Education week というメールマガジンに、アメリカのシカゴなどで取り組んでいる読書力向上のための活動が紹介されていた。 (高橋コーチ記)
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/10/14/07read_ep.h29.html?tkn=S[XF9PH3Qq0wvVG9fDDxdjt7BW8ZkAqPz4KcBy Mary Ann Zehr
10/9/09 Education week
Chicago
Rayshad Harris, a 7th grader at Edward Coles Model for Excellence World Language Academy here on the city’s South Side, disliked reading, but that changed with his participation in the federal government’s first reading program focused solely on adolescents.
Through after-school reading lessons Rayshad took last school year with a literacy-intervention teacher at Edward Coles, paid for by the Striving Readers program, the boy learned strategies that helped him overcome his frustration with reading.
“I used to read the story, and I didn’t know what the story was about,” Rayshad said. “Now, we know how to break the story down. We’ll read a paragraph and then ask what the paragraph is about.”
Plenty of students here at Edward Coles or Rachel Carson Elementary School, another Chicago school that takes part in Striving Readers, say they came to enjoy reading for the first time or became better readers through the program, now in its fourth year.
More difficult to gauge is what impact the small federal program has had in the eight sites nationwide where it has been implemented, and thus, whether President Barack Obama’s proposal to double funding for it in the fiscal 2010 budget, to $70.4 million, is a good idea.
Expansion Planned
Members of Congress have also drafted a comprehensive literacy bill that would greatly expand funding for adolescent literacy, and includes many of the same components as Striving Readers.
The federal program supports the implementation and evaluation of “research-based” reading interventions for schools that are at risk of not making adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act or have large proportions of students who are reading below grade level. Grantees select their own curriculum.
Malik Barrett looks over his vocabulary homework, part of the Striving Readers program.
—Beth Rooney for Education Week“There needs to be intervention within secondary schools, and we know there needs to be funding for it, but we’re not at the point of saying this particular program is effective because we haven’t seen the data yet,” said Marcy Miller, who as a senior policy associate for the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education, co-wrote a recent policy brief on lessons learned from Striving Readers.
The brief was based on a meeting of Striving Readers literacy coaches and teachers convened by the alliance, an advocacy group, after the federal program’s first year.
“No one [at the meeting] was saying, ‘I think this is a waste of money.’ They were saying, ‘We really need this in schools,’ ” said Ms. Miller, now a graduate student in school psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education released evaluations of Striving Readers’ effect on student achievement during the initiative’s second year of implementation, the 2007-08 school year. The evaluators concluded that students in Striving Readers programs in five of the seven participating districts, including Chicago, did not improve significantly more in reading than did their peers in those same districts who didn’t take part in the initiative.
In the Portland, Ore., and San Diego school districts, Striving Readers had a statistically significant effect on student achievement, according to at least one test. The reading program implemented in juvenile-correction facilities by the Ohio Department of Youth Services also showed a significant impact, the study says.
But even where Striving Readers demonstrated an impact on student achievement, the effect was small, Michael L. Kamil, a reading expert at Stanford University, pointed out after a quick examination of the data released last week.
Striving Readers Program
The Obama administration has proposed increased funding for Striving Readers program, a federal program targeting adolescent literacy. Students from the Edward Coles Model for Excellence World Language Academy in Chicago discuss their experience in the program.
—Video by Mary Ann Zehr/Education Week
“The significant differences are not encouraging,” he added. “For struggling readers, particularly those in high school, this is simply insufficient to make a substantial difference in academic achievement for these students.”
Early Days
But Braden Goetz, the group leader for high school programs for the Education Department, said he views the study results as “encouraging,” particularly since only five or six years ago, many reading experts weren’t sure it was possible to have an impact on adolescent literacy.
“In fact, we can have an impact,