In one sense, District 207 Supt. Steven Snider has every reason to smile.
After all, the jewel of his district, Maine South High School, reversed a several-year slide in reading scores by posting a 20-point gain on this year’s Illinois Goal Assessment Program test.
Just the same, the district’s other two high schools continued to slip, a fact that has Snider and school officials across the state looking for real answers to what some warn is a reading crisis.
“The status quo for learning is not satisfactory,” Snider said. “There obviously has been a call to action.”
State Supt. of Education Joseph Spagnolo will attempt to answer that call in Chicago on Thursday, when he unveils his much anticipated recommendations for boosting reading scores in public education.
Among the likely suggestions will be a renewed push for parents to read to–and with–their children. A more concrete proposal will call on schools to expand reading-skills classes beyond the 4th grade, when pupils typically switch from the how-to of reading to courses such as literature and language.
“We’re at a crisis point,” said state board of education spokesman Tom Hernandez. “Improvements can be made, and now is the time to start doing that.”
Maine West Principal Paul Leathem shares the sentiment. Even though the Des Plaines school’s scores remain above state averages, he has seen them take a nose dive over the past five years.
Since 1993, average reading scores at the school have fallen 41 points, steadily dropping from 270 in 1993 to 229 this year on a 500-point scale.
More disturbing for Leathem is the percentage of new students failing to meet state expectations on the reading portion of the exam. Since 1993, that number has more than doubled, from 12 percent to roughly a quarter of the entering freshman class.
“There are students entering here with poor scores, and we need to improve that,” Leathem said. “There’s a larger proportion (not meeting state expectations) now than in the past, so we’re trying to be proactive.”
A similar scenario is unfolding in Wheeling District 21, where 8th-grade reading scores fell more than 20 points this year, prompting assessment director Bob Gerry to begin mapping “a formal plan of attack” to be presented at the district’s Sept. 18 board meeting.
Elsewhere in the northwest suburbs, libraries and other institutions are getting into the game, including Arlington Heights Memorial Library. There, staffers have elected to expand special summer reading programs throughout the school year to reinforce reading programs in neighboring Districts 25, 23 and 59, as well as several neighboring parochial schools.
Maine West, for its part, is dramatically expanding a long-standing program this fall that targets struggling students with intensified reading-skills training and places these students in smaller classes with a higher teacher-pupil ratio.
Before this year, the program–called CORE–had only involved the bottom 50 kids entering the school. The intent was to capture every new freshman who was two or more years behind in reading as well as those struggling in language and math.
As the years passed, that number swelled. And last year, after the school’s sophomore class recorded a 16-point drop in reading on the IGAP, the school scrambled to widen its safety net for failing students. One answer was a doubling of the CORE program.
“We needed to do something,” Audrey Haugan, assistant principal, said. “Reading scores are going down across the nation, and there’s no exception here.”
Other initiatives include a new testing regimen to gauge student achievement periodically, and the use of reading instructors to train freshman teachers–no matter their area of study–in reading strategies.
At the district level, meanwhile, a new summer school program was launched this year to bring struggling 8th graders up to speed before they enter high school. New computers and reading labs also are being added to shore up reading proficiency.
“We don’t necessarily teach reading skills to the general population (at the high school level) because we assume they already know how to read,” said Suzanne Millies, District 207’s assistant superintendent for instruction. “But now we’re finding that’s not true.”
Helen Kurtz, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction at District 25, cites the usual suspects: TV, computers, the Internet, video games and a general lack of interest in reading on the part of today’s young.
“Students are much more visually, graphically oriented than they are text oriented,” said Kurtz, whose district has created a number of support systems for at-risk students over the past year. “It’s just characteristic of our age. Print is now a deliberate choice.”
Still, some state officials are pointing to a similar trend that bedeviled math and science teachers several years back.
In response, many districts revisited their math and science curricula and made the necessary changes. Impressive gains on the IGAP followed, as evidenced by a continued upswing in math and science scores recorded this year.
“We’ve seen it before,” said Hernandez, of the state board. “There is precedent for reviving test scores. It takes renewed emphasis and renewed initiative. It’s not impossible.”
