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In St. Louis, The Focus is Reading
While the rest of the class was looking for irony in "The Ransom of Red Chief," Pat Burton had a captive audience of one.
"Did they kidnap him?" asked Burton, explaining the short story about a boy who actually revels in his capture. "Instead of being afraid, he's what? Asking to stay up late - sort of like, hey, this is fun," she prompted the student sitting next to her in the hallway at Carr Lane Middle in St. Louis.
The fidgety seventh-grade boy, who had missed several days of class, is struggling through O. Henry's diction, elaborate for a 13-year-old: "constables ... lackadaisical ... diatribe."
This type of one-on-one interaction is part of a new comprehensive focus on reading that officials at St. Louis Public Schools are hoping will help cure the district's academic ills. On the ground, the effort will be led by Burton and 93 other "literacy coaches," one for each school.
Much has been made of how the turnaround firm running the city schools will make the district run more like a business, slashing costs and cutting bureaucracy. But the push for literacy is what the management team is offering as a scholastic blueprint for better test scores and capable graduates.
Components of the program have been tried before. Some seem overly ambitious - like asking students to read more than two dozen books a year. Yet experts say similar plans have worked elsewhere, and educators like Burton are optimistic that St. Louis will succeed.
"I really do believe," Burton said, "this is an idea whose time has come."
Burton has worked in the district for 24 years. She says her new position is "like a football coach, calling in plays."
Recently, Burton was sitting in the corner of a math class, observing the teacher and watching as students computed a word-intensive math problem about a girl named Sara and her dog Cinnamon.
Unknown to the students, Burton keeps the results of their reading test scores in her notebook, and pays special attention to the children who need improvement. One such student was distracted from Sara and Cinnamon, instead complaining about taunts from a classmate.
"Son, I don't want to hear it," Burton says looking at the child. "I want to hear you read."
Burton also helps teachers, taking them on "learning walks," to watch how colleagues teach literacy in their classrooms.
A key part of the plan is to stress reading "across the curriculum," in all subject areas, from social studies and English to music and chemistry.
"The same practices that make you good readers are the same practices that will make you a successful math student," Burton said. "Reading and writing are the keys."
The literacy plan is being pushed by Rudy Crew, the educational heavyweight whom the management team hired as a consultant. Crew, former chancellor of New York City schools, backs the model for several reasons. It ends the school district's position of "instructional coordinator," which some complained was an ambiguous cross between principal and teacher. Also, it's a move toward creating a shared approach to teaching throughout the school system. That's especially important in a district with a high mobility rate, where students often end the year in a different school from where they started.
Years of failed reforms, Crew says, have resulted in scattered results and jumbled lessons.
"The potpourri of activity has to stop. The randomness of ideas has to stop," Crew said in a recent interview. "Most of our systems have layer upon layer upon layer upon layer. Effort upon effort upon effort. It's confusing to people who are practitioners to then figure out, what do you want me to do? We have to get that confusion out of the system. In its place has to be coherence around reading."
The "Literacy Initiative" includes testing reading levels every 10 weeks, encouraging students to read 25 books each and training literacy coaches through the year.
Some parts of the plan are not a far departure from current practices.
When asked what Carr Lane was doing to satisfy the new requirement for 90 minutes of reading time, Burton pointed to the same language arts class that existed last year.
Many of the literacy coaches are the same people who in June were instructional coordinators.
"It's a new title," said Bessie Hayes, the literacy coach at Langston Middle School. Last year, Hayes was the school's instructional coordinator. "I am doing the same things."
Hayes holds up a teaching guide, distributed in 2000 by the district's previous administration, titled "The Reading Initiative."
Principal Carol Barnes added that Langston has focused on literacy for years - but this new effort may bring in line schools that have not.
"Reading is in every single subject," Barnes said. "Every teacher here considers themselves a literacy coach."
And they seem to be making progress. This year, 30 percent of the middle school's seventh-graders scored proficient or advanced on the state's communication arts test. In 1999, only 4 percent scored advanced, and none were proficient.
Test scores often go up in schools that stick with literacy coaching, said Robert B. Cooter Jr., professor of urban literacy at the University of Memphis. Coaching has proved far more effective than so-called reform models - programs providing scripts and teaching materials that have been purchased in the past by St. Louis and other districts.
"It's bogus; it just never works," Cooter said. "All the research through the ages is that the single thing that makes the difference every time is that you have masterful teachers working with your kids."
Between 1997 and 1999, Cooter was associate superintendent for language arts in the Dallas school district. Local media dubbed him the "reading czar" for his efforts to bring literacy coaches to the district. To attract teachers from other districts to take the job, Cooter helped persuade businesses like Texas Instruments to add $10,000 to salaries for literacy coaches. More than 25 district schools were removed from the state's low-performing list after the coaches were hired.
"We got the best of the best," Cooter said.
Carr Lane's Burton would welcome a boost to her paycheck, but for now will settle for the feedback she got from her student after the "Red Chief" tutoring session.
"He started smiling," Burton recalled. "So, yeah, I think he was getting it."
— Jake Wagman
New staff jobs focus on reading
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
2003-10-12
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/News/4B49B67B2064CBC086256DBE000FED7D?OpenDocument&Headline=New+staff+jobs+focus+on+reading++
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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