Reading Plans That Work

Reading scores are rising dramatically in the primary grades in Sacramento, Houston and several other urban school districts, proving that Johnny can learn to read even if he is poor, minority or just acquiring English.

The impressive results are attributed to highly structured, phonics-based reading series required in every primary classroom. Longitudinal studies prove that three research-based programs, Open Court, Reading Mastery and Success for All, are especially effective for low-achieving, high-poverty children. These reading series can also be adapted for limited-English children. They belong on every campus in Los Angeles.

Teachers aren’t just given a series manual and told to go teach. They are trained extensively before school starts, coached throughout the term and given the resources and support they need. The Los Angeles Unified School District needs this approach because many first-grade teachers are new, inexperienced or uncredentialed or were poorly trained.

Reading instruction is failing many in L.A. public schools. Only one in three students reads at grade level by the end of the third grade. The importance of reading competently by age 9, before schoolwork becomes more complicated, cannot be overstated. Reading difficulties cripple futures. Early literacy improves lives.

The primacy of reading is not lost on the newly reformed L.A. school board. Members spent several hours last week listening to experts and quizzing district staffers on a proposed policy that would require teachers at low-performing schools to use one of the three reading programs.

The best time to phase in a new reading series would be in kindergarten and first grade, when children are beginning to learn to read. An incremental approach would allow the publisher time to train local teachers before they use the reading series. Once teachers are specially trained, they should not be replaced in their classrooms by teachers with no such training but more seniority. This would require labor negotiations in Los Angeles, where seniority dismayingly trumps teaching ability, but the teachers union supports adoption of the structured reading series, with extensive training for teachers.

School board members want to know how the district would pay for the training. They also are asking good questions about the textbooks involved and their effectiveness.

Open Court provides explicit, direct, systematic instruction in phonics and is also rich in literature. Most Sacramento teachers use this series. In that school district, second-grade reading scores rose in a year from the 35th percentile nationally to the 50th and indicated progress by both poor and more affluent children. In the LAUSD, second-graders scored at the 27th percentile in reading.

In the Houston school district, where more than 85% of third-graders read competently, teachers are allowed to use Open Court and the two other research-based, prescriptive reading programs that are under consideration in Los Angeles. Reading Mastery, highly structured and strong on phonics, is scripted and planned down to the minute. Success for All, developed at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is also systematic and stresses phonics. This intensive program covers much more than beginning reading instruction and requires teachers to vote it into their classrooms so they buy into the system. All are proven choices.

Whatever choice is made by the school board at its meeting Aug. 24--and we believe Los Angeles would benefit from giving schools options among these three effective reading series--the debate indicates how seriously the new board, the union and the district take reading instruction. This focus should pay off for the children.