November 14, 2007

HSTW Success Story: Solving the Most Difficult Reading Problems

“This New Reading Program had a Tremendous Impact on Students’ Getting to Grade Level,” Toni Pace, Principal, Mt. Rainier High School

In October, 2007 Washington State awarded ‘School of Distinction’ awards to the top 5 percent of schools whose students have shown outstanding growth in both reading and mathematics skills during the past six years. Of 88 high schools in King County (Seattle and surrounding districts), Mt. Rainier and Garfield are the only two that earned the ‘School of Distinction’ award.

 Significantly, both Mt. Rainier and Garfield High Schools have Read Rightâ tutoring projects for struggling readers in their schools. Since the project’s inception in 2003, Mt. Rainier has tutored 465 students for a total of 24,460 hours of instruction. Garfield began its project in 2002 and has tutored 404 students, who have accumulated 14,554 hours of instruction.

 At the 2007 High Schools That Work Conference in New Orleans, Sharon Schmitt, literacy coach for Mt. Rainier High School, presented on their highly successful reading intervention program. Schmitt has taught reading for 16 years to struggling high school students including Special Education students.  “When I first heard about Read Right I was really skeptical,” reported Schmitt, “because Read Right isn’t promising an incremental gain of one or two years.  Read Right is promising a total elimination of the reading problem.  When I heard that, I was not very interested, because, frankly, I was tired of publishers promising results that they never delivered. To say that you were going to eliminate a kid’s reading problem I thought was outrageous.  But I called the Read Right office, and I made them give me the names of 30 schools that had Read Right projects in them.  I wanted to talk to the teachers so they could give me the real skinny.  Amazingly, every teacher I talked to had the same kind of enthusiasm for Read Right and the results it was getting for their students. 

 “The first thing that is fantastic about Read Right is that it works for all categories of students.  It doesn’t matter if the kid is labeled Special Ed, LD, ADHD, dyslexic, MMR or if a kid doesn’t have a label at all and is just failing and for some reason isn’t a very good reader.  In the first three years we served 388 students, 262 of those were regular ed, 74 were Special Ed, and 52 were ELL   The hours of tutoring for one grade level of gain on average has been 9.4 hours. Regular Ed students averaged 8.8 hours, Special Education 11.6, ELL 10.2.  So there is some difference, though not much, in the hours of tutoring needed for kids in different categories to improve one grade level. For me as a teacher this program is really fabulous because we have to serve every category of student, and, as hard as it is to believe, Read Right really does work for every category.”

 Former English Teacher Frustrated by Trying to Teach High School Students to Read

 “I was an English Teacher for over 20 years, trying to teach kids to read and I wasn’t able to do so”, said Toni Pace, Principal of Mt. Rainier since 2003. “I knew that’s why students were not successful in my class. Not because they didn’t try or because they were not intelligent kids, they just didn’t know how to read well enough. And now when you see them succeed right before your eyes, students transformed, I just can’t get that picture out of my head. That’s what drives me.”

 “Read Right has found the solution to what we need to do to get kids to read.  And it is not as simple as just another reading program.  It is based on brain research, critical thinking and the constructivist theory of teaching and learning.  It has been a catalyst in my building. It is their whole approach to teaching that has shown us that all students can learn and it is just a matter of theory on how to teach them.  It has impacted all of us.  It is integral to everything we do.”