Fort Worth summer programs are trying to teach kids to read. Here’s what they are doing.
Fort Worth schools are working with 19 community partners across the city this summer with one central goal — helping children learn to read.
The collaboration, which is facilitated by the nonprofit Read Fort Worth, is of particular importance this year as teachers continue to help students recover from learning losses accrued over the course of the pandemic, while trying to prevent them from falling behind during the summer months.
A history of low scores, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, catalyzed a “seismic shift” in the way educators teach reading across the Fort Worth Independent School District, including a new curriculum with a greater focus on phonics, professional development and a departure from long-used interventions and tools. One of those interventions is Leveled Literacy, a small-group intensive program targeted at students behind in reading.
Some of the district’s summer program partners, including United Community Centers and AB Christian Learning Center Freedom School continue to use Leveled Literacy Intervention despite that departure.
The intervention is used in addition to a traditional curriculum. Students are given an assessment to determine their reading level, and then are given books at that level to work on until they master them enough to move onto the next level.
The program identifies students throughout the year by using assessments to pinpoint reading deficiencies to target during the summer.
“We have a specific literacy program that we are working with called the Fountas and Pinnell leveled literacy intervention,” Frances Torres, the UCC program director, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram last year. “It works with children who are in the first and second grade, who have been found to be at a lower reading level than their peers.”
Torres noted that the program, which runs after school and during the summer, is not the same as in-class instruction.
“That’s a huge difference between any other curriculum,” she said. “This curriculum is not one that is taught during a regular school day. It is very intensive.”
The fast-paced intervention involves small groups of three to four children gathering for 30-minute sessions with a trained teacher.
But a growing body of research has found the intervention isn’t always effective and depending on how it is implemented, can be harmful.
That’s why Fort Worth school district leaders phased out the program over the last two years.
Fort Worth leaves old interventions behind for new approach
Fort Worth ISD Chief Academic Officer Marcey Sorensen said the removal of the leveled readers came after an exploration of the current research on how children learn to read.
“We have actually collected those materials back from our campuses, as well as the other reading materials as we give them new materials,” Sorensen said. “We have collected those materials back because we don’t believe and … what the research shows is that leveling kids’ texts and not exposing them to grade-level text” is not beneficial.
“We’ve replaced it with more complex texts, more grade-level text and provided more text in Spanish, for students who are in our dual-language programs,” she said.
Trudy Darden, a former Fort Worth school teacher, has a long history working with Leveled Literacy Intervention — and developed the curriculum for both the summer programs still using the intervention.
“It’s available, and they may use it,” Darden told the Star-Telegram, adding that other interventions are also available. “Fountas and Pinnell will be available for them to use to help close that gap because I think it is one of the best intervention programs going, period. I love Fountas and Pinnell.”
Teachers in Fort Worth schools have moved toward providing students with books that are on their grade level, even if that is above the students’ current ability — while providing extra support to help the student accelerate to the point they can read them so they aren’t falling behind while their peers continue to move forward. The concept is known as scaffolding.
But Darden said that with students falling so far behind in recent years, there could be too much ground to make up without leveled approaches like LLI.
“When you do something like that, you have children operating on a frustrational level rather than an instructional level,” she said.
Darden said that children are still learning to read up to the first half of third grade and reading to learn after that.
“If you look at a third-grader versus a second-grader level … that’s a lot of scaffolding.”
Out-of-school factors can limit at-risk student success
Loretta Burns, the founder of AB Christian Learning Center, said that the summer program, which focuses heavily on reading, also goes far beyond academics to address the whole child.
The hyperfixation on curriculum and teaching philosophy, Burns said, leaves out key considerations for vulnerable populations.
“Poverty, hunger, the environment our scholars grow up in, racism, all of those adverse childhood trauma things that our scholars …have to live with,” she said.” “Those are definitely impactful for a child learning … not knowing where home is going to be, where they’re going to sleep that night, these are all variables that you cannot ignore and act like that doesn’t affect learning.”
Nicol Russell, vice president of implementation research at the curriculum company Teaching Strategies, said it is essential to pay attention to these factors when trying to improve reading scores.
“You go in sort of eyes wide open and say, in this context that I’m working in, what is it going to take to move literacy rates for children?” she said. “I can’t think that if I select a better curriculum, it’ll be the one thing that changes everything. But if I can do that, right, that’s better than not choosing the right curriculum, and also addressing the context.”
That context, in places like Fort Worth, which is 85.5% economically disadvantaged according to the Texas Education Agency, includes understanding the impact of poverty on families and the related stressors.
“We start to look at, ‘Oh, that could be impacting how often this child shows up to school, it could be affecting how tardy or not tardy they are, when they come to school, how tired they are when they come to school,’” Russell said “So as a teacher, you start to factor that in and say, ‘How can I take the load off of them in relation to those things that could affect their ability to access higher-order thinking, that ability to access phonics learning, right?”
That can range from giving students a snack if they are hungry to letting them rest their head if they haven’t been able to sleep.
“That might be it right?,” she said. “Like, I’m exhausted, my mom got home late from work from her second job last night, I just need five more minutes to rest. And then I can be in a mode where you can teach me explicit phonics, right. So it is part of our conversation on how do we help with that.”
Teaching Strategies provides the curriculum for Fort Worth prekindergarten classrooms.
Burns said that those variables fall outside of the scope of the district, and any one group or agency. A societal approach is necessary to addressing the many issues, she said, but educational outcomes can’t ignore these circumstances.
“The district does not have the capacity, the funding (and) that’s not their task, their mission to take care of those things, but you can’t ignore them,” she said. “We’ve got to stop acting like that’s not part of educating your child.”
Nonprofit blends old, new approaches at summer reading program
United Community Centers, which boasted about advancing students during last year’s summer reading collaborative, has worked with the school district as well as Texas Christian University’s college of education to develop a strategy for teaching reading that used multiple approaches, including LLI and the programs implemented recently in Fort Worth schools.
Torres, the director of programs for UCC, said that LLI has been declining in popularity for years, but has continued to prove itself as an effective tool when used with their other curricula over the summer months.
“We are trying to be aligned with Fort Worth ISD, ... we’re also using Lexia Core 5,” she said. “We’re working side by side with them.”
Lexia is a computer-based program that uses artificial intelligence to help students learn specific skills.
According to school board documents, 27% of all elementary and middle school students using the program advanced one or more grade levels in a school year. The district expanded the usage to 42 schools in June 2021, for more than $700,000 the first year.
“But we also have to understand this is our program,” Torres said. “And we’re going to continue using what we believe in. Our literacy specialists, who have over 100 years combined together, have said that this is probably the best that we could do right now.”
Leveled Literacy Intervention is only one program provided by UCC.
“We have another program at Fort Worth ISD and in our community centers called Success By Six,” Torres said. “We are using the Neuhaus curriculum and the Starfall curriculum that we have used in the last few years, which is a very basic letter recognition, letter sounding for pre-K kids who are really far behind.”
Torres and Burns both said they are dealing with dramatic setbacks following the pandemic, when some children missed more than an entire year of instruction.
“Some of our first- and second-graders who are really low in LLI, were actually kindergarteners ... or even in pre-K during the pandemic. They didn’t go to school (in person) , they didn’t have the basics,” she said. “And so now they’re first-graders, and you know, everybody was moved up and given another grade during the pandemic. So, you know, they just moved them up. And now we’re trying to help catch up now.”
Burns also said students were shockingly behind.
“I don’t think we’ve seen all of the effects of that gap in education,” she said. “We lost two years of education. And everybody’s moving along like nothing happened. We had kids in first grade last summer that didn’t recognize all the alphabets. How could that be? How could that be?”
“We were celebrating every morning because a child had learned and recognized the alphabet and started making sounds phonetically with the alphabet. But first and second grade, and don’t know your alphabets. And that was because of COVID because they hadn’t been in school.”
Program building on last year’s enrollment
The district and its partners hope to build on the success of last year’s summer programs, which spanned across 17 community partners and served over 5,000 students. This year there are 20 partners, and a projected 6,000 student enrollment.
An analysis of the program last year found that 99% of students either maintained or improved reading scores and 11% more students improved their reading scores than the previous summer reading program. Nearly three times as many students attended with a surge in need following the pandemic.
“I think in arguably one of the most needed times for kids to be in enriching literacy experiences in the summer, the Summer Scholars Collaborative program really met that need for kids across Fort Worth,” Read Fort Worth CEO Elizabeth Brands said at the time.
Students targeted in some programs, like the Leveled Literacy Intervention hosted by United Community Centers, showed promise in mid-summer, according to teachers in that program.
But students came into the program at a lower level than in the past last summer, Brands said, and assessment data from Fort Worth ISD showed that students entered the 2021-22 school year at lower levels than the beginning of the prior school year.
Administrators are still waiting to see whether another year with extra efforts like Saturday learning programs and a new curriculum will show any improvements.
Brands said that the most important and unique part of the Summer Scholars Collaborative is the cross-sector commitment to literacy goals.
“I think that the most exciting thing about the collaborative is that the city of Fort Worth has said we have a common goal that improving literacy is a shared commitment across our city,” she said. “And we have community partners with very diverse missions and purposes that have raised their hand and said, regardless of my mission and purpose, I believe in the shared goal that literacy matters, and I want to join the collaborative to make sure that I have effective literacy practices incorporated into my existing programming.”
Participants in the program range from those focused primarily on academics like Fort Worth ISD summer learning, to those focused on art and music like Arts De La Rosa.
