Copyright 2000 The Baltimore Sun Company
THE
BALTIMORE SUN
October 15, 2000, Sunday
Correction
Appended ,FINAL
SECTION: LOCAL ,2B The Education Beat
LENGTH: 858 words
HEADLINE:
Reading course lives up to name: Success For All
It works: Fast-moving
program is phonics-based, but without the dull parts.
BYLINE: Mike Bowler
SOURCE:
SUN STAFF
BODY:
GRASONVILLE - Teacher Allison
Torrence's first-graders are in the 11th book of 48 they'll read this year, and
these pupils at Grasonville Elementary School are learning the
letter C, tracing it in the air while intoning together, "Half circle left,
around and stop."
Thousands of kids in hundreds of schools across the
nation were doing the same thing Thursday. Success For All, the nation's largest
school reform model, was first displayed at a single Baltimore
elementary school a dozen years ago and has just reached its
millionth child in 1,800 schools in this country, Mexico and England.
Success For All has a number of elements, but basically it's a reading
program incorporating a number of proven instructional methods. It's so
fast-paced and heavily scripted that Grasonville teachers use timers to remind
them to move to a new phase of the daily 90-minute reading period.
In
the early grades, Success For All injects more phonics than you will find in
most instructional approaches.
Yet there is no "drill and kill"
atmosphere in a Success For All school. The program is far from dull.
Moreover, it works. When Grasonville adopted Success For all three years
ago, 25 percent of pupils at the school tested at or above grade level. Last
spring, 82 percent fell in that category. Meanwhile, third-graders more than
doubled their reading scores on the Maryland school performance tests from 1998
to 1999.
"We've bought all the way into Success For All," says
Grasonville Principal Lawrence Dunn Jr., in his 14th year at the Queen Anne's
County school, just east of the Bay Bridge. "The reason is very simple. We have
more kids reading, and they're reading at an earlier age."
Here are some
of the basic elements to the program designed by researchers at the Johns
Hopkins University:
Pupils are tested every eight weeks and grouped
across ages according to their reading level. This eliminates the need to have
reading groups within the class and gives more time for direct instruction. Most
reading classes in the early grades have no more than a dozen pupils.
The 48 storybooks published by Success For All are " phonetically
regular." They move children through a careful program that builds reading
skills, with teachers constantly probing with questions and suggestions. There's
also plenty of time for teachers to read to children - and for children to read
to each other during "show time." And lots of real literature is interspersed
among the program's basic reading textbooks.
Cooperative learning,
another concept associated with Hopkins, is a hallmark of the program. Kids work
with each other in partnerships or teams, helping one another to become
strategic readers and writers. It's not unusual to see two children raise
clasped hands in response to a teacher's query.
Writing is emphasized
throughout the grades. Children plan, draft, revise, edit and publish their
compositions with feedback at each stage from teachers and each other.
In partner reading, children in pairs read to each other quietly while
facing in opposite directions. When one gets stuck on a word, the other
corrects. Or they check a chart on the wall giving strategies for figuring out
unknown words. The first strategy: Sound it out.
"The idea of partner
reading is reading ear-to-ear rather than eye-to-eye," Torrence says.
At
all levels children read 20 minutes each evening as homework. A "family support
team" works in the community, explaining Success For All to parents and working
out problems. Cooperative learning and the public relations work of the support
team have "helped bring people together" in racially diverse Queen Anne's County
by having teachers and pupils of different ethnic groups work with each other,
says Carol Amp, the program's facilitator at Grasonville.
Tutors work
one-on-one with pupils who are failing to keep up with their classmates.
First-graders get priority.
After the first grade, Success For All's
reading curriculum is designed to dovetail with major reading textbooks so that
a district doesn't have to abandon them when it adopts the program.
Teaching in a Success For All school is demanding and, at first, "more
than a bit overwhelming," Dunn says. That's why the program insists that 80
percent of a school's faculty approve the program before a school can adopt it.
Success For All must be doing something right. Fueled by federal
antipoverty funds from Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act, the program has grown almost exponentially in the past few years.
It has 380 employees, 150 of them at its headquarters in town, and a budget of
$55 million.
And now the nonprofit Success For All Foundation
has crossed the Big Pond, opening an office in Nottingham, England, to engage in
a British campaign to wipe out illiteracy in impoverished schools.
"
We're not huge in England yet, but there's huge potential,"
says Robert E. Slovenia, who founded Success For All in Abbottston Elementary
near Memorial Stadium.
Is he surprised at the success? "In some ways,
no, but in some ways I can't believe it took this long," Slavin says.
CORRECTION-DATE: October 16, 2000
CORRECTION:
The surnames of two people quoted in
the "Education Beat" column yesterday were incorrect. They are Carol Kamp and
Robert E. Slavin. The Sun regrets the error.
GRAPHIC:
Photo(s) 1. Reading buddies: Second-grade reading partners Callie Pfeiffer
(left) and Emily Stonesifer raise hands together to show teacher Joan Cohee they
collaborated on an answer.
2. Phonetically based: Teacher Allison Torrence
pronounces a sound for Tyler Smith to help him write the letter that stands for
the sound.
3. Reading along: Nancy Perez follows in her book as her teacher
reads to the class as part of the Success For All reading program.
LOAD-DATE: October 20, 2000
