Fort Worth ISD’s new reading plan is like one Texas used before. Can it work this time?
For years, Fort Worth ISD has lagged behind the rest of the state in reading. And for years, district officials have made a priority of fixing the problem.
This year, the district has a new a plan that’s designed to help teachers in early grades teach reading more effectively. The plan, which is outlined in part by a new set of state requirements, includes more emphasis on phonics, more training for teachers and more time for direct reading instruction. Ultimately, district officials say the plan will mean more students reading on grade level, leading to better-quality education overall.
It’s a plan the state has tried before, said Susan Neuman, a professor of childhood and literacy education at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and former education consultant for then-Gov. George W. Bush. In the late 1990s, Texas began training teachers on the science of reading in the hopes of getting more students to read on grade level. But more than two decades later, the state still struggles. Neuman said that’s largely because the state didn’t follow through with that effort after Bush moved from the Governor’s Mansion to the White House.
“It’s redoing what we’ve already tried before,” Neuman said. “And what we should begin to say is, ‘Why didn’t it work?’ ”
Marcey Sorensen, Fort Worth ISD’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, said she’s confident the plan will produce results this time. The district has developed a support plan to make sure the new teaching techniques are effectively woven into what goes on in classrooms, she said. The district is also requiring elementary principals to go through the training, which she said will help them implement the plan on their campuses.
“Literacy leadership will be key to our success,” Sorensen said.
Academies train teachers on science of reading
Later this fall, Fort Worth ISD teachers and principals will begin 12-part training sessions on the science of reading. The training will include sessions on skills like helping students decode the relationships between sounds and letters and helping them understand the sound structure of words, Sorensen said. Those training sessions are part of a series of new state requirements included in House Bill 3, the school finance overhaul passed during Texas’ 2019 legislative session.
Reading scores in Fort Worth ISD have been behind the rest of the state, which, in turn, has under-performed compared to the rest of the country for years. The district’s reading scores for fourth- and eighth-graders slipped in last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, falling slightly below where the district scored in 2017. The district also lagged behind other large-city school districts nationwide in the percentage of fourth- and eighth-graders who met the basic or proficient reading levels.
Statewide, fourth-grade reading scores remained flat in 2019 as compared to 2017 and declined among eighth-graders, according to the report. Texas’ average reading scores among both fourth-graders and eighth-graders have lagged below the national average since 2007, when the state tied the national average in both grades.
In response, lawmakers included a requirement in House Bill 3 that teachers and principals in kindergarten through third grade go through literacy academies that cover the science of teaching reading. The law also requires districts and charter schools to adopt a phonics-based curriculum “that uses systematic direct instruction” for kindergarten through third grade and to make it a priority to place effective teachers in kindergarten and first and second grades.
The stakes are high for districts that want to boost reading performance in early grades. Education researchers and leaders often say third grade is a critical year in students’ lives because it’s the year they stop learning to read and start reading to learn. 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.
Jerry Moore, Fort Worth ISD’s chief academic officer, said the new requirements in House Bill 3 pair well with the district’s new emphasis on the science of teaching reading at every level, not only in early grades, when students are beginning to learn to read.
Part of that emphasis is making sure teachers are prepared to work with students on literacy, Moore said. Many of the district’s teachers have never received any training, either in college or through the alternative certification process, on how to teach children to read, Moore said. Others may have training in reading instruction but need refreshing, he said.
One of the biggest changes will be that teachers will spend less time working with small reading groups and more time working with entire classes, Moore said. Before, teachers generally divided their classes into groups of students with similar reading skills — advanced readers would be grouped with other high-level readers, students who struggled would be placed with other struggling students and those who were somewhere in the middle would be grouped together. Teachers would rotate through those groups, working with each group separately while students in the other groups did self-directed activities.
The problem with that model is that, while it allows teachers to work with only a few students at a time, students spend the majority of the time doing something other than working with their teachers, Moore said.
Under the new model, teachers will spend more of their time working with their entire classes at once. That doesn’t mean those small reading groups will go away entirely — there will always be students who need extra help, and that will take place in a small group setting — but students will spend the majority of their reading time with direct instruction from their teachers rather than working on their own.
Sorensen said the model also means that students of all reading levels will be exposed to books that are appropriate for their grade levels. Under the old model, teachers gave each small reading group books that matched their reading levels, not their grade levels, she said. So a third-grader who was on a first-grade reading level would read first-grade-level books.
But if teachers never expose their students to books that are appropriate for their grade levels, students who have fallen behind have no chance to catch up, Sorensen said. By giving classes grade-level-appropriate books and offering extra support to students who struggle, teachers can help those students make up lost ground, she said.
The new model also includes a shift toward more deliberate phonics instruction, Sorensen said. Before the change, Fort Worth ISD used a model called balanced literacy, which gets students into books quickly and doesn’t include much explicit, systematic phonics instruction.
The balanced literacy model emerged in the 1990s as a middle ground between explicit phonics instruction and a discredited teaching philosophy called whole language. The whole language model is based on the assumption that reading comes naturally to children the way speech does, and that children will become readers if adults simply surround them with books. Proponents of the whole language philosophy actively reject teaching children phonics in favor of teaching children to read whole words.
Sorensen said students need elements from both philosophies to become readers. There’s plenty of research that shows students need deliberate instruction on phonics skills like decoding letters and understanding how letters blend together to make particular sounds as they learn to read. But learning phonics by itself won’t turn children into readers, she said.
“Kids still have to do vocabulary,” she said. “Kids still have to write.”
Texas has tried the model before
Neuman, the NYU professor, said the program Texas is rolling out this year is strikingly similar to one then-governor Bush implemented in the late 1990s. Neuman, who was involved in that project as a consultant and later served as U.S. assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education during Bush’s time as president, said that program was a broad-based effort that required all kindergarten through second-grade teachers in the state to undergo the same training on the science of teaching reading. Districts across the state spoke the same language and focused on the same targets, she said.
The problem, Neuman said, was that the program didn’t go far enough. It was ambitious in its goals, but to meet those goals, it needed consistent support over the years, she said. When Bush became president and then-Lt. Gov. Rick Perry took over as governor, the program lost momentum as Perry shifted toward other priorities, she said.
This iteration of the program gives districts, and the state as a whole, the opportunity to build the long-term consistency that was missing last time, Neuman said. But even that consistency may not be enough to make a sizable difference in reading scores in big, high-poverty districts like Fort Worth, she said.
That’s because, while the program is “very technically correct,” Neuman said it’s missing a key component — giving students a reason to read. Phonics is a critical component of any reading program, and any program that doesn’t include it is bound to fail, Neuman said. But if schools don’t follow that instruction upto show students why they should be interested in reading, students are likely to get burned out on reading by third grade, she said.
“We haven’t done that,” she said. “We just drill, drill, drill.”
Neuman said that’s a particular problem in high-poverty districts like Fort Worth ISD, where about 84% of students are economically disadvantaged, according to state records. As a part of her research, Neuman has conducted focus groups with low-income parents, many of whom have told her they regularly drill their young children on letters and numbers. Those parents often want their children to learn to read for reasons largely having to do with getting things done and getting by in the world, she said. For example, one mother told Neuman she wanted her son to learn to read so he’d know his own address.
From a parent’s perspective, those reasons make sense. But Neuman said they aren’t likely to inspire children to want to learn to read. And if their only exposure to reading at school is being told to read books they find boring and practice on boring materials, those students aren’t likely to see the use of learning to read, she said.
If schools want to inspire students to learn to read, the easiest way is to expose them to books they’re interested in, Neuman said. For younger learners who can’t yet read, teachers and parents can read them books that will attract their interest, she said.
Another way to teach young learners the importance of reading is to show them that they’ll need to know how to read if they want to do much of anything in the world, Neuman said. If they want to bake a cake, they’ll need to read a recipe. If they want to build something, they’ll have to be able to read the instructions.
“We haven’t built that into our system right from the beginning,” she said. “We engage kids in hands-on learning, but we don’t use reading along with that to show them that reading can help them in their learning early on.”
Pennsylvania district offers model for success
In 2015, the school district in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, faced many of the same challenges district officials in Fort Worth are wrestling with now. Only about 56% of the district’s third-graders scored proficient on state reading exams, and district officials looked for ways to improve.
So that year, the district reviewed the way its teachers taught reading. Kim Harper, Bethlehem’s literacy director, visited schools and found that teachers were using the balanced literacy model, which emphasized teaching students to look at a word, think about context clues like pictures and make a guess as to what the word might be. Harper, who had taught high school English in the past, knew that strategy wouldn’t work once those students reached high school because their books wouldn’t have pictures.
So the district implemented a plan to train its teachers on the science of teaching reading. Instead of teaching students to guess what words meant, teachers would go over how combinations of letters make certain sounds and form words. At first, it took some convincing, Harper said. During one meeting where she explained the change, teachers yelled at her and banged tables, saying the material she was talking about wasn’t an appropriate way to teach reading.
But once teachers had gone through the training, the difference was noticeable right away, Harper said. By early March in the first year after teachers began the training, kindergarten teachers told her they were starting units on skills students didn’t usually get to until first grade because they’d already mastered everything else. By the end of that year, half of the district’s 16 elementary schools exceeded benchmarks laid out in the district’s achievement tests. The previous year, only two schools had exceeded those benchmarks — the school with the lowest rate of students in poverty and another school that had been placed on an improvement plan and had already had training on the science of teaching reading.
After it adopted the phonics curriculum, the district started training its teachers on morphology — the ways that word parts fit together. Now, kindergartners in the district learn about common word prefixes like un- and re-. Third-graders learn the Greek and Latin roots of English words.
“It doesn’t end with phonics, but you definitely need that,” she said. “It’s just the starting point.”
Harper said she’s gotten more buy-in from teachers as they’ve seen the progress students have made over the past five years, although people still joke about the meeting where teachers yelled at her. Now, teachers and district officials look forward to seeing achievement test results so they can see the progress the district makes, she said.
“The proof is the results,” Harper said. “The kids are able to do things that they never thought they could.”
