Volume 7 Number 1
High Standards for All
IDAHO — Shawna Exline talks about her year on the front lines of Idaho's school reform effort with satisfaction at meeting a tough challenge head-on. Still, a lingering note of anxiety creeps into her voice as she recalls the superhuman pace and heated resistance she endured as the leader of a new statewide reading initiative.
"It was an exciting time," she says; then, after a pause, "It was a scary time, too. I'm still picking up the pieces."
Sitting in the pleasantly cluttered office she shares with another district administrator, Exline doesn't look at all like a rabble-rouser. Her everyday hats — reading expert and devoted mom — are evidenced by stacks of books on early literacy and snapshots of her two young children. Yet the affable 40-year-old spearheaded a revolution of sorts. In a state with a deeply embedded tradition of local control, she was charged with carrying a statewide decree to every district. By all accounts, she negotiated the bumpy landscape with uncommon skill. Exline's colleagues talk about her with awe.
"Shawna Exline was the most extraordinary leader of this process imaginable," says Dr. Lynette Hill of the state education department. "She was the person with the brains as well as the 'brawn' to get the job done."
In her current job as reading specialist in the quiet community of Meridian, Exline is now far from the fray of statewide politics and policy. But she remembers every last detail of the genesis of Idaho's groundbreaking reading initiative. Appointed two years ago by state Superintendent Dr. Marilyn Howard to guide schools through the minefield of mandated reform, Exline and her staff felt the ire of disgruntled educators from the northern panhandle all the way south to the Blackfoot reservation.
"When we went out to train the first time around, it was kind of ugly," Exline admits. "People were upset." With a wry smile she adds: "We often joked that we should wear T-shirts with a tire track across the front and a bull's eye on the back. We had to keep reminding people, 'We are only the messengers.'"
The message Exline carried forth originated in the Idaho Legislature. It was seeded when a 1997 study, commissioned by the House and Senate education committees, found sub-par reading skills among Idaho's youngsters. But it was in 1998, at the intersection of a national movement and a landmark report, that the idea for a state-mandated reading plan really grabbed hold. Across America, parents, pundits, policymakers, and employers were demanding better performance from their schools. With the standards movement revving up to full throttle, the National Research Council released a study on how kids learn to read and what gets in their way. Synthesizing 20 years of research, the report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, affirmed what many teachers know from practice: Kids need explicit phonics instruction, in addition to exposure to good literature and immersion in language, to become strong and successful readers. The 17-member committee chaired by Catherine Snow of Harvard University recommended direct and systematic instruction in sound-letter relationships. Phonics got another boost when a second key piece of research by Jack Fletcher of University of Texas and G. Reid Lyon, Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, came out about the same time. "Failure to develop basic reading skills by age nine predicts a lifetime of illiteracy," the researchers warn in the report, Reading: A Research-Based Approach. Their solution echoed that of the earlier study: Beginning readers should receive explicit, systematic instruction in sound-symbol relationships and decoding.
This conclusion wasn't welcomed by many practitioners and professors who have a longstanding commitment to whole-language instruction, as most Idaho educators and teacher colleges do. The State Board of Education and the legislature, however, embraced these reports. Dissatisfied with state reading scores and recognizing that reading is the support beam for all learning, the board formed a committee to begin developing a statewide reading strategy. The committee hired a consulting firm to prepare a framework — a kind of blueprint for teachers — to guide literacy instruction blending phonics with whole language. The Legislature adopted the Comprehensive Literacy Plan, Grades K-3, for the State of Idaho designed by the Lee David Pesky Center for Learning Enrichment, a Boise nonprofit offering assessment, remediation, and counseling for learning-disabled kids and their families.
"It really spelled out, in response to the research, what students in K-3 need to know and be able to do in order to demonstrate grade-level proficiency," says Hill, a state-level language arts specialist who helped develop the plan. "The legislature required that all schools use it. It's not optional."
The committee next turned their attention to making sure the plan was put into practice. They were astonished to learn that kids can be doomed to limited life options as early as first grade if they don't catch on to the mysteries of print.
"Fewer than one student in eight who is failing to read by the end of first grade — less than 12 percent — ever catches up to grade level," Hill reports.
So the committee resolved to make sure that no child slips through the proverbial cracks. Without teacher training, targeted intervention, and financial support, they knew that the most ambitious of plans would stall. So in 1999, they crafted what has come to be known as the Idaho Reading Initiative. The three companion bills mandated:
"The IRI is the first piece of legislation we've had that impacted every classroom in the state," notes Margot Healy, Curriculum Director for the Caldwell School District 30 miles west of Boise.
About $4 million in surplus education funds generated by declining enrollments was earmarked for the initiative. Despite the promise of extra dollars, however, the education community's reaction to the legislation was bitter.
"First, there was a lot of shock, and then dismay and anger," Exline reports. One administrator, who asked for anonymity, says the initiative sparked "a lot of hate and discontent among superintendents" who resent the intrusion of lawmakers into educators'domain. Idaho's two largest districts — Boise and Meridian — argued against the initiative on the grounds that it would deprive local schools of their "autonomy to decide teaching methods and curriculum," the Idaho Statesman reported. The Nampa district complained that the initiative interfered with a monthly local testing program that drives curriculum there.
Teachers at Sacajawea Elementary School in Caldwell were stunned. "The way it was presented to us — the legislative mandate — made us very defensive at first," recalls second-grade teacher Angelina Wilson. "We had been so heavily whole-language, and all of a sudden it was phonics, phonics, phonics — you have to do phonics. It came from very, very high up — from people who weren't in the schools. At first, it was very overwhelming."
Many teachers felt vilified. "It was kind of like, here we go again — teachers are the bad guys, we're not doing our jobs right so somebody's got to tell us what to do," Wilson says.
Wilson's colleague at Sacajawea, Carol Caba, recalls: "At first it was like, phonics? We're going to drill phonics? Are we going back to m-m-m and leaving the language behind? Most teachers were skeptical. We didn't know if it was the only thing we were going to be allowed to teach. About every five years, something else comes along, and everything changes. We've followed almost every wave, and it was like, Is this the next one?"
First- and second-grade teacher Renee Bettencourt was unhappy about noneducators taking potshots at teachers and dictating solutions to educational problems. "I'll be honest," she says. "I've been a little upset with what I read in the paper from legislators. It's hard to hear people being critical when they're not here in the school. I think it needs to come from real-world people who know what's going on here."
Debate on the initiative got front-page coverage in the Idaho Statesman for weeks. There, the concerns voiced by educators found their way to Idahoans' breakfast tables. In February 1999, for instance, state Representative Lee Gagner of Idaho Falls told fellow legislators that some school boards and districts perceived the new rules as creating "state reading police who were encroaching on local officials' territory." Despite the heated rhetoric on the capitol floor and in teacher lunchrooms, the package passed both houses overwhelmingly in March 1999. On July 1 — just 83 working days later — it became the law of the state.
Not every educator was dismayed. First-grade teacher Jeannie King of Boise's Cynthia Mann Elementary, for example, told the Statesman: "A lot of us aren't taught everything we need to know. This (initiative) gives us a guide of what we are doing right." Another first-grade teacher, Barb Friedt, applauded the initiative's provision for small summer classes for struggling readers. "Any opportunity for smaller classrooms is good," she told the newspaper shortly after the initiative took effect.
Months before the legislation passed, the state education department had seen the writing on the wall. They knew the law was coming, and coming soon.
"There was no stopping this train," Exline notes.
So, while lawmakers were still hammering out the details of the initiative in Boise's capitol building, Exline was in her office just across the street, working at warp speed for 12 or more hours at a stretch. She ate a lot of Chinese take-out, and mostly saw her kids after their dad had tucked them in for the night.
Her first burning task was to find an assessment tool suitable for little kids — an "indicator" that could signal a possible problem that could be followed up with a more diagnostic tool if necessary. What she quickly discovered was that she would have to design something from scratch.
"There weren't any good primary literacy assessments on the market," Exline explains. Most, she says, were of the fill-in-the-bubble variety. "Multiple choice is not appropriate — it's not really kid-friendly." What she envisioned was a short (maybe 10-minute) test that could be administered face-to-face. With the phone glued to her ear for days on end, Exline contacted all 113 districts to ask what kind of assessments they were currently using.
"It became really obvious to me that we were all over the board — from nothing, to well-designed CBMs (curriculum-based measurements)," Exline recalls. "It was looking pretty grim."
But then something serendipitous surfaced. Coincidentally, a reading initiative launched in Idaho by the J.A. & Kathryn Albertson Foundation was in its first year of implementation. As part of that initiative, the foundation had supplied all districts with an early literacy program designed by an Idaho firm called the Waterford Institute. Exline called CEO Benjamin Houston. "We're piloting our own literacy test in eight districts right now," Houston told her. That very day, he Fed-Exed her the test — developed with consultation from national reading expert Marilyn Jager Adams. As soon as she pulled the string on the overnight envelope and the test flopped out on her desk, Exline knew she was onto something.
"I looked at it and thought, 'This is what we need,'" she says. "So I called them back and said, 'Would you be willing to sell us items for our Idaho Reading Indicator?'"
So a deal was struck. For $1 per student — about $73,000 — the education department, using money appropriated by the legislature for the assessment, bought items that had undergone some preliminary testing for validity and reliability. (The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory conducted further reliability and validity studies of the items the following year.) Waterford also laid out, printed, and distributed the test, which is administered to students not by their classroom teacher but by retired or substitute teachers, paraprofessionals, or others trained to administer the indicator.
"When you look at what other states are paying, it was a bargain," Exline says emphatically.
After massaging and tweaking the test items in response to input from teachers and reading specialists, the cut scores were set for three levels: (1) below grade level, (2) near grade level, and (3) at grade level. The test items attempt to get at what kids should be able to do at each grade to be on target for reading. For example, kindergartners should know how to write their name, detect rhyme, detect syllables, and identify upper- and lower-case letters. By first grade, kids should be able to produce rhyme ("Tell me a word that rhymes with 'fat'"), write letters of the alphabet, say beginning sounds, and read sentences. A beginning second-grader should know how to read a story, answer comprehension questions, and sound out words. Third-graders should have the ability to read sight words, read a passage, spell, and answer comprehension questions.
"The Number One change brought by the IRI is the focus on the skills that are the greatest predictors of success in reading," says Healy. "Our teachers are now real clear. Their teaching is becoming more powerful, more intentional. There's nothing like accountability to sharpen your focus."
Caldwell Superintendent Rick Miller concurs: "The IRI provides a real formalized monitoring system in the area of early literacy — essentially, that three times a year, we're monitoring our progress. That keeps everybody on task, and we can adjust as we go along."
Adds Healy: "Instead of waiting till the end of the year to see how our kids are doing — which is what we all tended to do — now we know we're going to have an assessment in January. So where do my kids need to be in October and November and December? It gives us a better framework for that monitoring than we've ever had before."
Most of the kids who score a 1 bring multiple issues to school with them, according to Exline. Their families may be recent immigrants or migrant workers whose first language is something other than English. The obstacles created by language, poverty, culture, and frequent moves may be compounded by learning disabilities. Because students from Mexico and other Latin countries are attending Idaho schools in increasing numbers, the state has developed a Spanish version of the 10-minute assessment. Spanish-speaking children are tested in both Spanish and English so that schools can determine whether difficulties are really reading problems or are in fact language problems.
At the top of a gentle rise on Caldwell's northernmost edge, a reader board outside a tidy brick schoolhouse proudly proclaims the top priority of Sacajawea Elementary: All Children Will Learn To Read. Remarkably, for a school with lots of English language learners and free-lunch recipients, the sign is more than just a slogan. Rather, Sacajawea's first-grade reading scores on the 10-minute assessment would make many a more affluent school drool. In the fall of 2000, after the first year of the initiative, almost 80 percent of first-graders were at grade level. The remaining 20 percent were split evenly between near and below grade level. If you drop the scores of first-graders who were new to Sacajawea that fall (that is, kids who hadn't received the instruction in reading readiness mandated by the law), the numbers are even more dramatic. More than 90 percent of that cohort of kids were reading at grade level. No child — not a single one — scored below grade level. Scores for 2001 have hovered right around the same numbers.
For the handful of students who don't catch on in the regular classroom, Sacajawea provides a variety of safety nets. One net is a six-week reading clinic for Title I and special ed kids. On a balmy morning last spring, three children sit in a classroom with teacher Janet Hofstra reading a series of sight words through a "frame" or small window cut out of a ruler. A girl with long, raven hair and smiling eyes zips along the line of print with her frame, calling out each word with the confidence of a seasoned reader.
"Wow!" Hofstra exclaims. "I could hardly even move my frame that fast!" Based on strategies devised by Lindamood-Bell, the clinic approaches reading instruction kinesthetically for the 10 percent of students who can't auditorily process phonemes — the sounds made by letters and combinations of letters when spoken.
"We know that good instruction is multimodality," says Miller. "So we keep looking for the variety among the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic."
Just down the hall, nine third-graders are cradled in another safety net, this one in quite an unlikely location: the principal's office. If you didn't know any better, you'd think you had accidentally wandered into the wrong room. Principal Gary Johnstonspace looks more like a mini-classroom than an administrator's den. On the wall next to a dry-erase board hangs a spelling-sound chart; beside it is a list of "irregular sight syllables."
Here the principal huddles daily with his group of struggling readers to focus on decoding big words — those multisyllabic monsters that can be terrifying to young readers until they learn to break them down into manageable chunks. When even the boss is helping kids gain command of print, there's no mistaking the impression that this school is riveted on reading.
Johnston and his staff, alarmed by findings that 75 percent of kids who aren't reading at grade level by age nine lag behind their classmates throughout their schooling, actually had gotten a jump on the reading initiative. As soon as Johnston took the school's helm (two years before the law passed), he started right in tracking every child's progress, compiling data from running records, direct writing assessments, and ITBS scores. He shares those data with his staff, who can then act upon the information immediately.
"It's a lot more proactive than waiting for the end of the year or the end of third grade to assess where they are," says Johnston. "We take a preventative approach."
When a child is lagging behind her peers in an area that can be addressed in pull-outs — for instance, speech, English as a second language, reading fluency — she carries a "book bag" with her to each special setting. The bag holds the books she has been reading in her regular classroom. In this way, the child's core instruction becomes the nucleus around which supplemental instruction turns.
"Our teachers and teacher assistants use the book bags to reteach, preteach, or expand language skills," Johnston explains. "By coordinating services across programs and using the same books in all the different settings kids encounter, we simplify things for them. We're helping them make connections. The key is everybody working together to meet the needs of that child."
The initiative requires schools to make an individual reading plan (IRP) for every low-performing third-grader to guide his progress in fourth grade. Not content to dally, Sacajawea prepares an IRP for every K-3 student who's below grade level.
"Why wait for the third grade to start getting specific about planning?" Johnston asks rhetorically.
Before the initiative, the Caldwell School District had already mandated a 90-minute reading block for every elementary classroom. At first, the school grouped all kids by reading level for the whole 90 minutes. But the groupings weren't working for everyone. As time went by, the teachers began tinkering with the groupings to better suit their needs. Before long, new configurations had emerged for every grade but one. Only the fourth-grade teachers continue to group kids by reading level for the whole 90 minutes. The fifth-grade teachers now group kids by reading level for 30 minutes, and then form heterogeneous groupings for the remaining hour. The first- through third-grade teachers stopped sharing kids across classrooms at all. Healy offers this reconfiguration as an example of how schools can continue to innovate and to customize their programs even while meeting the requirements of top-down decisions like the IRI.
"The goal — meeting the standard — hasn't changed," says Healy. "But at this school, with their staff and their kids and their schedule, they've finagled the configuration of groupings around and fixed it so it works for them. It's a site-based decision."
Sacajawea has been able to serve kids better not only by reconfiguring groups but also by reconfiguring funds. Johnston and his staff funnel Title I money into a full-day kindergarten for kids who aren't hitting reading benchmarks. For the struggling first- , second- , and third-graders, Title I money supplements state IRI money to finance a "fifth quarter" of extra reading instruction in the summer. While the state mandates (and funds) only 40 hours of extra help, Sacajawea is using the federal money to add math to the mix and hours to the total intervention. The mingled dollars also help to boost the pay rate of teachers who sign up for summer duty.
Teaching as teamwork is a key theme at Sacajawea. Even the mug from which Johnston sips his morning coffee is stamped with a definition of "team." To move kids along a trajectory of continuous growth, he says, each building's teachers and principal must be in sync. To that end, the principal has carved an hour out of the weekly schedule when teachers meet with the other teachers at their grade level. They trade stories and share strategies for boosting performance for struggling students. Johnston circulates through the grade-level meetings, sometimes offering an idea but mostly just listening.
"We've had a paradigm shift here — from hierarchy to teamwork," Miller notes. "It used to be that the superintendent would think a good thought and then reveal it on clay tablets to everyone else."
Teamwork got another big boost in the four-credit Comprehensive Literacy Course required for all K-8 educators under the IRI and taught by consultants hired by the state. Johnston took it two years ago with his K-3 teachers and again last year with his 4-5 teachers. "It's given me a chance to work side-by-side with my staff," he says. "My success is only because of their success. I set a few outside boundaries, but I give them the freedom to move within those boundaries — and to be responsible for the results."
Miller stresses the importance of staff working together across classrooms and grade levels. "Reading, and the instruction of reading, is a complex task, and it's a multiyear, integrated task," he says. "If I'm a teacher, I can't do it by myself. I have to count on her. She has to count on him. Because of that, we have to have a conversation about what the standard really looks like. It's a whole system, a four-year sequence that we're talking about. One of the ah-ha's in our buildings is that we have to rely on each other in a way we never thought we had to do. We used to think we could do this in isolation."
Second-grade teacher Angelina Wilson agrees.
"Before, we didn't have a system to fill in the gaps in kids' reading skills," she says. "One first-grade teacher might have taught reading one way, while another first-grade teacher did it another way. Then the kids would come to me, and I'd do it my way. Now, we're all using the same system, and the kids are hearing the same things over and over — first grade, second grade, third grade. It's smoother for them."
Adds Healy: "What the standards have brought is that every classroom, every teacher has the same goal — and it's research-based."
By August of 1999, with the initiative just barely underway, the tenor of the media debate had rounded a corner. Under a headline reading, IDAHO TEACHERS ON RIGHT TRACK: NATIONAL EXPERT APPLAUDS EFFORTS OF NEW PROGRAM, the paper reported that national reading guru Louisa C. Moats, director of a five-year study of early reading instruction for the National Institutes of Health, praised the initiative at a Boise conference on reading instruction. "Now the real work will come in implementing it," Moats told the 400 teachers present.
By last summer, the tide seemed to be turning for teachers, too. By the time Idaho schools wrapped up their second full year of IRI implementation in June, teachers like Wilson and Bettencourt were conceding some respect for the new approach, which includes a districtwide adoption of a phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. When Wilson entered the classroom at Sacajawea straight out of college, she found that her whole-language training hadn't prepared her to meet all the complex needs that diverse learners bring to school along with their lunch boxes and backpacks. "It was apparent that there were a lot of gaps, and the kids did need more phonics skills," she reports. "So I'm thankful that we have the programs that we have now, because I think our kids are a lot stronger readers. I know that they're stronger writers and spellers."
Renee Bettencourt sees the changes as part of a natural evolution already unfolding in the Caldwell district. Although she had doubts initially about using a scripted, phonics-based curriculum, she has seen big gains among her disadvantaged learners: "You turn around and your Title I kids are reading, and your resource room kids are beginning to break the code a little bit. It's because they have that one piece — decoding sound-by-sound and word-by-word — that they can hang on to. If they're limited in vocabulary and they're limited in language, they still have that one piece that's pretty tangible, pretty concrete, so that they know they can read."
Twenty-year veteran Carol Caba was pretty leery of the initiative when it first came down. But two years later, she concedes that phonics has a place in reading instruction, especially with at-risk kids.
"So many of our kids come in without background experiences," she says. "They don't know what a rake or a mower is. They've never been to an amusement park. Blending and decoding words is their best help when they first learn to read. They go, 'Oh, that's how people figure out those words!' When they see a big word, there's no reason to panic because it's just like a whole bunch of little words all put together."
Caba is careful to note, however, that phonics must not crowd out reading strategies such as multiple word-attack skills, high-quality literature, and reading for meaning. "You have to do both," she insists. "I teach both."
Still, she sees the curriculum narrowing down as teachers come under increasing pressure to meet the new standards. "As much as I hate to say it, I think we are driven to prepare students for the test," she laments. "We all want to score well. I would love to be doing more plays with my kids, but I don't have time. I don't have time to do dioramas. I don't have time to make mobiles. I don't have time to do puppets. But if you put something in, you have to take something out.
"Teaching is so different than it was even five or six years ago." 
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Date of Last Update: 10/24/2001 
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