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A diploma doesn't necessarily mean Johnny can read and write. A dynamic teacher brings passion and problem solving to literacy issues.

The Two R's

Literacy Lessons for High School

Story By Rhonda Barton, photos by Mount Burns

Vancouver, Washington—Isaac, a blonde freshman with a football player's build, pores over a copy of The Outsiders at a sunlit table in the atrium of Skyview High. Urged on by teacher Erin Rogers—whose conservative black business suit is the only clue that she's not a student herself—Isaac and his classmates delve into S.E. Hinton's world of greasers and rich kids in high school, dissecting the relationships and motivations of characters like Ponyboy and Sodapop.

This could be any ninth-grade English class, but it's actually a new approach to helping high school students become more fluent, comfortable readers. At Skyview and throughout the Vancouver School District, incoming freshmen who've struggled with reading in middle school now have the opportunity to take a two-period Academic Literacy Block that focuses on the strategies skilled readers use to understand texts.

Isaac's mom, Lori Bond, knows it's working. "His reading level has gone up, from a sixth-grade level to an eighth, and he has more confidence," she says. "This doesn't come off as a special education class, so he doesn't feel marked. He can get the help he needs without feeling segregated."

A District Approach

To be recommended for Academic Literacy, students have to meet certain criteria: get low scores on the eighth-grade ITBS; fail to meet the reading standard on the seventh-grade Washington achievement test (WASL); earn low grades in content area classes; and have a STAR or MAP reading score of fourth to seventh grade. But make no mistake, this isn't a "dummy class," says Rogers. "I tell the kids they are simply lacking some skills. This class is designed to help them fill in those gaps."

The gaps are painfully evident, both here in Vancouver and around the country. According to Vancouver's curriculum director, Layne Curtis, district officials studied assessments and current research on reading, and came to the conclusion that they couldn't ask high school kids to "read to learn" without giving them the tools to do so successfully. A pilot literacy program was launched at one of the district's four comprehensive high schools during the 2002-2003 school year and then modified and expanded to serve roughly a third of all freshmen in the district.

A secondary literacy specialist, like Rogers, is assigned to each of the district's high schools, splitting her time between the classroom and mentoring other teachers. The program, which is in addition to more intensive support for students reading below the fourth-grade level, is funded through a combination of Title V money, a Small Learning Communities grant, state Learning Assistance Program (LAP) funds, professional development allocations, and basic education funds.

While students' progress is monitored on an ongoing basis, the most convincing proof of success comes in personal testimonials. "When the program began, a lot of students weren't anxious to be in the class," recalls Curtis. "But through the course of the year, students have recognized what they were gaining. We have really poignant letters, written to the teachers, that say 'it's making a difference in my life; my friends need to do this too.'" Although some students originally stated their intention to opt out of the course at mid-term, only a very small handful actually did. Most will continue Academic Literacy in their sophomore year.

What The Statistics Show

The need for high school literacy programs is clear: The 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exams showed that 26 percent of high school seniors were reading at "below basic" levels. NAEP scores also reveal that while fourth-graders' reading assessments improved significantly from 1998 to 2002, eighth-graders' performance remained flat and 12th-graders' achievement actually declined. In international comparisons of reading performance, America's 11th-graders score close to the bottom, trailing students in Indonesia, Brazil, and other developing nations.

"These findings confirm teachers' impressions that many students who read well enough in the primary grades confront difficulties with reading thereafter," writes Stanford University Professor Michael Kamil. He points out that middle and high school teachers have traditionally viewed themselves as content specialists, believing that teaching reading is a job for elementary school instructors. One way to turn that around, he suggests, is through ongoing professional development with literacy specialists coaching content teachers on how to infuse literacy instruction in their teaching.

Pressure is building to face the issue of high school literacy head-on. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), every high school student must reach "proficiency" in reading/language arts (as well as mathematics) by the end of the 2013-2014 school year. In addition, 20 states—including Alaska in our region—now require high school students to pass an exit exam in order to graduate. There's fallout from students' poor reading and writing skills in postsecondary circles, too: 73 percent of employers rate the writing skills of recent high school graduates as "fair" or "poor" and more than a third of undergraduates participate in remedial reading and writing courses during their first two years of college.

Making Reading "Visible"

For Erin Rogers, the need to teach reading to high school students came as a revelation—even after seven years as an English teacher. "I didn't realize that kids had problems with decoding," she sighs. "For example, when I got back some WASL tests two years ago, a large proportion of them had the same question wrong. I thought it was just outside their scope of experience. But this year, when I gave my literacy kids the same WASL as a pretest, 85 percent couldn't answer the question 'At what occasion would this poem be read?'" When Rogers asked the question in class, it became apparent that the students were avoiding the word "occasion" and that it had no meaning for them. "Once you tell them it's an event, something that's planned, then they show they really do know the answer," she explains. "It was that one word that held them back."

In the Academic Literacy class, Rogers and other Vancouver School District literacy teachers lean heavily on the Reading Apprenticeship framework developed by the San Francisco, California-based WestEd. (For more on this program, see Northwest Education online at www.nwrel.org/nwedu/10-01/read/). The model encourages students to read for recreation, gain insights into their own reading processes, and develop problem-solving strategies. It also calls on teachers to make their own reading process "visible" to students. Rogers shared with her class some of the technical texts she was reading for her graduate school courses in ESL. "I remember one sentence was full of overly technical vocabulary, but once you eliminated those words, the sentence was very simple. I read it to the kids and said, 'Do you guys know what this means? How do we break it down?' We diagrammed it, and I told them I use the same strategies in my studies that they're using: highlighting, questioning, looking things up, slowing down, and trying to pick out the important pieces."

Spreading The Word

The Reading Apprenticeship techniques—and the writings of Colorado teacher Cris Tovani—have spilled over into Rogers' social studies classroom and into her instruction at Lewis and Clark, an alternative school that has a satellite program at Skyview. While Lewis and Clark students can take advantage of a literacy specialist at the main downtown campus, Rogers "slips reading strategies" into their work wherever possible.

She's also trying to convert other teachers to the need to infuse literacy lessons across the curriculum, though she admits that's not going to happen overnight. "We're trying to change a paradigm and a way of thinking that everyone's not comfortable with moving to that quickly," she admits. "I think it will happen. NCLB is forcing it to happen. It almost has to be grassroots though... I start with a few people who trust me, and put out fingers. It might take three or four years for people to get on board, and not everyone will, but I hope I can show (them) this is the right thing to do. It's good for kids and they really, really like it."