By Challen Stephens
Times Staff Writer
Published on June 8, 2006
Alabama may serve as a role model for other states that want to teach reading to students in middle schools and high schools.
Starting this week, a national study of the Alabama Reading Initiative will be handed to education officials in the governors' offices of most every state, said Terry Salinger, who conducted a study for American Institutes of Research.
The Alabama Reading Initiative is mostly a program for elementary students but is offered to students in 135 of about 1,000 middle schools and high schools, state officials say.
The country is flooded with reading programs in the elementary grades. But most states do not have schoolwide literacy programs in high school or middle school.
Principal Tommy Ledbetter at Buckhorn High School, who ushered in the Alabama Reading Initiative at Buckhorn in 1999, said the state should find a way to add the program at all high schools.
"Reading is the single most important indicator of a student's success in high school," Ledbetter said. "When students don't read very well, it's almost like saying they are doomed to failure from the start."
The researchers, who visited Buckhorn, found that Alabama teachers became creative in uncovering ways to teach reading that differed from the elementary techniques.
"There really isn't anything quite as ambitious" as Alabama's efforts to help middle school and high school students, Salinger said.
Released Wednesday, the national study found the Alabama reading program survived an initial lack of support and lack of flexibility to become a potential model for the country.
The report, entitled "Lessons and Recommendations from the Alabama Reading Initiative: Sustaining Focus on Secondary Reading," was funded by the Carnegie Corp. of New York and prepared by American Institutes of Research of Washington, D.C.
Researchers interviewed teachers and administrators throughout the state, visited Buckhorn and seven other schools, conducted student focus groups and tallied teacher surveys. Although the findings will be widely distributed, Larry McQuillan, spokesman for the American Institutes of Research, said the organization conducts research without drawing conclusions. "We don't advocate for anything."
The researchers found the Alabama Reading Initiative improved communication among teachers, increased student confidence in the classroom and led more teachers to take responsibility for addressing the reading difficulties of individual students.
"Alabama was the only state four years ago that had done anything" at the middle school and high school level, said Dr. Katherine Mitchell, Alabama's assistant state superintendent in charge of reading, "and that's why Carnegie paid to have this done."
In Alabama, reading programs continue to focus on the early grades. There has been no money to expand the Alabama Reading Initiative in the upper grades for four years, Mitchell said.
As of this year, every elementary school offers the Alabama Reading Initiative, Mitchell said, but the state has no plans to add the program at all middle and high schools.
She said the reading initiative requires a staff commitment, costly schoolwide professional training, a willingness to buy materials on different reading levels and the data analysis to determine the reading skills of individual students using standardized tests.
Mitchell said it might cost $700,000 for professional training and the extra staff, such as a reading coach and possibly an extra teacher for remedial help, to start the program at a high school.
"We never funded reading coaches for the middle schools or high schools," she said.
Principal Ledbetter said high school students may know how to spell and pronounce words, but still need to learn how to read more effectively so they understand what those words mean. That could be as simple as teaching a student to re-read a section when they don't grasp it the first time.
For teachers, he said, teaching reading requires a shift in philosophy. He said teachers used to assign the reading and teach a subject, such as science.
Ledbetter said, "That philosophy is dead now and we have to bury it and we have to all become teachers of reading."