January/February 2007

Response to Intervention

A new approach to reading instruction aims to catch struggling readers early

by Nancy Walser

It's two weeks before Halloween in Carolyn Callender's first-grade class. After sitting in a circle and reciting the October poem from Maurice Sendak's Chicken Soup with Rice in their scariest voices, 15 youngsters split up into four groups to practice literacy skills. Working from teacher guides and scribbled notes, an intern, a student teacher, and an assistant teacher help Callender put the groups through their paces. Each adult staffs a work station, equipped with an assortment of props-computers, white boards, letter tiles, grids, and markers. Each group of students moves from station to station to count sounds, combine them to make and write words, spell out sight words, illustrate main ideas, and read silently from leveled readers.

Callender already knows ten of her students are having trouble. The good news is that it's October, not June. But she knows the clock is ticking: When it comes to creating strong readers, first grade is a pivotal year.

Four years ago, Callender's school, the Haggerty School in Cambridge, Mass., began a new approach to reading instruction when it received a federal Reading First grant. The approach, called Response to Intervention or RtI, is at once simple and complex.

The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.

Getting Advisory Right

Focus and commitment are keys to connecting with youth

by Mitch Bogen

It was a particularly tough parent conference. The mother of a student who had been suspended begged Richard Esparza, then a first-year principal at Granger High School in Granger, Wash., to readmit her son so he could get his diploma. When Esparza looked up the student's record, he found that after four years of school, the student "only had six credits to his name." The mother, realizing that her son would not be eligible to graduate, burst into tears.

"That's when I said, 'OK, we better work on our communication,'" Esparza recalls. "I had this experience in my first year, and in our second year we started our advisory program."

Schools across the country are looking-or in some cases looking again-at advisory programs, in which teachers meet regularly with small groups of students to help them navigate the challenges of school life as a way to improve graduation rates, family involvement, and academic performance.

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Basic Skills Revisited

Under NCLB, the pendulum swings too far--again

The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and most state accountability policies judge school quality exclusively by student performance on standardized tests. This form of accountability has encouraged a renewed emphasis on basic skills, reigniting a debate that has raged throughout American history: whether basic skills can (or should) be taught at the expense of other objectives.

Here's how NCLB distorts the curriculum in the direction of basic math and reading skills. First, because high-stakes tests measure math and reading, educators have incentives to shift time and resources from other important goals toward these subjects. Sanctions result from poor performance on math and reading tests, but not from inadequate learning in social studies, physical education, the arts, and science, or from students' failure to develop noncognitive skills and atti-tudes-conflict resolution skills, physical fitness, or creativity, for example-that are equally important outcomes of schooling.

The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy this issue.

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