Reading Intervention Program at Risk

By Keith Reid, The Record, Stockton, Calif.

Dec. 9–A popular elementary school reading program that offers one-on-one instruction to struggling first-graders may be on the way out in the Lodi Unified School District, where officials are expected to cut the program in favor of state adopted curriculum at the end of the year.

Reading Recovery, a teacher-favored intervention program that provides intense reading instruction to Title I school first-graders who test in the bottom 20 percent of their peers, will be cut in favor of a English-language arts curriculum supplied by publisher Houghton Mifflin.

A school deemed socioeconomically disadvantaged based on a high number of students who qualify for that state’s free or reduced-price lunch program is called a Title I school.

Calonico said the district has been monitored by the state because of low performance on standardized tests for three years and now must make some strategic moves to increase student achievement.

“That means we have to present a letter to the state stating what we plan to do to improve,” Calonico said.

Using state-adopted English-language arts textbooks in order to raise the district’s low standardized test scores is a corrective action that will satisfy state officials, Calonico said.

Reading Recovery is a nationally known program that reaches roughly 180 students a year at 10 Title I schools in Lodi Unified. There are 22 teachers trained to teach Reading Recovery, according to the district.

Each teacher meets with four or five first-grade students individually for 30 to 40 minutes a day, and with small groups of second- and third-graders for the second half of their day, Clairemont Elementary Reading Recovery teacher Marianne Chang said.

Chang and her colleagues are voicing opposition to the program’s planned discontinuance because they don’t see the district creating an intervention program for students who are behind in first through third grade.

“Our goal is to get students who are in the bottom 20 percent and taking them to the median,” Chang said, noting that she sees a lot of success in her students. “These students will fall behind without the intervention. Houghton Mifflin doesn’t have an intervention program until the fourth grade. It’s going to be too late for some students.”

Calonico believes that the Houghton Mifflin curriculum, if taught the correct way, will make interventions at early grades unnecessary.

There are cost issues, too, Trustee President Ken Davis said, adding that Reading Recovery is “not cost effective.”

Davis said that in a time where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has warned that districts should tighten budgets, Reading Recovery doesn’t reach enough children.

“Unfortunately, the program only reaches a couple hundred students in the district,” Davis said. “We have to do what is best for all students.”

Contact reporter Keith Reid at (209) 367-7428 or kreid@recordnet.com.

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