Fort Worth schools have lagged in reading for years. Will this new plan help?
Mike Lins learned the science behind reading when he was studying education in a master’s program at the University of North Texas. But that was nearly a decade ago.
Over the past year, Lins brushed off his notebook and took a fresh look at the topic. Lins, a special education teacher at Christene C. Moss Elementary School in Fort Worth, was one of more than 600 teachers across the district who participated in a reading academy designed to help them better understand how children learn to read.
Lins said he noticed students struggling with reading as soon as he transferred to Christene C. Moss after spending four years at an alternative school in the district. The academy gave him a broader perspective on literacy instruction and helped him understand how much is involved in teaching students to read and write well, he said.
“We’ve got to pull these kids along that are struggling readers,” he said.
The literacy academy Lins attended is one piece of a major overhaul of the way teachers in Fort Worth teach students to read. School leaders are rolling out a single unified framework for literacy instruction at schools across the district. The new framework includes a shift toward more explicit phonics instruction, more time for teachers to work with students on reading and more training for teachers on the science of teaching reading.
For years, the Fort Worth school district has lagged behind Texas’ other major urban districts in reading. In the spring of 2019, only a third of the district’s third-graders were able to read on grade level, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. Education researchers and leaders say lackluster third-grade reading scores are a worrisome sign, because students who don’t read proficiently by the end of third grade will struggle academically later on.
The district is still in the early stages of rolling out the new literacy framework. But district leaders say they’ve already seen encouraging signs that the new instructional philosophy is moving students in the right direction.
Fort Worth schools lag in reading
Like most districts across the state, Fort Worth’s third grade reading scores declined this year, due at least in part to the educational disruptions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Just 26% of the district’s third-graders met grade level in reading on the spring 2021 STAAR exams, down from 33% in the spring of 2019. The 2020 STAAR exams were canceled due to the pandemic. The Fort Worth and Arlington districts tied for second-to-last place among the 11 districts TEA classifies as major urban districts, ahead of the San Antonio school district.
But Fort Worth’s reading struggles didn’t begin with the pandemic.
For years, the district has lagged behind Texas’ other major urban districts in grade-level reading among third-graders. The district ranked second-to-last in 2018 and 2019, behind every other urban district but San Antonio. In 2017, it ranked behind all but the San Antonio and Dallas districts.
Education leaders and researchers often say third grade is a make-or-break year for reading because it’s the year students stop learning to read and begin reading to learn. If students can’t read proficiently by the end of third grade, researchers say, they face daunting challenges for the rest of their academic careers. A 2012 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation suggests students who don’t read proficiently by third grade are less likely to finish high school on time and more likely to drop out before earning their diplomas.
New literacy framework emphasizes phonics
The district’s new literacy framework is designed to give every school in the district a common definition of what high-quality literacy instruction looks like, said Jerry Moore, the district’s chief academic officer. It emphasizes phonics instruction and calls for teachers and principals to maximize the amount of time students spend working with their teachers on reading.
The district’s lagging reading scores were the main reason behind the rollout of the new reading framework, Moore said. When he and Marcey Sorensen, the district’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, came into their current roles in late 2019, they realized the district didn’t have an overarching philosophy of what reading instruction should look like, he said. So the reading instruction students at one school received was often radically different from what students at another got, he said.
The district rolled the new framework out in January 2020, three months before COVID-19 gained a foothold in North Texas. Although the pandemic created disruptions for school districts nationwide, district leaders recognized that improving reading instruction was an urgent need, Moore said. So even after the pandemic began, the district maintained a focus on literacy, he said.
The district’s new reading framework allows for more time for teachers to work directly with students on reading, Moore said. The district asked principals to schedule more time during the day for reading instruction, he said. Officials also asked teachers to change the way they do reading to allow for more face time with each student, he said.
Before the change, teachers often split their classes into smaller groups to work on reading, Moore said. Teachers would cycle through each of those groups, and students would work on learning stations or read on their own when their group wasn’t working with their teacher. Under the new framework, teachers spend more time working directly with their whole classes rather than smaller groups. Teachers might still divide their classes into reading groups, but they float among those groups.
Sorensen said the new model can help teachers spot problems more quickly. Before, teachers spent so little time with any one of their students that they might not have noticed if one of their students had learned a skill incorrectly. When a mistake like that goes unnoticed for a while, it can be harder to correct later on, Sorensen said. But when teachers spend more time working with their entire classes, they can catch those mistakes earlier, correct them and, if necessary, re-teach those skills to the entire class, she said.
Although the new reading framework is still in its early days, district leaders can already point to encouraging signs. Students in grades 1-5 performed better than projected growth targets on last spring’s MAP Literacy tests. Moore noted that those targets are set based on a typical school year. The 2020-21 school year was anything but typical.
District officials hope that progress will continue over the coming years. They emphasize that the new framework represents a permanent change in the way the district teaches reading.
“We don’t view this as a program,” Sorensen said. “This is a strategy. It’s not an initiative. It’s a way of doing instruction.”
House Bill 3 funds literacy academies
The rollout of the district’s new reading framework coincided with a new state law requiring teachers and principals in kindergarten through third grade to go through literacy academies that cover the science of teaching reading. The requirement was included in House Bill 3, a sweeping education finance overhaul lawmakers passed during the 2019 legislative session.
The law also requires districts and charter schools to adopt a phonics-based reading curriculum for kindergarten through third grade. Districts and charters must also make it a priority to place effective teachers in kindergarten and first and second grades.
That new requirement was well timed for Fort Worth, Moore said, because it essentially provided a way of training teachers and principals to implement the goals that the district had already defined. About 60% of the district’s teachers in kindergarten through third grade went through one of the academies during the 2020-21 school year, he said.
Elizabeth Brands, director of the nonprofit organization Read Fort Worth, said the reading academies outlined in House Bill 3 can help districts standardize their reading curriculum across many schools. That can be a challenge in large districts like Fort Worth, which have a large and diverse pool of candidates applying for teaching jobs each year. Larger districts tend to draw teachers from many different colleges of education, she said, and each of those colleges has its own philosophy of teaching reading. So it’s important that districts have a way to bring them all together on a single instructional model, she said.
That standardization is crucial in districts in which large numbers of students transfer from one school to another during the school year, Brands said. When all teachers in the district use the same teaching methods, students who transfer get consistent instruction, she said.
The standardization across grade levels is also important, said Robin Rivera Torres, one of five literacy academy coordinators for the district. Torres, a former third- and fourth-grade teacher, said she didn’t have a strong foundation in teaching reading when she was in the classroom. The varying levels of reading proficiency across students in a given class makes the academy beneficial to even seasoned teachers, Torres said.
“All teachers are knowledgeable teachers, or they wouldn’t be in their position,” Torres said. “So having that knowledge that you’re bringing to the classroom, coupled with this extensive knowledge and content, we hope to see great gains in reading.”
Phonics is good, but not a silver bullet, expert says
Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said focusing on phonics is, on balance, a good idea. But it isn’t a silver bullet for schools struggling to raise their reading scores, he said.
“Some people have it in their head that all these kids are illiterate, but once you start doing phonics, they’ll all be highly literate,” Shanahan said.
When Shanahan served on the federally appointed National Reading Panel in the late 1990s, the panel analyzed data showing the effectiveness of phonics instruction. They found that, on average, explicit phonics instruction had a measurable effect, but not a huge one, Shanahan said.
But explicit phonics instruction makes a bigger difference for some students than others, Shanahan said. There’s a small group of students, about 5%, who would learn to read on their own or with their parents’ help, no matter what kind of instruction they received at school, he said. But there’s a bigger minority of students who would never be able to read well without explicit phonics instruction, he said. Students at the top end won’t be any worse off for having been exposed to phonics, he said. So overall, explicit phonics instruction narrows the gap between struggling students and their peers, he said.
But phonics instruction by itself won’t turn students into readers, Shanahan said. Reading is a complex process that requires a combination of skills. Students need to be able to look at a word and decode the sounds the letter combinations make, and they also need to be able to understand what the words mean. Phonics is an effective way to teach decoding, he said, but it does nothing to help students build up their reading comprehension skills. For that, he said, schools need to teach vocabulary and reading strategies like pausing occasionally to reflect on what the author is trying to say.
“Phonics is a piece of it, but there are certainly other pieces of it that need to be addressed,” Shanahan said.
Fort Worth teacher sees results from new framework
No matter where students end up, the first step in learning to read is learning the alphabet and the sounds the letters make.
Lins, the Christene C. Moss teacher, used his experience in the reading academy to teach letter-sound correspondence. Using a direct and repetitive exercise, he would write a letter on the board, point to it and repeat the sound the letter makes. Then, Lins said, he would add a word, and invite students to repeat back to him what he was saying.
Throughout the year, Lins gave students one or two letters a week to practice with, until they were proficient at matching sounds with every letter of the alphabet, he said. From there, Lins built on the progress he made and have several breakthroughs with students throughout the year. After a year of applying lessons from the reading academy, Lins said he’s seen success in students with dyslexia who started the year unable to read.
“It is phenomenal because, in the end, we got them to be able to write,” Lins said. “And if you can learn to write … then they can start to be able to read. All that was coming from this training.”
This story was originally published July 23, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
