by
Rhonda Stone
of The Literacy Alliance
& Read Right
Systems
June
15, 2004
Fred W.
Traner Middle School in the Reno area has the kind of
demographics that challenge the success of children all across
America—high family poverty and low literacy. But the school
has a new equalizer approved by the State of Nevada that is
producing rapid success in reading for even the most severely
impacted struggling readers.
Traner
Principal Mike Bumgartner brought
Read Right®
to his school two years ago. In that time, he has watched many
students grow from low-level readers to grade-level readers in
a single school year. A few students have gained as much as
seven grade levels in nine months. Such success wasn’t
supposed to be possible with reading programs, or so he
thought.
Pam
Moreno and Kathleen Connell,
Read Right
tutors at his school, thought the same thing. Reading
improvement could be achieved, but the best a certified
teacher or teaching assistant might hope for was two, maybe
two-and-a-half grade levels of improvement for a few
outstanding students. At Traner, the average gain for all 136
students participating in
Read
Right
during the 2003-2004 school year was 2.0 grade levels.
For the 103
students who received more than 20 hours of tutoring, 24
students (22 percent)
advanced
four grade levels or more.
“I was amazed by how well it works,” says Connell,
a certified teacher and trainer at the site who has been
involved in
Read Right
since it was brought to the school. “The more kids bought into
it and did it, the faster they progressed.”
Teaching assistant and
Read Right
tutor Pam Moreno is amazed, too. “I really didn’t have any
idea that this could bring students from a second grade level
to a seventh-eighth grade level by the end of one school
year,” says Moreno. “These kids are fluently reading passages
and comprehending them.”
Read
Right
has been approved by the State of Nevada for inclusion on the
List of Effective Reading Programs. Schools with deficient
reading scores can apply for state grant monies to fund
programs appearing on the list.
Most reading programs operate on the assumption
that reading is about individual word identification, says the
developer of the program, Dolores “Dee” Tadlock, Ph.D.
Read Right
methodology operates on the very different assumption that
neural networks guide all processes that humans perform and
passage reading requires the construction of its own complex
neural network specifically for passage reading. The neural
network is the engine that drives the passage reading process,
not individual word identification, she says.
“The
difference between a poor reader and an excellent reader is
the quality of the complex neural network he or she
constructs,” Tadlock adds. “We have figured out how teachers
and instructional assistants can quickly and efficiently
compel students to remodel the entire neural network—not just
one piece of it—so that it produces truly excellent reading.”
Schools interested in more information can visit
the
Read Right
Web site at
www.readright.com
or they are invited by Principal Mike Bumgartner to contact
Traner Middle School in Reno directly.
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For more information, contact us at
Email: info@readright.com
Telephone (360) 427-9440
Copyright 1995-2010
Read Right Systems, Inc.
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