Reading Success for Special Education Students

by Rhonda Stone
of The Literacy Alliance
& Read Right Systems

April 19, 2004

 ROBINSON, Mississippi—Many adolescents with reading problems and special education teachers are known to have something in common: Burn-out and drop-out.

            But not for Puyallup High School special education teacher Tammy Summers of the Puyallup School District, Puyallup, Wash. Summers was a featured presenter in April at the Effective Strategies Conference sponsored by the National Drop-Out Prevention Center located at Clemson University and held in Robinson, Mississippi. Her topic: Transforming teens at risk of dropping out of school because of reading problems into effective readers and successful students.

            “I remember when I went to school they told me special education teachers have a life-span of about seven years and then they burn out,” she told conference attendees. She acknowledged to the crowd that she was contemplating leaving the field of special education in her sixth year but was given the opportunity to try a new reading program with her students. Called Read Right^®, the program would require her to participate in seven weeks of on-site, hands-on training through the course of the school year and to devote herself full-time to the tutoring-oriented reading intervention.

            “When I was going to school, I was very idealistic,” she said. “I believed that all children could learn, especially children with disabilities, and I wanted to help them be successful. Then I got into the real world of teaching and, although those were still my goals and objectives, it was so hard. The kids had to work so hard and I had to work so hard for a minimal amount of progress. I began to understand the burn-out rate and I began to understand my students’ frustration.”

            Then Read Right came along. According to Summers, it transformed her and her high school students, allowing both to experience relatively quick and lasting success.

            Now, she says: “I plan on teaching as long as I possibly can—as long as I can teach Read Right—because it allows me to meet those idealistic goals, helping all students learn, especially students with disabilities. In my school, Read Right is not only a reading program that allows students to eliminate their reading disabilities, it is also an opportunity for my students to build self-esteem and meet their future goals.”

            To make her point at the conference, Summers presented a number of case studies from her first full year delivering the Read Right program. Every student in her program achieved a wide range of growth, she said: from one grade level of improvement in one semester to five or six grade levels of improvement in a single school year. All students achieved—general ed. students, special education students, and English language learners.

            “Jeanette,” for example, had a host of discipline issues, had done time in a juvenile detention center, and was at risk of dropping out of school. In her senior year, she started Read Right reading at a fourth/fifth grade level. At her IEP meeting just a few months later, Jeanette’s mother couldn’t thank Summers enough. “I cannot believe this is my daughter,” she told Summers. “This girl always has a book in her hand. She’s always reading. I even have to buy books for her.” Jeanette took an extra semester and graduated from high school reading at a tenth grade level—five or six years of improvement in one calendar year.

            Another student, “Linda,” moved to the United States seven years ago and is an English language learner. After just three months in Read Right, she shared that she felt she had learned “more English and learned how to read more than she had ever learned in the seven years that she’s been in our traditional education program.”

Another teenager felt so strongly about the program she asked Summers if she could become an advocate for Read Right. “She wants the school board to make sure that all of the schools and the elementaries are teaching Read Right or providing Read Right as an opportunity. She doesn’t want kids to have to suffer or struggle with reading as she did.”

            Currently, the Puyallup School District has Read Right tutoring in two of its four high schools and two of its middle schools. A total of 341 Puyallup students have been tutored since September 2002, with 55 percent of those students served by special education services. It will be expanding to its other two high schools and more of its middle schools next year, when it will also introduce the program for the first time at the elementary level.

            Read Right is significantly different from other reading programs in that it is consistent with neuroimaging research (Keller et al., 2001; Vandenberghe et al., 2002) that suggests that sentence reading and individual word identification are separate cognitive acts with very different patterns of neural activation. The methodology is grounded in a view of procedural learning (Inhelder & Piaget, 1968) supported by the field of neuropsychology that says that every individual must construct a complex neural network to guide a process. To produce efficient and effective reading, the neural network must be oriented to excellent sentence reading, not individual word identification. To fix a reading problem, the entire neural network must be remodeled to guide the process accurately (Tadlock, 2004)—not just one system for decoding words or individual word identification (Shaywitz, 1998 & 2003).

            Read Right Systems tracks the monthly progress of every Read Right student while they are in a certified program. School employees who deliver the Read Right tutoring program do the testing. At the end of March 2004, students in the Puyallup High School Read Right program were averaging one grade level of improvement for every 11 hours of tutoring—remarkable success for high school students. At one junior high in the Puyallup district, Summers reported that, on average, Read Right students were advancing one grade level for every 12.5 hours of tutoring.

            The rejuvenated special education teacher used just four words to sum up student progress with Read Right: “It is phenomenal success.”

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