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| Eliminate Reading Barriers | |
"Eliminate
Reading Barriers and A presentation at
the Work Now and in the Future Conference Excerpts from a presentation by Dr. Bob McLaughlin, Superintendent of Union Gap School District, Union Gap, Washington and Past President of the Washington Vocational Association: "For eight years I was the principal at Davis High School in Yakima, a school with about 1750 students. When I arrived the first year we found at registration that we had students who were just not prepared for high school, so we built curriculum for them, and I started one remediation class. By the eighth year I had to have a total of eight classes for low-level students. This is a crucial problem, and it isn’t unique to Yakima. This is happening all over America. These students can’t read well enough to do high school work! "We have a drop out rate of 24% in the State of Washington, and Davis was no different. I became absolutely convinced that the lack of reading skills, the low self esteem, poor academic performance and the high drop out rate are all interconnected. I determined to do something about the reading problem as my mission in education. But I had to start earlier than high school. So I took the job as Superintendent of Union Gap School, a K-8 school with about 600 students, 73% of them on free or reduced lunches. Change is much easier to make in a small district. "I started doing research on my own, and it took me about six months in the superintendent’s job to determine the problem. The problem is the students can’t read and they can’t compute, but we keep pushing them on. The second grade teacher says, ‘I did the best I could, but I’m moving them on to the third grade.’ The third grade teacher says, ‘Oh, what am I going to do with all these students that can’t read and can’t compute? I’ll do the best I can.’ Nine months later they move them on to the fourth grade, and what does the fourth grade teacher come and tell me? The same thing I heard from the second and third grade teachers. We have to stop pushing them on! It means we need to find a way to solve the reading problems. "My next step was looking at reading programs. I couldn’t find a good one, so I said, ‘All right, what we’ll do is double their time on task, double them on their reading time spent in school.’ Every teacher in the District sat down with the principal and myself and built a plan to increase reading time. And they were beautiful plans. After a year, guess what? We had made some progress, but very little. So this told me that spending more time doing the same thing is not going to solve the problem. We needed a paradigm shift. "So then I went out looking again, and kept looking. I looked at all the famous reading programs that you hear about. I looked at Reading Recovery—very, very costly, and you have to have your best certified teachers running the program. In the schools I looked at who were doing this program, the gains were very flat. And then I ran across the Read Right program. Their results looked very promising. I took the idea of running a pilot project to the school board, and they finally said, ‘All right, you run a ten-week pilot program, and let’s take a look at it.’ "What would you do? You’ve got ten weeks to try out this program in a K-8 district. Are you going to take a few students out of every class and try it? We talked about that for a while, and we decided no, if there is one critical grade in the elementary school it’s grade three. I might be wrong but my teachers agreed with me. Why grade three? Because up to that age they have been doing everything as a group, and then they start working independently. And if they don’t know how to read, they’re lost. So we said let’s take every third grader who is having a problem in this district and put them in the Read Right program. That’s what we did. In January of 1996, we brought in the Read Right program. We took our 21 worst readers out of their regular 3rd grade reading classes one period a day and tutored them in Read Right. These are the students who the third grade teachers identified as being high risk, dropout students because of their reading problems. Ten weeks later we took a look at the results of the program, and I just couldn’t believe it. For some of these students we totally solved their problem; they were now excellent readers. This was almost unheard of in a school setting. We were absolutely delighted with their progress. We used the Woodcock-Johnson Reading Test as a pre- and post- measure. In ten weeks the group of 21 students as a whole had moved from the 19th percentile to the 34th percentile. "We decided to make a full scale implementation of Read Right including the 7th and 8th graders. With the board’s approval, we shifted our budget for the 96-97 school year, and brought in Read Right Systems staff to train our Title I teacher and four paraprofessionals. We started tutoring full time in September of 1996. This is November of 1997, and the impact on our school district has been a joy to behold. Our goal in 1998 is that every eighth grader who leaves our school is reading at or above grade level, and I think we’re going to make it. What I’m saying to you is that in a few short years in Union Gap, except for the students that transfer into our school district, we’re going to eradicate our reading problem. Using this new methodology I’m absolutely convinced we can do it. If a small school district with our limited resources can do it, you can do it too!" UPDATE:
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Copyright 1995-2007 Read Right Systems, Inc. |
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