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Raising Standards From Word One

About This Series Christine Short (right) takes her turn being the "daily greeter" in her first-grade class by giving a hug to Keyondra Jones. (By Susan Biddle – The Washington Post) Harris Educational Center Patricia Roberts Harris Educational Center, in Southeast Washington, is struggling to overcome teacher shortages, lack of substitutes and funding delays. The Post followed its progress.

By Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 12, 1998; Page B1

Teacher Minnie Bartelle was preaching the gospel of sounds and letters in a basement classroom at Patricia Roberts Harris Educational Center in the District – and, like true believers, her congregation of 19 eager first-graders hung on every sentence.

Bartelle extolled the long "e" in the word "cheek," then asked the students what to call the "c-h" sound. A dozen arms shot up.

"A digraph!" Gregory Foster shouted, using a term many well-educated adults might not know.

"Excellent!" Bartelle said. "And how many sounds does a digraph make?"

"One sound!"

"Excellent! Now make that sound for me."

To applause from his teacher and classmates, Gregory chanted: "ch, ch, ch."

Bartelle, eyebrows knitting behind tortoise-shell glasses, asked next for the digraph in "sheep." Index fingers rose to small, pursed lips as the class whispered: "sh, sh, sh."

Watching from a child-size yellow chair, Linda Butler, a former D.C. teacher, smiled and took notes. Later, she advised Bartelle to really accentuate the difference between "sh" and "ch," making sure the youngsters saw how the mouth must move to make the two distinct yet similar sounds. But Bartelle and the children, she assured her, are on the right track.

Butler was evaluating Bartelle's class as part of an experimental National Institutes of Health program that is slowly revamping the way reading is taught at nine District elementary schools, including P.R. Harris, a struggling school of nearly 900 pre-kindergarten through ninth-grade students in far Southeast Washington.

Inside this imposing brick building, the enthusiasm shown by Bartelle's students wanes sharply in the upper grades. In third-floor classrooms where grades six through nine are taught, many students read too poorly to understand their textbooks or get through a novel at their grade level. They frequently come late to class or sprawl at their desks, unprepared and uninterested in whatever the teacher is trying to teach.

This is just the kind of academic apathy the NIH program is trying to stave off. It hopes to preserve the first-graders' eagerness to learn by training teachers in the early grades to stress "phonemic awareness," the science of how letters form individual sounds, as well as the more traditional phonics method of breaking words into single syllables. Using games, songs and lots of repetition to teach youngsters about vowel combinations and consonant blends, the technique is supposed to help children decipher even unfamiliar words as they progress from simple to more complicated literature.

The curriculum also stresses understanding words in context and using colorfully illustrated stories grouped by themes – sharing, creepy crawlers, etc. – instead of the dry primers of years ago. This approach of combining phonics and "whole language," methods that have stood for years as opposites, is the latest trend in teaching reading and marks a detente of sorts in what academicians have termed the "reading wars."

Starting this year with kindergarten and first grade, and expanding to the fifth grade by 2002, the program will determine whether intensive early intervention leads to long-lasting reading success. The goal is to overcome the D.C. public school system's crippling pattern of turning out many students whose performance gets worse as they move from grade to grade.

The NIH program, launched three years ago in Houston, was introduced in the District this year. And while some teachers resent the extra workload and close supervision, this revamped method of teaching reading is earning high marks from new principal Theodore Hinton and other administrators.

These school officials are delighted when they walk past Bartelle's and three other first-grade classrooms and see youngsters competing for a chance to read or identify the type of sounds that make up a word. Hinton said he expects to see more improvements during the next five years, when all kindergarten through fifth-grade classes will have been through the program.

"Learning is in progress!" Bartelle proclaimed triumphantly one morning a few weeks before the school system's annual standardized achievement tests. Students who last fall recognized few letters were reading easily, and Bartelle's hopes were soaring.

Minnie Bartelle's students eagerly raise their hands to give an answer. (By Susan Biddle – The Washington Post)

"You keep this up, and you guys are going to score high on what?" she asked.

"The test!" the children shouted.

"What test?"

"The Stanford 9!"

The reading and math achievement tests that D.C. students in grades one through 11 took in April carried unprecedented importance this year. For the first time, scores will help determine who must attend summer school and which elementary school students are promoted to the next grade. Results are expected by early June.

But for P.R. Harris, one of 20 city schools that then-Superintendent Franklin L. Smith flagged two years ago as needing special assistance because of chronically low test scores, the exams carry even more weight. Unless its scores rise 10 percent over last year's, the principal and up to half the teachers will be ousted in a last-ditch improvement effort.

All 20 targeted schools, which each face a similar shake-up if scores don't get better, have received extra funds for tutorials and other outside assistance. The school system would have provided money to pay for any well-regarded reform initiative, but P.R. Harris and eight other schools chose the NIH program, which doesn't cost the city a cent.

Hinton, who took the helm at P.R. Harris last August after the NIH program was selected, is concerned that it is too narrowly focused – concentrating on reading and on working with only two grades each year – to help him fulfill his mandate to improve scores immediately in all grades.

"This is not a reform model. It's an experimental [reading] program," Hinton said. If scores rise this year, he added, it will be because of renewed efforts by teachers throughout the school and other remedial programs, most of which P.R. Harris arranged on its own. These include weekday and Saturday tutorials by college and community volunteers and a privately contracted reading program for students in grades seven through nine.

NIH program director Louisa Moats, responding to Hinton's concerns, has agreed to start working with teachers in the upper grades. The Harris principal also is searching for a more comprehensive program to address problems with student attendance, classroom organization and teacher morale and training.

The $10 million program is a partnership between the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a team of doctors at the University of Texas Houston Medical School. In addition to training seminars for teachers and close classroom monitoring, it provides a part-time tutor to work 30 minutes each day with up to six children who are struggling the most.

"It really works," teacher Deloris Brown said one recent morning, taking a break while her students were in gym. "These kids here, they have really picked it up."

Brown's classroom area is diagonally across from Bartelle's in the cavernous space they share with the other two first-grade teachers, Lawrencia Cole and Augustine Claiborne. Like all classrooms at P.R. Harris, theirs are separated only by screens and partial dividers – an open-space design that was popular when Harris was built in 1976 but has since been discredited by most educators.

Bartelle's class tends to be the most exuberant. But students from all four classrooms can be heard chanting letter sounds, reading in unison and practicing rhyming and other exercises.

A veteran of school systems in her native South Carolina, Prince George's County and the District, Bartelle has taught first grade at P.R. Harris for eight years. Brown, a former parent volunteer who earned her bachelor's and master's degrees while raising her children, started teaching in the federally funded Head Start preschool program and was assigned to first grade last summer. Both teachers said they have come to rely on the NIH program for material and new ideas.

"I'm looking for all the help I can get," Brown said, "because I want to lay the foundation for the kids."

Claiborne, too, calls the program useful and refers to the teaching manual constantly while leading her students through reading exercises. But she missed the first two months of the school year – a former parent volunteer and substitute, she was not hired as a teacher until two other teachers quit – and was absent several more weeks because of health problems. Her students read more slowly and are less confident in deciphering words.

Tutor Lanny McGroom and Antonio Matthews examine a penny found on the floor. (By Susan Biddle – The Washington Post)

Cole, who is finishing her seventh year at P.R. Harris and eighth in the school system, said she has always stressed phonics and the phonemic awareness that the NIH program promotes. Though she has adopted some of the program's approaches, she says it hasn't helped her deal with the children whose difficult home situations and behavior problems make her class chaotic.

She also bristles at the extra training requirements and the constant surveillance. "How would you like it if your supervisor was with you all the time?" she asked.

Butler said she constantly tells teachers that she is there to support them, not spy on them. Her evaluations always include some praise and only one or two critical suggestions.

"You take it in small parts. No one can do a total improvement plan" all at once, she said.

That balancing act was evident at training sessions Moats and Butler put on every other Monday night this winter for teachers from the nine participating D.C. schools. The course was voluntary – teachers came on their own time after a long day in their classrooms. They received a $500 stipend and could earn continuing education credits.

When the teachers complained that homework assignments were too time-consuming, Moats and Butler agreed to cut back. The instructors peppered the classes with words of encouragement and new teaching concepts, and used creative exercises to remind the teachers what it feels like to be 5 or 6 years old and learning to read.

One night, Moats taught the group three new "letters" (actually symbols from the Greek alphabet) and told them to use them in a sentence. "What is it like writing with new symbols? Frustrating? Slow?" she asked. "What if you were dealing with 26 new symbols, like your children are?"

Butler and Moats say the teachers are very motivated. "They all want their children to achieve," Moats said. "Once in a while in a school, it's clear that a teacher really doesn't belong in a classroom. But I don't see that here."

A typical morning with the first-graders provided a sharp contrast to the lack of academic interest upstairs. Bartelle was again inundated with volunteers when she asked the youngsters to summarize the plot of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." Answers spilled quickly, each child clutching a new textbook with the brightly illustrated story.

"The egg was lying on the leaf!"

"It burst open!"

"A worm came out!"

Bartelle and the children counted the fruits and other foods the caterpillar devoured to grow big enough to build a cocoon and turn into a butterfly, linking the literature to both science and math in a textbook NIH approach.

"There's an 'r' in fruit," a little boy named Nathaniel Hawkins chimed in, bringing the lesson back to reading. Bartelle didn't skip a beat.

"And what sound does it make?" she asked.

"A consonant blend," Nathaniel said.

"Yes, and what sound?"

"Fr."

Bartelle turned to the class. "Let's make the f-r sound."

"Fr-fr-fr-fr!" filled the classroom.

"Excellent," Bartelle said. "Give yourselves a round of applause."