NWREL Team Evaluates

Reading First Programs

By Rhonda Barton

Educators around the nation may be divided over the merits of Reading First, the $900 million-a-year initiative that's a centerpiece of President Bush's education reform agenda. But, a team of evaluators from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory is in the thick of assessing how well the program works and what schools can do to achieve better results.

NWREL evaluation experts are working with more than 150 schools in five states, including Washington, Arizona, Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana. "Mostly we're analyzing data within each state, but we can't help looking across the states to see if we can learn things that will benefit all of them," says Project Director Theresa Deussen.

Deussen notes that the assessment involves more than just administering surveys, collecting numbers, and looking at test results. "Besides crunching scores, we go out to the schools and interview reading coaches and principals; observe classroom practices; and talk to reading leadership teams. These qualitative data provide a context and deeper insight that help make sense of patterns in assessment scores."

In Washington and Arizona, where the evaluation started at the beginning of the 2003–2004 school year, Deussen's team is helping schools identify the "holes" in their programs and set the direction for the current school year. Alaska and Montana schools, which came on board last spring, are getting baseline data and Wyoming is just beginning the process.

Results from the first year showed kindergarten students making gains that students in other grades didn't match. The question now is why? Do kindergarten students simply learn faster or do they respond better to the instructional methods embodied in Reading First? Another intriguing question is what role does instructional leadership play? "I think this will be a big predictor of how successful schools are," Deussen believes. "We're probing whether certain behaviors by principals make a difference: for example, do they do walk-throughs; do they have an articulated vision rather than just being building managers; and do they give feedback to teachers?"

The project—with its demanding workload—has had some unexpected professional benefits for Deussen and her core group of eight evaluators. "Because we're involved in multiple states, we have enough time to develop a high level of content expertise so there's a depth of knowledge about K–3 reading strategies, national trends, and the debates around different approaches," she observes. "Also, we've become a real team; there's so much work that we've had to collaborate and we've shared many of the same experiences doing site visits."

Ultimately, the group's work should inform the national discussion of Reading First, providing data on whether this approach improves overall reading performance and what elements need to come together to make a difference for students at low-performing, high-poverty schools.