s children to read--and has thrown a barrage of resources behind--has attracted the national spotlight and, with it, the praise and criticism that have fueled the “reading wars” for decades. But as the rosy reports out of Houston inspire other districts to try to emulate the strategy, some experts are urging closer scrutiny.
In a state and a city that closely guard local control of education, decisions about how to teach children have traditionally been made at the school or even the classroom level. A 1991 school-based-decisionmaking policy had given principals and teachers wide latitude in choosing instructional methods that suited their students’ needs.
But several years ago, a group of the district’s best teachers lamented that teaching reading had become haphazard. Over the years, schools had jumped on the bandwagon of nearly every new trend in the field, they complained. Nearly a decade ago, the district adopted instructional materials styled for whole language, a method of teaching reading in the context of literature. And they had bought “every basal known to man,” says district reading manager Phyllis Hunter. Reading instruction was approached in dozens of different ways.
The district’s high rate of student mobility--at least 25 percent of students at most schools, and as many as 63 percent at others, transfer within the district or leave altogether--pointed to a need for uniformity, the teachers said.
Paige, who had formed committees with representatives from the district, local universities, and the community to review management policies since becoming superintendent in 1994, decided to do the same for reading instruction.
“I wanted to settle the argument once and for all,” says Paige, referring to the perennial debate over whether to use a phonics- or literature-based method to teach children to read.
After months of reviewing research, conducting focus groups, and discussing the issue, the Peer Examination, Evaluation, and Redesign Committee--or PEER--unveiled its report, “A Balanced Approach to Reading” in 1996.
As a result, “our board adopted a district philosophy of reading,” Paige says. “We announced that reading is not a decentralized activity and that we expect compliance across the district.”
Under that policy, which plucked many of the decisions out of teachers’ hands, reading in grades K-3 must be taught in an uninterrupted block of at least 90 minutes each day using a six-pronged approach. By incorporating all the components--phonemic awareness, print awareness, alphabetic awareness, orthographic awareness, comprehension strategies, and reading practice--district administrators aim to get all children reading at grade level by the 3rd grade.
“Our task now is to bring together reading components supported by research from cognitive science and the effective practices of successful teachers in a balanced approach to reading instruction,” the 1996 report says. “Balance involves a program that combines skills involving phonological awareness and decoding with language- and literature-rich activities.”
Implementation of the program in Houston has coincided with a state reading initiative, led by Republican Gov. George W. Bush, that also prescribes greater attention to phonemic awareness.
Responding to alarming statistics on reading achievement among young children--some 40 percent of 4th graders could not read at the “basic” level on the 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading-- many districts and states have begun to set similar, more explicit guidelines for teaching reading in the elementary grades. Texas students scored at the national average on NAEP, with 57 percent of 4th graders reading at the basic level or above.
But it is the sheer scope of the effort in this, the nation’s 7th-largest district, that makes it notable, observers say.
“All in all, they have seen some positive effects from the emphasis placed on reading in the increased attention on professional development, the public attention to the issue, and the money,” says Leslie Patterson, a language arts professor at the University of Houston.
As the pendulum has swung from employing one method of instruction to another, teachers have rarely gotten the training and support necessary for adopting the changes effectively. District leaders here have made that training a priority.
Over the past year, three dozen reading teacher-trainers have been leading carefully designed sessions for some 3,000 elementary teachers. During the sessions, the trainers outline the district’s reading philosophy and the PEER report, which serves as the foundation of the program. They hand out articles outlining the latest research in the field, review a glossary of language arts terms, and discuss curriculum guidelines. They lead activities that often end with teachers reciting nursery rhymes or breaking into song as they demonstrate techniques for developing early reading skills. The training also prepares teachers to conduct the program in English and Spanish to accommodate the district’s large Hispanic population.
The district has budgeted $3.4 million a year for the professional- development portion, which includes the hiring of Hunter, the reading manager. Nearly $2 million more from federal Title I and Goals 2000 grants has also been directed toward reading. The full-scale training is supplemented with smaller workshops that assist teachers in writing lesson plans, setting up literacy centers, and creating other means of infusing the program’s elements into their lessons.
Nearly all the district’s elementary teachers have been put through the paces of the intensive training mandated under the initiative. The program was expanded this year to include many in middle and high schools as well. Eventually, all the secondary teachers will receive training in reading instruction.
For elementary teachers, five days are scheduled throughout the school year for them to review research, run through reading and writing activities that they can use with their classes, and learn assessment techniques. Middle and high school teachers must attend three training days--10 days for reading-enrichment teachers--on literacy and comprehension strategies.
For some of the district’s veteran teachers, the training was a hard sell, either because they didn’t see the need for more training or they suspected it was another fad that would fade away.
“Many longtime teachers have seen programs come and go,” says Jean Barber, a reading teacher-trainer. “Some said, ‘I’ll wait this one out, too, and continue doing what I’ve been doing.’”
Many teachers here had been taking a balanced approach for years, using their own blend of phonics lessons and literature to build students’ skills. Now, the district demands that all understand the specific elements of the district initiative and the underlying reasons for addressing them, Hunter says.
District officials say the impact of the program has already reverberated down to even their most troubled schools. On state tests, students’ scores at every grade level have increased steadily. The gains at some schools have been dramatic.
Superintendent Paige and his staff were ecstatic when the latest results of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, or TAAS, were released last month. Overall, 85 percent of 3rd graders, 89 percent of 4th graders, and 88 percent of 5th graders met at least the minimum standards on the reading portion of the annual test, an increase of at least 4 percentage points at each grade level since last year. In some schools, all the students who took the test passed. Fourth graders have improved 11 percentage points since 1996--the year before the new mandate went into effect.
Houston students’ achievement rivals that of many of their suburban counterparts, yet the district profile would predict far less success. Roughly half its students are Hispanic, another 35 percent are African- American, and more than one-fourth have limited proficiency in English. Some 65 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and in many schools, almost all the children live in borderline or extreme poverty. More than 40 percent of district students are identified as at- risk of dropping out of school because of poor academic achievement. And many students here, teachers and administrators say, begin their academic careers with limited experience with books, words, or even the alphabet.
At Wesley Elementary School, teachers and administrators have headed off that formula for failure. All its 1,000 students qualify for federal Title I aid earmarked for disadvantaged children. More than three-fourths of the pupils, 93 percent of whom are black, qualify for free or subsidized lunches. Yet, 87 percent of 3rd graders passed the TAAS reading section last year. It is not uncommon for Wesley’s kindergartners to read 2nd grade books. Fewer than 6 percent attend special education classes in a district where 10 percent is the average.
On the other side of the school’s barbed wire fencing is a neighborhood characterized by tiny, rundown dwellings. Nonetheless, Wesley Elementary has garnered national attention as a model urban school.
Thaddeus S. Lott Sr., its no-nonsense former principal who now directs a project that clusters Wesley and two other public elementary schools under the state’s new charter school program, has become something of a celebrity after appearing on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” and being featured in magazine articles and on television newsmagazines.
A cover story in the February issue of Policy Review, published by the conservative Heritage Foundation, declared that Lott “Puts Failing Schools to Shame,” for demanding a strict adherence to the basics.
All students at Wesley are taught to read through what is called direct instruction, an intensive phonics-based curriculum. Using the commercial reading program SRA Reading Mastery, formerly named DISTAR, teachers lead children through daily drills sounding out letters and letter blends and other repetitive reading exercises. Teachers, who receive extensive training in conducting the program in lockstep fashion, ask several hundred questions of their students each day.
“Boys and girls, get ready,” kindergarten teacher Mary Abdelsayed prompts a half-dozen pupils. “What’s the word?”
They respond in decibels barely below shouting: “Fin.”
“Again,” the teacher instructs as she runs her finger quickly under the word.
“Fin.”
“Once more.”
“Fin.”
“Get ready,” Abdelsayed directs, maintaining a steady rhythm to keep the children focused.
“What’s the word?”
“Fine.”
“Again.”
“Fine.”
“Once more.”
“Fine.”
After this warm-up, they read from a text featuring the words they just practiced.
Lott, who was principal here for 23 years before forming the charter school cluster, brought this program to the school shortly after his tenure began. Raised just blocks from the aging brick building, he was taught that education could break the cycle of poverty.
| The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is so impressed it has offered $4.5 million over the next three years to train teachers around the city in direct instruction. |
When he discovered that students in his school couldn’t read, he quickly set out to institute wholesale change. Nearly two-thirds of the five-dozen teachers at Wesley have less than five years’ experience, and one-fourth of its teachers leave each year. The students are also highly mobile. Under such conditions, a standard reading program is the only answer, Lott maintains.
“I had teachers who didn’t know how to teach reading and whose hands I was not able to hold until they learned,” he says.
Lott paid for the reading materials out of the school’s supplemental budget during the years the district purchased texts for whole-language instruction. But in 1991, when the television news program “Prime Time Live” featured Wesley Elementary as a school that was achieving widespread success with little help from the district, Lott began to win more support. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is so impressed it has offered $4.5 million over the next three years to train teachers around the city in direct instruction.
The school has been praised by back-to-basics advocates, but it also has been the subject of scrutiny by state officials. The state audited its testing methods and results after skeptics raised suspicions that a school with such an impoverished student population could not possibly perform so well. The audit found nothing out of order.
Lott doesn’t mince words about how he interprets such challenges. “It is nothing more than a display of ignorance,” he says. “It is racist” to assume that poor minority children can’t learn.
Despite Wesley’s success with the approach, SRA Reading Mastery is practiced by only a handful of schools here. Most of the 181 elementary schools have opted for other popular programs that also provide step-by-step guidelines for teachers but are somewhat less restrictive. More than 70 use Success for All, a whole-school reform program created by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Some schools, including Thompson Elementary, use Open Court, also published by SRA, while still others combine several programs or design their own. Incorporated in all the programs are periodic assessments.
At Poe Elementary School, which draws a mix of students from wealthy and poor areas of the city, Principal Anne McClellan and her teachers customized their reading program to better suit the needs of students and teachers. The school’s literacy lab, the centerpiece of the program, helps teachers in planning their lessons and assessing students’ reading skills. Dozens of other schools have also opted for their own plans.
“We decided that it would be easier [to devise the school’s own strategy] than buying a package, to capitalize on the strengths of our teachers,” says McClellan. At least two teachers left the school, where whole language was previously a common instructional approach, because the new plan conflicted with their own philosophy, she adds.
While few educators and researchers will criticize Houston’s sharp focus on reading, or the millions of dollars dedicated to it, the district’s seeming preference for commercial reading programs has been faulted for promoting a one-size-fits-all attitude.
“Obviously, they are making great gains with the types of kids that many schools have not made great gains with,” says Kathleen Stumpf Jongsma, a language arts specialist for the Northside district in San Antonio and a board member of the International Reading Association.
“But the programs seem to be geared toward the masses, and progression is made for all children rather than on an individual diagnostic basis.”
Teacher advocates, while praising the district for attending to professional-development needs that are often ignored, say that some of the programs, when applied too strictly or in lieu of other strategies, fail to capitalize on the skill and experience of the teaching corps.
“The strongest teachers are not trained in one method, but have a number of methods or strategies to work with children,” says Margaret H. Hill, an associate professor of reading/language arts at the University of Houston at Clearlake and the new president of the Texas State Reading Association, an IRA affiliate.
| Many teachers say they like the predictability of the structured programs. |
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Programs like the one at Wesley Elementary School may add to the problem of teacher turnover, according to Gayle Fallon, the president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, the local affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers.
“It’s a ‘burnout’ program,” she suggests. “Because it’s so interactive ... you are talking and [working closely with students] for the better part of six hours a day.”
But Fallon says it is better to have more structure than not enough. “We have seen improvements in student test scores and, basically, every teacher likes to feel successful,” she says. “We went for years with a new reading program every year, adopting every fad that was out there. ‘A Balanced Approach to Reading’ stabilized the reading program and put the focus on making sure it is research-tested.”
Many teachers say they like the predictability of the structured programs.
Abdelsayed, who has been at Wesley for four of her nine years as a kindergarten teacher, says she prefers direct instruction to the whole-language approach she used elsewhere.
“This program gives kids a very solid base,” she says. “When I got these kids at the beginning of the year, they couldn’t read anything. Now, they are on the 2nd grade level.”
But she believes that any program would be effective with the same amount of training and resources that Houston is expending.
“I can work with any program as long as I’m trained,” Abdelsayed says. With sufficient support, “any program would work.”
Schools are not required to adopt a commercial program, Hunter, the district’s reading manager, says. They need only incorporate the six required components into their classrooms in a systematic way.
“You will not find ‘A Balanced Approach to Reading’ in a box,” she says. “It is not a program; it is a philosophy.”
Administrators here point to recent research as providing the basis for that philosophy. They point to one study in particular, which was conducted in another Houston district and sparked national controversy last year.
Barbara R. Foorman and Jack M. Fletcher, researchers in the pediatrics department at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School, studied the effectiveness of several commercial programs in teaching at-risk children to read. The study, underwritten by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and published in the March issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology, found that explicit, systematic phonics instruction led to higher word-recognition skills among poor 1st and 2nd graders than methods that teach phonics less directly.
The study has been held up by legislators around the country--primarily conservatives--who have called for schools to get back to basics. They say the findings are proof that phonics is the best way to teach children to read. But that interpretation has led to oversimplification and widespread misinformation about the findings, says Foorman, who has been surprised at how her research has been used as ammunition in the reading wars.
“I was amazed at the attention we got. Our findings are consistent with a lot of research over the last 20 years,” says Foorman, who was the chairwoman of the Houston PEER committee.
Fletcher says that many people have misinterpreted the research as prescribing “phonics first, and phonics only,” when, in fact, it merely indicates that explicit phonics instruction may be the best initial strategy for teaching the most disadvantaged students to read.
G. Reid Lyon, the NICHD’s director of research, says the Houston plan does incorporate a balance of essential elements. He does, however, add a caveat: Teachers must have the training to recognize how the components should be applied to meet the needs of individual students.
“The plan clearly includes the components that the research indicates are critical in reading development,” says Lyon, whose federal agency is financing Foorman’s latest research project in nine Houston schools.
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| Houston educators say their performance on state tests is proof that the program is working. |
But some prominent researchers disagree. Richard L. Allington, a reading professor at the State University of New York at Albany and an IRA board member, contends that the Houston strategy gives short shrift to comprehension strategies. It also ignores evidence that a single policy for all schools in a large district is ill-advised, he says.
“The best research we have says that this is a school-by-school process,” Allington says. “This plan assumes that every Houston elementary school is alike and that one plan will work in all of them. It also seems to assume that there is some quick fix ... that if you buy a particular program, or buy a test, you can turn things around.”
Houston educators say their performance on state tests is proof that the program is working. Some schools, where barely one-third of students met minimum requirements on the TAAS reading test several years ago, now see a majority of students passing. For instance, at Peck Elementary School, which serves more than 300 largely impoverished students, 68 percent of 4th graders passed the TAAS last year, compared with just 34 percent two years earlier. Third and 5th graders at the school also made significant gains.
Although there are still a dozen or so schools where fewer than half the children at a given grade level are performing up to par on the state exam, most schools in the district have done well.
But critics say that those results prove only that students have learned the rules of the language and how to do well on the test. They do not prove that the children are reading well, or that they understand what they read, they say.
The TAAS, which does not have a significant reading-comprehension portion, does not offer “an appropriate assessment of reading levels” in Houston, according to the PEER committee.
On the Stanford Achievement Test-9th Edition, which has a reading-comprehension section, the district’s students scored below the 40th percentile nationally--considered below average--at nearly every grade level last year.
Even in Foorman’s study, the impact of direct phonics instruction on reading comprehension was not “as robust” as it was on word recognition, and it had no greater effect on spelling achievement and vocabulary development than methods that teach phonics less directly.
“The children can call the words on almost any text put in front of them, but the synthesizing of ideas with real-life experience may be lacking,” the IRA’s Jongsma says.
Houston officials acknowledge that work remains to be done. A more uniform assessment system that will gauge students’ comprehension skills is in the works. A state-mandated reading inventory to identify children at risk of having reading difficulties is set for grades K-2 in the fall. The district is also in the process of adopting new spelling textbooks that will meet the demands of the program. But with the adoption of reading materials a full two years away, schools must make the best of the basal readers that the district purchased before it adopted the reading initiative.
The district may be closer to realizing some of its reading goals than others.
Of the 12 broad goals the district has outlined, the first four deal with concepts of print, the structure of language, word recognition, and vocabulary skills. Others aim to foster students’ interest in reading and their comprehension and critical analysis of text. Goals 8 and 9 call for students to express their thoughts and reactions to various types of text and to analyze critically its elements.
In one elementary school here, 6th graders, who were taught to read well before the reading program was in place, provide a compelling example of how mastering reading skills does not guarantee comprehension.
As part of a program that encourages students to read children’s literature, small groups of students recently completed extensive research projects on the themes and characters highlighted in the books they selected.
On one recent morning, the groups present their research, starting off with a lengthy and well-rehearsed summary of the plot, characters, moral, conflict, symbolism, and irony of the story. They proudly show off small-scale models of a scene in the book and turn in research papers outlining their work.
But when they begin to answer more substantive questions about why characters took certain actions, or what particular words or phrases mean, some of the students appear perplexed.
One group, which read Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, cannot express what the title of the book means or why one of the story’s protagonists is considered brave. The children hesitate before giving the meaning of basic vocabulary words, and they guess at explaining figures of speech.
“We are trying to get them to look deeper into what they are reading,” the school’s principal says. “Obviously, the teacher now knows what these children need to work on.”
